The blue wave may give us the national popular vote

If you’re not glutted on good news already, here’s another implication of the Democratic midterm tsunami that deserves more attention: By the 2028 election, we may be choosing the president with a national popular vote.

The electoral college is a blight on American democracy. It gives outsize importance to voters in a handful of unrepresentative swing states, while diminishing the importance of everyone else. It means that conservative voters in reliably blue states, and liberal voters in reliably red states, have no voice at all when it comes to choosing the president. Worst of all, it allows a candidate to win the presidency with only a minority of all votes cast. That shouldn’t be possible in a democracy.

But getting rid of the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment. That isn’t likely to happen, since the states that benefit the most from it would have to vote away their own power.

Instead, reform advocates came up with a clever end-run around the electoral college: the National Popular Vote Compact. States that join the compact pledge to award their electoral votes, not to the candidate who wins that state, but to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide. This is allowed under the Constitution, which gives state legislatures the power to allocate their electoral votes any way they wish (Article II, Section 1).

The National Popular Vote Compact takes effect once it’s been enacted into law by jurisdictions which represent 270 electoral votes (an absolute majority of the total 538). As of November 2026, it’s been passed by 18 states plus the District of Columbia, representing 222 electoral votes.

To put it into effect, we need states which hold 48 more electoral votes. Currently, the holdouts include Nevada (6 EVs), Arizona (11 EVs), Michigan (10 EVs), Wisconsin (10 EVs), and Pennsylvania (19 EVs).

But as a result of the 2026 blue wave, Democrats will likely have a trifecta in all five of those states.

A Democratic lock on state government has already been confirmed in four of the five – in some cases, for the first time in decades. Votes are still being counted in Arizona, but a Democratic trifecta looks likely there as well.

This should be Democrats’ number-one priority when they take office. It’s hard to exaggerate how big this is. If we chose the president with a popular vote, George W. Bush would have lost in 2000, and Donald Trump would have lost in 2016.

It would reshape the landscape of American politics, making it impossible for presidential candidates to win solely by courting white conservatives in small rural states. It would boost the electoral importance of the large, diverse, progressive metropolises where most Americans actually live. That’s as it should be. Democrats have the power to do this now, if they choose. We the voters just need to force them to use it.

New on OnlySky: Blue Texas

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the blue tsunami of Democratic wins in this week’s midterms, and what it means for the future of politics in America.

Last night, in a decisive verdict on Donald Trump’s chaos and cruelty, Democratic candidates romped to victory in red states all across the country. They won back both houses of Congress and claimed a majority of governorships. Possibly the biggest and most welcome surprise was in Texas, where Democrats swept the governor, senate, and many other statewide races besides, shattering Republican control and breaking a thirty-year electoral drought.

Is this a short-lived fluke brought about by voter anger, or the harbinger of a lasting American sea change? Only time will tell, but we have one relevant historical example to study. Namely, California used to be a solid red state just like Texas – but gratuitous Republican cruelty toward Latino immigrants galvanized a political realignment whose consequences continue to this day. It’s not inconceivable that Texas is headed down the same path.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Nothing is new under the sun, and in the 1990s, as it is today, illegal immigration was a hot-button issue in American politics.

There were several high-profile scandals revolving around politicians who employed undocumented immigrants as household help. The passage of NAFTA decimated the agricultural industry in Mexico and forced thousands of Mexicans to emigrate to the U.S. in search of work, raising fears among prejudiced voters of Latino immigrants “stealing” jobs that rightfully belonged to Americans.

In 1994, pandering to these fears, California Republicans introduced Proposition 187. It would have made California the opposite of a sanctuary state, requiring local police to report to federal officials whenever they arrested anyone whom they suspected of being an illegal immigrant. It would have banned undocumented immigrants from receiving publicly funded health care, attending public school, or receiving any other public benefit.

Republicans thought this was a slam dunk, and at first, it seemed they were right…

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Forty acres and a mule

A "Homestead Act" stamp showing white settlers of the West

The Probability Broach, Appendix

We’ve reached the end of The Probability Broach. But following the conclusion of his story, L. Neil Smith includes an appendix that recounts the fictional history of his anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy. There are a few points of interest I’d like to highlight.

Smith’s appendix dates significant events using two numbers, the first in his new “A.L.” scheme, the second in the older (i.e., “our” world’s) CE scheme. Here’s one of the earlier entries:

11 1787 Federalists under Hamilton, Jay, Madison meet in Philadelphia, illegally adopt new “Constitution” creating strong central government.
12 1788 Ratification by ninth and last necessary state (New Hampshire).

There’s an awkward contradiction here which Smith doesn’t linger on. He condemns the Constitution as “illegal“—yet even in his alternate history, it was debated, voted on and ratified by the states, the same way it was in our timeline. If the Hamiltonians were so ruthless and power-hungry, why didn’t they impose it by force? Is calling for open debate and a democratic vote the act of a wannabe dictator?

Smith’s next point concerns his hero, Albert Gallatin, who led a successful rebellion against the Constitution and George Washington, then became the first president of the newly formed North American Confederacy:

20 1796 Gallatin confirmed by Congress; calls for neutral stance between England and France, humane Indian policies, and revision of Articles.

Smith wants you to think of his founder as a principled and ethical person, but doesn’t go into any detail about what these “humane Indian policies” were. Whatever they were, it doesn’t seem that they involved Native American sovereignties getting to keep their own land.

As I noted earlier, the North American Confederacy spread westward the same way as it did in our history, just with a slightly different ideology justifying it. There’s no acknowledgment that any of this territory was already occupied, or if it was, that the people living there posed any obstacle to settlers taking whatever land they wanted for themselves.

A map of North American political organization c.1800

Here’s what the American West looked like circa 1800. Does it look like vacant land just waiting for white homesteaders to roll in? (via Human History Map)

The same issue exists with the the Louisiana Purchase. Smith has it take place in 1803, the same as in the real world, with the only difference being that it involved “borrowing from private sources against [the] value of [the] land” rather than with public funds.

What goes unsaid is that France sold the U.S. a huge swath of land it only controlled on paper. In reality, that land was inhabited by untold numbers of Native American people and tribes. The U.S. claimed that, because it had “bought” this land from an overseas emperor, it had the right to displace the people who actually lived there—either by paying them a pittance, or through outright theft and violence.

How could this same thing have happened in the NAC? How can anarcho-capitalism, which supposedly shuns coercion and values property rights above all else, countenance buying people’s homeland out from under them without their consent?

In fact, the next point in Smith’s appendix further emphasizes the problem:

40 1816 Genêt re-elected (second term), proposes abolition of slavery, reparatory land grants to slaves in West.

Again, Smith wants to show that his alternate timeline was more moral and humane than our own. But it poses the question: why did it seem like a good idea to grant freed slaves land in the West? The only reasonable deduction is that in Smith’s history, like our own, Americans perceived this land as unoccupied and free for the taking, even though it wasn’t.

If Smith had taken his own premises seriously, what would make more sense would be to have freed slaves seize the land held by their former masters and take it for themselves. That way, they’d be the ones to benefit from all the labor they put into it, rather than having to start over somewhere else. That would be fairer and more just than the scenario Smith envisions, where the enslavers get to keep their property and all their ill-gotten gains, and former slaves get the consolation prize of being resettled on someone else’s land, displacing them in the process.

Shouldn’t an anarchist cheer the idea of an uprising where enslavers are cast down and their slave-labor plantations are turned into free communes, owned and run by the people who were once forced to toil there? Wouldn’t that be a transformative change that would symbolize America becoming a truly free society?

Alas, L. Neil Smith lacked the imagination to conceive of such things. He’s not against revolution in general—he approved of the American Revolution, obviously, and in another throwaway line in the appendix, he says that Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot succeeded in this timeline, wiping out Parliament and precipitating the collapse of the British government in favor of an anarchist alternative.

But this tinkering around the edges with real history seems to be all he was capable of. He doesn’t grant Black or Native American people the dignity of autonomy, of being able to decide their own destiny or participate in this world as true equals. At most, he depicts them as unimportant side characters in the glorious American story of colonialism and manifest destiny. His world has more or less the same outcomes as ours, just with a slightly different ideology justifying them. For all he wrote about liberty, he lacked either the vision or the courage to follow that principle to its truest and most radical conclusion.

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The Probability Broach: Liberum veto

A man giving two thumbs down

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

Win and Clarissa are on their honeymoon, but he’s still trying to figure out why the North American Confederacy is so different from his world. After much searching, he thinks he’s found the point where the two timelines split. In the NAC, the Declaration of Independence has one extra word:

The screen split, showing nearly identical documents side by side, the handwriting far too small to read, one tiny, illegible word blinking on and off. Clarissa punched ZOOM. The vital paragraphs leaped into visibility, the U.S.A.’s on the right, the Confederacy’s on the left:

…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happinefs—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the…

“There it is!” I paused. “But what the hell does it mean? Is this what I’ve been searching for, what made all the difference?”

She shrugged. “Well, the sentences do have rather different implications, don’t they?”

I thought about that. Yes, if each were followed to the letter. I read “my” version aloud: “…deriving their just powers from the—”

“—unanimous!—” Clarissa supplied from hers.

“—consent of the governed,” I finished.

Smith is fixated on this idea of absolute consent. He hates the notion of any law applying to him against his will. What he ignores is that, if you abolish government, you don’t abolish coercion; you abolish the only means by which people can protect themselves against coercion.

In the laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog world of anarcho-capitalism, if someone is richer or more powerful than you, they can treat you as ruthlessly as they like. If they own the land you live on, they can raise your rent to extortionate levels. Even if they don’t, they can make your life hell by surrounding your house with stinking factory farms or toxic petrochemical plants or deafeningly loud data centers. With no usury laws, lenders can entrap people in debt that compounds at inescapable rates.

Employers can coerce hungry, desperate people to sign their lives away into indentured servitude. They can treat their workers as expendable, sending them into grueling, dangerous conditions. They can make them live in company towns where they can only buy basic goods at extortionate prices and can lose their income and their home at a single stroke if they disobey the boss.

If all else fails, they can coerce you with sheer brute force, sending armed thugs to your door to push you around and make you submit to their demands, or to kill you if you won’t. Again, it bears repeating that all these things have actually happened.

The answer to these outrages is the many banding together against the few, using their collective power as a counterweight. That’s the point of those “Organize” posters.

The "Organize" photo showing a flock of fish eating a larger fish

On a large scale, it’s also the idea of democracy. Rather than being ruled by monarchs, or plutocrats so rich and powerful they might as well be monarchs, we can come together to agree on laws that protect us all equally, so nobody can abuse or exploit anyone else regardless of the gap in wealth or power between them. (At least, that’s supposed to be how it works.)

“Win, why do you suppose Jefferson added that one extra word?”

“I don’t know. It would explain Gallatin’s supporting the Whiskey Rebellion. Unanimous consent? Ask those Pennsylvania farmers! Try getting any bunch of people,” I paraphrased Lucy, “to agree unanimously on anything! No wonder your government is so harmless and impotent!”

I was going to make this point, but Win makes it for me. People are unique, quirky, ornery and stubborn. They have wildly different opinions, beliefs, biases and upbringings. A large crowd will almost never agree completely about anything. Therefore, by requiring unanimity, you make government incapable of ever acting.

This means that, in the laissez-faire dystopia, the perpetrators of injustice can prevent action forever merely by voting in favor of themselves. (You may have heard the libertarian jibe that “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner”. Well, my response to that is: Anarcho-capitalism is one wolf and one sheep, and the wolf proclaims that none of the other sheep are allowed to intrude by passing anti-freedom, nanny-state laws about who he can and can’t eat.)

Or a single reckless person can blackmail everyone else, demanding a bribe before he’ll give his consent to solve a problem that threatens everyone. It creates a massive incentive for Prisoner’s-Dilemma-style betrayal.

There’s a real-life example: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a 17th-century European superpower. It was progressive for its era: one of the first constitutional monarchies, with legal guarantees of rights including religious freedom, and a nobles’ parliament called the Sejm which elected a king who was required to follow its decisions.

Unfortunately, the Commonwealth had a fatal flaw: the liberum veto, which allowed any member of the Sejm to block any legislation. Exactly as Smith wanted, it required unanimous consent to pass anything. The result was that the state was frequently paralyzed. After an initial period of expansion, its economy stagnated, its wealth became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and in times of crisis, it was unable to raise an army or defend its borders. As a result, it was slowly nibbled away by rival powers, until it was partitioned by its neighbors and dissolved.

In a very Ayn Rand-esque coda, Win narrates that he’s learned from NAC philosophers that “there’s only one act of free will… to think or not to think”. He says this is the ultimate explanation for the different wording in the two Declarations:

History isn’t determined by some mysterious impersonal machinery, but by people deciding whether to use their minds or slough it off. In this world, Jefferson decided to insert that one little word. Win Bear and Ed Bear don’t exist in twinned reality because they’re both Indians, but because they—their ancestors—decided they would, history be damned… The old alibis won’t wash any more: we’re responsible, and nothing’s ever written indelibly on that wall.

Apparently, Smith believes you can bootstrap yourself into existence, overcoming historical forces and genetics through sheer willpower. That’s his final explanation for why many people are the same in both worlds, despite their divergent histories.

As bizarre as this is, it fits his ideology. In a sense, this is something a libertarian anarchist would have to say. If people are the product of their heredity or their upbringing, they can’t be blamed for that. You can’t credit or fault someone for traits they didn’t choose to have. It also implies that you can make people better (or worse) by changing the society that created them.

But in Smith’s mind, none of that matters. People are who they are because they decide to be, and for no other reason—and they’ll be that way regardless of the world they exist in. Every outcome on both a personal and a societal level is brought about by people’s individual choice and nothing else.

In that worldview, you could justify not having laws or a safety net, since it won’t create any change in outcomes. But that worldview is based on pure magical thinking. It’s the supernatural belief that free will is a separate thing that not only floats free of both environment and genetics, but is more powerful than either. It holds that people choose to be good or evil, wise or ignorant, freedom-loving or power-hungry, and nothing that anyone else does can change that.

But this is patently not true. Whether or not you believe in anything called free will, humans are the product of their circumstances. Our brains are physical objects, subject to natural laws, and influenced by the environment they grow up in. Change that environment, and you change the people. To hold to a libertarian or religious worldview that denies this, you have to deny causality itself.

Next week: I’ll spend a little time discussing the appendix to The Probability Broach, which presents a timeline for Smith’s parallel universe.

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The Probability Broach: When is a war not a war?

Cavalry soldiers charging into battle

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith is still wrapping up loose ends. He says that the scientists are mass-producing their Probability Broach jammer, selling the device everywhere to block future incursions from unfriendly universes.

Because it seems like a point against his ideal anarcho-capitalist society that it was helpless to defend itself and was only saved by accident, he has Win Bear offer another last-minute saving throw: even if the villains had enacted their invasion plot, they still would have failed in the end.

But even if Madison had gotten everything he wanted from SecPol, I now think he would have lost anyway. Most Confederates would have taken to the hills, fought for centuries if necessary, rather than surrender to tyranny. And nobody in this crazy quilt of a country has the authority to surrender. Nobody. Eventually that would have driven Madison or his successors nuts. As it is, the few hypothetical surviving Federalists have other problems: their leaders are dead. People like Federalists need leaders. Confederates don’t. That’s why they’ll always win.

Well, if it makes you feel better to tell yourself that. Personally, it strikes me as a hollow consolation to say, “We wouldn’t really have lost the war. We just would have had all our major cities nuked, most of our territory conquered, and the ragged, irradiated bands of survivors would have fled into the wilderness to scratch out a meager existence while waging a centuries-long guerrilla struggle against their tyrannical oppressors!”

In another wrap-up paragraph, Win sorrowfully relates that Ed Bear, who he’s come to think of as a brother, is leaving Earth for good.

Win says it only belatedly occurred to him to wonder why Lucy, even at 136 years old, “was the only gray-haired little old lady” he’s met in this world. It turns out that she used to be an asteroid engineer, “jockeying rocks like Ceres and the Martian moons into locations and shapes that people prefer”—until an accident in space caused her to be blasted with a near-fatal dose of radiation.

Advanced medical technology saved her life, but she had to postpone anti-aging treatment for several years. In that time, she moved to Earth, met Ed, and fell in love. Once she’s young again, she and Ed are going back to the stars together: “toward a million ice-cold rocks just waiting to be turned into gold mines”.

And I’ll miss Lucy, for all her ridiculous advice and uncalled-for opinions. Just this afternoon, she was at it again.

“But Lucy,” I said, exasperated as usual, “you can’t call Americans warlike, exactly. We went to all kinds of trouble to avoid war. More, sometimes, than we should have.”

“And still managed ten or eleven real good ones!” she snorted. “That, plus all your rules and regulations, put you a hundred years behind us and at about three percent of our standard of living.” She rolled a cigar in her fingers, listening to the tobacco. “Anyway, I never said your people are warlike, Winnie. People don’t cause wars, governments do. Eliminate governments—hell, just eliminate conscription and taxation—and you eliminate war. Simple as that!”

“Bullshit!… You anarchists managed plenty of wars on your own. Look at the War in Europe, or the one with the Czar.”

“Whoa there, boy! The last war we fought as a nation was in Mexico, and we were still the old United States, then. The Confederacy ain’t a nation, and it doesn’t fight wars.”

“Oh? Well, who does, then?”

“Governments, son, like I said. ‘Twas a Prussian government decided to gobble up Europe. Same with the Czar in Antarctica. Every fight we’ve stumbled into has been that way, from the Revolution to this silly thing with the Hamiltonians: individuals tryin’ to stop what some damn fool government started.”

This sounds like a noble aspiration—peace on earth, no more war, no more killing—except that Smith’s own plot shows it’s false.

As you may remember, the North American Confederacy did get involved in this world’s version of World War 1. They assembled a force called the “Thousand Airship Flight” to invade Europe, defeating the Prussian army using advanced weapons such as “Goddard rockets”.

Later on, the NAC also engaged in a war with the Russian Czar, first fighting his forces in Antarctica, then winning a naval battle at the Bering Strait. Even at the Continental Congress, we heard from a faction called the “Neoimperialists“, who want the NAC to mobilize to destroy any governments left in the world.

Heavily-armed volunteer legions? Air forces firing missiles? Naval fleets defending the seas? First strikes to overthrow unfriendly states? All that sure sounds like war to me. But Lucy denies it, based on a semantic sleight of hand: only governments fight wars, so if you abolish government, you get rid of war. Even if it looks like war and sounds like war, it’s not, because her definition says so!

That may satisfy a staunch anarcho-capitalist, but it’s not likely to convince anyone who doesn’t already share the author’s premises. Even Win (for once) points out the fallacy of it.

Smith, through Lucy, insists that only governments have a reason to fight wars. This ignores the many instances through history where private entities unleashed organized violence: whether it’s imperialist trading companies who colonized other lands in the name of profit, or drug cartels who fight street battles over turf, or religious crusaders who set off to conquer the infidels in the name of faith, or capitalist business owners who hire armed thugs to kill striking workers.

Did any of these human-rights outrages happen in the NAC’s alternate history? How could they not, if there’s no government and no law to prevent them? What would stop a robber baron from hiring mercenaries to just take some land he wanted for himself? Or out-of-work mercenary firms from looting a city or turning to piracy?

It’s true that governments often go to war for bad reasons (as we’ve repeatedly seen under Republican presidents), and we should deplore that. But you can’t just stop there and conclude that governments increase the net amount of violence in the world. You also have to ask what conflicts didn’t happen because states compelled aggrieved parties to come to the bargaining table, whereas a power vacuum might have led to an armed conflict. (A list of U.N. peacekeeping missions might be a good place to start looking.)

Smith doesn’t want to engage in this kind of nuanced analysis. His ideology is strictly one-dimensional: Whatever the other side does is war, and therefore bad; whatever we do is not war, and therefore good. Ironically, this kind of uncritical black-and-white thinking has led to more wars than anything else.

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New on OnlySky: Christians are AI-pilled

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about a surprising new finding: practicing Christians are more likely to use and trust AI than the general public or the nonreligious demographic – and that includes questions about faith and theology. Several different studies independently confirm this stranger-than-fiction result.

Why are some believers consulting chatbots in preference to asking their own clergy members or reading the Bible? My hypothesis is that AI is a natural fit for them. It fills the same niche in their lives as their belief in God: to people who’ve been taught not to think for themselves and to rely on outside guidance for every major decision, AI gives them that, without the inconvenience and friction of attending church. It’s always there, always listens, takes their most trivial concerns seriously, heaps praise upon them and tells them they’re right no matter what. It’s a true deus ex machina that does everything they’ve ever really wanted from God.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Naively, you might have expected that churchgoing Christians would be less likely to use or trust AI. After all, these believers have been taught to trust the Bible as the only source of truth and their church as its supreme interpreter. It seems like they should be suspicious of any source of information that isn’t deeply rooted in their own faith tradition, let alone a new and enigmatic intelligence concocted by Silicon Valley.

But this expectation is wrong. In fact, practicing Christians are more likely to consult AI—for religious and nonreligious questions alike.

The million-dollar question is, why have so many believers embraced this technology?

The statistical relationship between frequency of church attendance and trust in AI should be a clue. The more fervently a person believes, the more likely they are to embrace AI—because AI serves the same purpose in their lives as their religion does. To be perhaps too blunt, it alleviates the need to think for yourself.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: A day late and a dollar short

An antique analog clock face

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith tries to wrap up some loose ends. He seems to recognize, belatedly, that it made his alleged utopia look bad for them to be utterly helpless in the face of an invasion. In an attempt to make up for this, Win narrates that the Continental Congress reconvened after he departed and swung into action after all:

I don’t know why I expected that stubborn congregation to sit on their hands with the world collapsing around their ears. Too used to the U.S. Congress, I guess.

But… they did!

That’s indisputable. The Continental Congress had the threat explained to them in detail. They heard firsthand testimony and video evidence. The villain confessed his entire plan. And in the face of all that proof, they voted to adjourn without taking any action, because doing anything to thwart the bad guys would have violated their rights.

This is a retcon on Smith’s part. In the earlier chapters, he made a big deal about how difficult it was to get Congress to assemble in the first place, because it requires the active participation of at least 90% of the population of North America, and because it meets in an unappealing remote area as an intentional obstacle. It normally meets only once every few decades, if that, and this one took weeks of work by the protagonists to persuade enough influential people to make it happen.

Once they voted to adjourn, that should have been it. Most people would have lost interest and gone home. The idea that Congress could easily be called back into session very shortly afterward flies in the face of what the author tells us about how this society works.

The explosions in Saint Charles and Auraria didn’t really change anything—maybe relaxed the timetable a little—because the Confederacy has decided to strike back. Not against the Hamiltonians, who were never regarded as a significant threat, but against SecPol and the culture that allows such an abomination to exist. And not with Confederate A-bombs or troops, but in the same way that Sequoyah won the Mexican War: with ideas.

There’s a lot of fundraising and enlistment going on in the Confederacy now. We’re preparing to change a world, an entire universe, and drag the United States of America, kicking and screaming, through two centuries of peace and freedom it managed to miss by letting Alexander Hamilton screw things up back in 1789.

Win narrates that the Propertarian Party in his world, as well as a few other politically amenable organizations, are about to receive funding and support from the North American Confederacy. It’s at this point that we find out that this whole story is a manuscript he wrote that’s being sent to them:

You can’t draft anybody or raise war taxes here, but you can ask folks to chip in, and try to explain why it’s important. And you can try to explain to the Propertarian Party why the first copy of this manuscript and an initial seventy-five pounds of 999 fine have suddenly materialized in the middle of their conference table.

This sounds like an anarchist-friendly plan: voluntary and peaceful, changing people’s minds with words and ideas rather than with force. Too bad that under the circumstances, it would have been much too little, too late.

As TPB spent most of its length reminding us, the Hamiltonians from this world and SecPol from Win’s world were prepared to conquer the North American Confederacy with overwhelming force. They were going to drop nuclear bombs to destroy any potential centers of resistance, then march armies through the Probability Broach portal to subjugate the survivors. And they would have succeeded, if not for a last-minute technological deus ex machina combined with Win’s completely accidental meddling.

This isn’t the kind of threat that can be countered with political tracts about the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. The NAC’s peaceful evangelism would have been utterly futile in the face of an organized enemy willing to use violence and terror to get their way.

The “persuade everyone to be an anarchist” plan would only have a chance of succeeding in a tolerant society with free speech—but Smith has insisted all along that Win doesn’t live in that kind of world. He lives in a dystopia where government black helicopters blast unauthorized radio stations, and jackbooted secret police haul people off to reeducation camps or even murder them outright to suppress the slightest whisper of dissent.

Ironically, if you think armed resistance against such an oppressive regime would be a better plan, then it would appear the nonhuman sapients of the NAC are smarter than the humans:

The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach. They have a tough job ahead of them, taking their borrowed culture to relatives who have, as yet, no culture at all. I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.

Ooloorie haughtily assures me that her own people will have no such difficulties. Cetacean civilization, she claims, was already ancient when H. sapiens was discovering the useful properties of obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of Telecom time with her while I’m recovering, listening to fascinating stories: how porpoises first discovered the forgotten world above the sea; how they decided to observe and protect man until he was fit company for civilized beings; how the finny folk met in a roving, decades-long convention, deciding at last to let the Confederacy join them.

So watch out, tuna fishermen! As I’ve had reason to learn, lasers are nasty weapons.

Smith continues his bizarre insistence that apes and cetaceans didn’t need to be uplifted to intelligence, but that they were intelligent all along—in Win’s world (the “real world”) as well as in the North American Confederacy.

If cetacean civilization is as ancient and as advanced as Smith says, it makes no sense that Win’s world wouldn’t have found out about it. How could it be possible that we’ve been hunting whales or drowning dolphins in fishing nets without suffering retributive attacks from cetacean armies with frickin’ laser beams?

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The Probability Broach: The irrevocable crime

A set of balance scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

When we left off, Win Bear’s ignorance had indirectly caused the villains of TPB to blow themselves up. The Hamiltonian plot is foiled; no nuclear bombs or invading armies are coming through the portal; the North American Confederacy is saved. Happy ending, ticker-tape parade, et cetera.

But wait a minute. There’s a problem that L. Neil Smith glides right past.

As we read earlier in the book, if a Probability Broach closes when an object is partway through, you get a big explosion on both ends. The size of the explosion depends on the mass distribution of the object. Depending on how much mass there is, it could be into the megaton range.

Win and his friends were on the smaller side of the blast, so they escaped with only minor injuries:

The explosion in Auraria was a mild summer breeze compared to what had happened across the river. Clarissa and I were last out of the building, and escaped with mostly minor scrapes and flash burns. She lost the back half of her coveralls, and, sadly, a lot of her beautiful hair. Protecting her eyes, I got a little careless about my own, so I am now sporting a rakish eyepatch until they clone me a transplant.

At least Lucy says it’s rakish.

But if the explosion on the other side was much bigger, what happened to the innocent people who were living next to the Hamiltonians’ hideout? Does Win feel any guilt about that?

Fortunately for his protagonist, Smith has an answer to this:

The Saint Charles Town explosion left a crater a hundred yards across. Of Madison and his people, we never found so much as a shirt button. Their hideout was an isolated building in the middle of an abandoned buffalo feedlot. I was grateful for that, although neighbors who had to shovel themselves out from under several kilotons of bison flops weren’t quite so happy.

This convenient coincidence spares Win from having innocent deaths on his conscience. However, we can infer he wouldn’t have been too bothered either way. He holds the misanthropic attitude common to libertarians, as we see when he speculates about what would have happened if the Hamiltonians had made contact with his world and the explosion had taken place there instead:

It could have been worse. The coextant point in Denver is a densely populated area, the four-hundred block of East Eighth Avenue. Thousands might have died, even some who didn’t deserve to.

With these lines, Smith figures he’s disposed of the problem. But he didn’t. There’s a loose end he’s forgotten to tie up.

Even if no innocents were killed in the explosion, Madison and his confederates certainly were. Are there any legal ramifications for that? There must have been an investigation into what caused it. Does Win have to face criminal charges or answer to a tribunal?

Smith’s implicit assumption is that the Hamiltonians were bad guys and no one mourns them, so no one would care that Win effectively murdered them by sabotaging their technology. But that’s not true. People have rights in the North American Confederacy, remember?

In fact, they take those rights so seriously that the entire Continental Congress voted to disband in the face of a looming invasion, because thwarting the plot would require violating individual rights and they don’t do that no matter the stakes. If the Congress was unable to take action against Madison for that reason, why doesn’t Win get in trouble for doing the thing they refused to do?

Perhaps most people don’t like the Hamiltonians, but Madison should have had some next of kin. Even if he had no relatives, he must have had other ideological allies in the world who would care that he was dead. In the very last resort, one of those professional civil liberties groups that represent people with no other representation should have looked into it. There should have been someone to lay charges against Win.

As Smith said in an earlier chapter, the NAC’s law requires criminals to make restitution to their victims. If you commit an “irrevocable crime, like murder” for which restitution is impossible, then you get ostracized from civilization and either accept lifelong exile to the asteroid mines or else face death by starvation.

So, why doesn’t Win face any punishment? True, he didn’t cause the explosion singlehandedly, but he definitely played a part in it (the legal system calls this comparative fault). If it’s not murder, it’s manslaughter at the very least. Why isn’t he being sent to the asteroids?

It would be one thing if Smith wrote that there was an investigation and Win was acquitted. But he doesn’t. Just as in the earlier scene where Win tortured a prisoner—and, again, should have faced punishment for that under the NAC’s laws, but didn’t—the author takes it for granted that his protagonists are exempt from consequences.

I doubt that Smith noticed this inconsistency, which is a telling piece of evidence for what he really cares about. His overriding belief, like many other conservatives, is that laws should only apply to the outgroup, not to people like him and to those he cares about. He proves it in his own novel, going to great effort to describe a society where everyone’s rights have ironclad protection, then showing people flagrantly violating those rights but facing no consequences for doing so. This dangerous hypocrisy is an object lesson in why people with this ideology should never get to exercise power in the real world.

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The Probability Broach: Somebody else’s problem

A statue of the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

Having escaped pursuit in last week’s plot-obligatory car chase scene, Win and his friends have set up shop in Saint Charles Town, the North American Confederacy’s parallel version of Denver. That’s close enough to the villains’ hideout for scientist Deejay Thorens to set up her modified Probability Broach, which will let them jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from bringing in their invasion force:

It was dark by the time Deejay sat back, turning knobs and watching the Telecom. Abruptly, the screen blossomed into an intricate moiré pattern. She began making frantic adjustments.

“I think I’ve got something here! Wait—yes, here it is! He’s just warming up again! Okay, I’ve got him. Hand me that meter, Lucy… we’ll know more in a few minutes.”

…She inserted a slender filament into the guts of the machine, plugged the other end into the Telecom, pushing buttons. I jumped three feet as the screen bulged with the proximity-distorted image of John Jay Madison.

…The picture backed off and swooped around the room in Saint Charles, panning 360 degrees to catch Madison’s associates: Skinner, others I recognized from the Continental Congress, finally resting on Bealls himself, up to his armpits in haywired paratronics.

Deejay explains that the interface is one-way; they can see the bad guys, but not vice versa. The villains are having an animated conversation, presumably about how to get their device working and reestablish contact with the evil government of Win’s world.

Deejay started turning knobs again, the viewpoint whirled dizzily. “Forward a bit,” she muttered. “A little more… there! Now I’ll punch up a short program, and—Good! Bealls is still calibrating. When he goes on full power, we’ll match him, foul up his field symmetry, maybe give him some feedback to play with. The best part is, he’ll never figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t know enough field theory yet.”

Clarissa crossed over to the ‘com, dragging me along. We watched Bealls’s distorted, sweaty face as he concentrated. “One thing I don’t understand, Deejay,” she said. “Do we have to watch him every minute, from now on, just to prevent him communicating with the other side?”

“That’s the cockroach in the hollandaise, all right!” Lucy muttered grimly. “Say, y’don’t suppose we could put a couple dozen slugs through this contraption of yours and…”

… “Sorry, boys. It’s a great idea, but we simply don’t have the power. On regular wall current, this Broach is good for about three-tenths-of-an-inch diameter. I can louse up Beall’s operations, but that’ll have to satisfy us until we think of something else.”

“Nuts!” Lucy complained. “Can’t get a fifty-caliber bullet through a thirty-caliber hole!”

I include this dialogue because it shows that the protagonists take for granted something they shouldn’t take for granted: namely, that they’re the only ones in the world who can or will do anything about Madison.

The problem, as Clarissa states, is that they can use Deejay’s technology to scramble Madison’s Probability Broach, but it requires active effort and proximity. Unless Madison gives up, which he’s not likely to do, they’ll have to stay near him and watch him 24/7. It’s a lifetime commitment to keep the North American Confederacy from being invaded.

But wait a minute. Why is it up to these people specifically to do that?

After all, Win and his friends made their case to all the delegates at the Continental Congress and, in theory, all the people of North America. Everyone who saw the films of nuclear war was appropriately shocked and horrified. Our protagonists should have a huge pool of volunteers eager to assist them.

Deejay could train others in the use of her Broach jammer, and they could set up a rotating schedule to watch Madison and block his device whenever he tried using it. This would be an anarchist-friendly solution, even, since it would thwart his evil plan without initiating force or violating anyone’s rights.

But that possibility is never discussed, nor even mentioned as an option. Nor does anyone else seek the protagonists out to offer assistance. It’s as if the entire population of the North American Confederacy has collectively decided that this isn’t their problem, and they’ll leave it up to this small self-selected handful of people to do something about it.

Obviously, L. Neil Smith wrote it this way for plot purposes. He wants his main characters to be the ones who save the day, so he doesn’t have strangers get involved.

However, whether he realized it or not, this is a perfect demonstration of how an anarcho-capitalist society would fail. When selfishness is the rule, there’s a strong incentive to ignore collective dangers in the hope that someone else will deal with them.

It’s the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: why should I spend my time and resources, or risk my own safety, to solve a problem when all those other selfish jerks will just sit back and get a free ride off my efforts? And because everyone reasons this way, no one does anything.

This is a problem in our society, where commons problems like homelessness, climate change, pollution, groundwater depletion, species extinction due to overharvesting, and other such issues tend to go unsolved until a government steps in. In a society based purely on capitalism, with no authority that can compel people to cooperate, no one will want to be helpful at their own expense. As a result, big problems will fester and multiply unless a few heroic suckers are willing to sacrifice themselves. That’s exactly what we see here.

Bealls starts to power up his device, and Deejay tries to jam it—but recall she said that if her alignment is off by a tiny bit, the two Broaches will go “concentric”, becoming a portal linking two points in the same world. No prizes for guessing that Chekhov’s gun is about to go off:

“Here it comes!” Deejay warned. “I’ve got to be careful now. It tends to drift. Don’t jog my elbow!” She sat tensed at the controls, making minute adjustments. The screen blurred, then sprang into a mind-twisting kaleidoscopic display. “Shit!” Deejay startled all of us, ripping the fiber-optic tube out of the interface. “It’s gone concentric!”

A tiny silvery button popped out of the Broach and sprouted toward us on a slender supporting rod. When the second joint passed the interface, I recognized it. “Not a manuscript!” I whispered hoarsely. “Not even a note! That’s an antenna, an ordinary walkie-talkie antenna!” On impulse I snatched a pair of vise-grips from the bench and clamped them onto the chrome-plated shaft. “Let the son of a bitch figure that one out!”

The antenna stopped sliding into the room, backed up suddenly until the pliers banged against the Broach chassis, arched forward, and retreated again, trapped.

Win chortles at his prank (he starts recounting an obscene joke about a vice squad and a public bathroom), but he’s forgotten something extremely important. If a Probability Broach shuts down while something is partway through the portal, you get a big bang.

Luckily for him, Deejay is quicker on the uptake and realizes what’s about to happen:

“Out!” Deejay screamed in horror, pointing at her instruments. “Get out of here before he shuts the field down!” She scrambled for the exit, dragging Lucy by the gunbelt. I shoved Clarissa through the door behind Ed, just making it to the sidewalk outside, when—

The world erupted in fire and thunder. Windows bulged and splashed, twin balls of fire either side of the door… My hair and eyebrows crisped and singed. The world was hell, a raging, incoherent furious roar.

Yet, even above the explosion we’d escaped, I could hear a distant rumble, see the smoke and flame of a vastly greater cataclysm, a mile across the river in Saint Charles.

And so, the day is saved—not by the heroes’ clever plan or bold action, but by Win’s blundering combined with another sci-fi deus ex machina.

Given how Smith hails firearms as the solution to every problem, you’d think he’d want to dispatch the villains in an exciting, climactic shootout. At the very least, there should have been a final face-to-face confrontation between Win and his archnemesis. But none of that happens. There’s no heroic gunplay, no Dirty Harry monologues, no James Bond-style action-hero quips.

Instead, the bad guys blow themselves up: offscreen, by accident, and without even the satisfaction of realizing what’s about to happen to them. It’s a disappointingly anticlimactic ending.

There’s one more short chapter of TPB, in which Smith tries to wrap up loose ends and summarize the moral of the story. Next week, I’ll deconstruct that chapter and offer some thoughts on the book as a whole.

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New on OnlySky: The energy crisis is coming

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the 1970s-style oil crisis we may be about to suffer because of the Trump administration’s ruinous stupidity.

The war that America started but can’t finish is spiraling into disaster. Our military in the Persian Gulf proved to be a paper tiger, and our promises to protect our allies were hollow. Iran already controls the Strait of Hormuz, and its allies the Houthis have seized the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. These are the twin chokepoints for Middle East oil. Now that they have control over both, Iran and its proxies can cut off shipments at will and inflict massive pain and suffering on any country that’s dependent on fossil fuel to run its economy.

It didn’t have to be this way. We should never have gotten ourselves embroiled in this pointless and unwinnable war. On a larger scale, we could have electrified the global economy years ago, switching to clean, dependable green power and severing our dependence on Mideast autocrats. But we didn’t do any of that, and we’re all going to pay the price: shortages, high inflation, and potentially the end of the petrodollar agreement that made America the world’s superpower.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for America’s war, Saudi Arabia had a fallback option. They could transport their oil through a pipeline running east-to-west across the country, to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. But shipping the oil onward from Yanbu to points south and east requires passing through Bab el-Mandeb… which the Houthis now control.

This isn’t a complete blockade, because oil can also travel north through the Red Sea, going through the Suez Canal. That means Mideast oil could still reach Europe, though countries in Asia are in a much worse position. On the other hand, Iran and its proxies can also attack the Saudi east-to-west pipeline… which they did this week, shutting it down for an indefinite time.

With Iran and its allies controlling both straits and bombing oil infrastructure at will, they’ve pinched the arteries of the world economy. This is a disaster for America and its allies. It’s our worst strategic defeat in decades, possibly ever.

Continue reading on OnlySky…