The "Learned Helplessness" Of 2026
What happens when a mad king rules and liberal democracy disappears into thin air.
The term “learned helplessness” is the result of a series of experiments the psychologist Martin Seligman devised in the late 1960s. Here’s a good summary:
While conducting experimental research on classical conditioning, Seligman inadvertently discovered that dogs that had received unavoidable electric shocks failed to take action in subsequent situations — even those in which escape or avoidance was in fact possible — whereas dogs that had not received the unavoidable shocks immediately took action in subsequent situations.
This “learned helplessness” also worked with humans in subsequent testing, using very loud noises rather than electric shocks. After a while, the humans stopped trying to shut the noise out and gave up. George W Bush and Dick Cheney borrowed some of this when devising their own torture program. The idea was to take a human being, pummel him with some kind of repeated Gestapo technique — freezing to near-death again and again, slamming against walls for days on end, waterboarding, sleep deprivation for weeks — so that his will to resist anything or even be anything collapses. Then he tells you anything you want him to say. True or false.
And if I were to describe my own state of mind observing the world and America right now, “learned helplessness” is pretty close. You may well be feeling it too. Each day, you read the news and see something completely beyond belief and yet feel utterly disempowered to do or even say anything about it. And then another story hits you again. And another. Again. And again. Trump shocks and shocks and shocks you some more. Even after all these years, you take it in the gut each time. And he feels nothing. This has been his entire life.
What the mad king announced this week — that he has not just pardoned but will now financially reward all the thugs who attacked the police and desecrated the Congress on January 6 — is the latest shock from the Trump taser. Another one hits when you find out he’s also exempted himself and his entire family from any past or future tax audits by the IRS. Then another one, as we learn he is making countless stock trades for huge amounts in companies very much affected by federal policy:
The new [financial disclosure] reports cover the first three months of 2026 …showing a cumulative value of between $220 million and around $750 million. The purchases included securities linked to companies such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Oracle, Broadcom, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.
Trump does not have a blind trust; it’s a revocable one managed by his sons and an old buddy. And if you think Trump maintains a saintly distance from how his own money is invested, well, you should join the administration. It’s where amoral tools like Todd Blanche belong. It’s hard to put it better than Derek Thompson:
Within one 24-hour period, Trump: got out of a $100 million IRS fine, secured “immunity” from all future tax investigations for his family and friends, created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters, and was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion. … Nobody even tries to defend it.
And the latter is the point: no one can defend it, but Trump will still continue to bleed public office for every penny he can find, and our job in this de facto monarchy is simply to watch him, helplessly.
We are also, in case you hadn’t noticed, in a war that we are losing, that we had no warning of, that Congress had no say in, that has put a rocket under inflation, and that has hugely depleted stockpiles for our own defense — way more than the Israelis used for the war they conned Trump into:
The imbalance, according to three U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes during Operation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world.
Israel first! But there’s no chance of a vote in the Congress stopping the war any time soon despite its manifest illegality, massive popular opposition, and a slim anti-war majority in the House and Senate. Because, well, er, we have a Congress that might as well not exist.
And as all this goes on, a spasm of hideous gerrymandering all over the country empowers the extremes on both sides; and GOP primary voters obediently throw out two of the few independent-minded, sane Republicans left in the Congress: Senator Bill Cassidy and the great Thomas Massie, the latter destroyed by Trump and AIPAC for daring to expose the Epstein files and oppose this war. AIPAC always, always takes out the good ones.
Yes, the polls are showing a real slide for Trump. But it’s still incredible that a president this corrupt, this incompetent, and this vile still commands 37 percent support. Yes, this week there were some tiny signs that the constitutional corpse is twitching: maybe paying off violent criminals in a giant, far-right slush fund is not so great, and maybe a ballroom fit for a Russian oligarch can wait — mutter some men pretending to be Senators. But don’t kid yourselves. This is a one-man cult, not a party. They’ll cave. They always do.
And when you look at the alternative that’s supposed to rescue us, the learned helplessness really kicks in.
The Democrats are still ideologically split, have a lame bench of candidates for 2028, and haven’t shifted an iota from the positions that lost them the last election. Their 2024 “autopsy” says nothing of any consequence, and dodges the Biden age issue and the Harris uselessness issue. Even now, with Trump at 37 percent, “70 percent of all registered voters said they were dissatisfied with Democrats. 64 percent said the same of Republicans.” Does it get any more damning than that?
And yet the current Dem mood is to do nothing but win the midterms by default — then use that as an excuse to do nothing again. Check out the cross-tabs in the NYT poll. Only 38 percent of Dems think they need to shift on transing children or having boys compete with girls in sports. They still love mass migration and will promise another massive influx in 2028 (as long as it’s “orderly”). “White” is still a term of abuse. Gay men and lesbians are still “queers”. Men are still women and women are still men. When you ask Democrats what they mean by moderation, it’s the exact same far-left policies as Biden’s, but delivered more nicely. Woke isn’t dead. It’s merely waiting.
Look abroad and the despair deepens. Our “ally” Israel is conducting a campaign of pogroms, murders, arson, and rape in the West Bank, and killed more than 30,000 civilians in just two years in Gaza, which is now a moonscape. Read this story and see what we fund and support, and Israel’s supporters ignore or deny. The Israeli prime minister praises torturers caught on tape as heroes, even as he gleefully levels whole towns in southern Lebanon, wiping them off the face of the earth.
A member of the Knesset from a party in the governing coalition said the quiet part out loud recently: “In Jenin, there are no innocent civilians. In Jenin, there are no innocent children.” A fringe extremist? In one poll, 62 percent of the Israeli public overall and 76 percent of Israeli Jews agreed with that view. Killing women and children is seen as legitimate self-defense by a majority of Israelis. Which is why the IDF either buried or burned alive over 30,000 of them in Gaza alone.
And yet say a word about this and an army of woke fanatics is outraged! It’s a blood libel! The Free Press has run one piece on the West Bank pogroms, by an Israeli, downplaying them, and six pieces attacking Nick Kristof! His offense? Taking seriously extreme claims of torture under a minister who openly celebrates it, and taunts activists held in stress positions, and begs Netanyahu to “give them to me for a long, long time, give them to us for the terrorist prisons.” And if you are revolted by this, and want us to stop funding it, you’re simply complicit in attacks on synagogues in the US. The charge of antisemitism to squelch good-faith debate is what they’ve done for decades. They’re still at it!
And so the rest of us slowly learn to give up and drop out. So many normie friends of mine have just stopped engaging the news. Every day, another headline is like another electric shock we have become used to. If you actually care — about America, the Constitution, basic decency — the psychic impact is greater: you will be slowly ground down into the dust. There is no point resisting and so, eventually, no point in even paying attention. Reason and deliberation are irrelevant.
That’s why, I suspect, so many very online folks have become crazy caricatures. It’s the only way to survive mentally. It’s psychologically Sisyphean to try to retain intellectual honesty or complexity or a grip on truth in this environment. So many people have just put on a performative partisan mask, and pander. The alternative — to keep being assailed by both sides with brutality and venom most humans naturally recoil from — becomes too much to bear.
I have tried to resist the depression this Weimar culture engenders. It’s my job. I’ve tried to tell the truth about both extremes. I haven’t given up on liberal democracy. But I’d be a fool to believe I have gotten anywhere these past ten years of trying. Trump’s re-election really was an extinction-level event for our former way of life. I was right in 2016. We could have escaped after 2020. But then Biden shat the bed.
All the mountains of ink spilt on Trump’s malfeasance? Hasn’t changed a thing. All the arguments about immigration, crime, transing children, and “white supremacy”? The Democrats are where they were in 2015 and not budging. Only the about-to-die — like Barney — have a chance of saying anything honest, and among Republicans, only those headed for the exits. Obama? A sphinx with a giant ugly stump in Chicago, Netflix gigs, and trips on yachts with billionaires. The few ordinary folks who have stood up in office? Like Massie, they’re just play-putty for the mad king.
Like the rest of us for the foreseeable future.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a chat with my old professor Harvey Mansfield on modernity; reader dissents over my piece on Kristof and Israel; nine notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award for Buck Angel; 15 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of Beyoncé blended with the Beatles; a window from the Isle of Skye; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Harvey Mansfield
Harvey is a political philosopher. He’s been on the faculty at Harvard since 1962, and he’s currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government. His 13 books include Taming the Prince, Manliness, and Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. His new book is The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy. Harvey was my tutor as a graduate student at Harvard, an overseer of my dissertation, and I was a teaching fellow for the course in modern political thought that his latest book reprises brilliantly. To be honest, my reverence for him made me nervous for this podcast. But his brilliance and dry humor and joie de vivre all came through, and he put me at ease.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the shift from virtue to freedom during the Enlightenment, and how Nietzsche reframed the West. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod with Jerusalem Demsas on the Dems, along with a couple others. We also air a bunch of reader dissent and debate over the Kristof op-ed and the EEOC case against the NYT, with my lengthy replies throughout.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. We have some real stars coming up: Ben Rhodes on Iran and speech-writing, HW Brands on the life of George Washington, John Gray on Trump’s new world, Bob Wright on the evolutionary force of AI, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Daniel McCarthy on conservatism, Stephen Grosz on the struggles of love, and Robby George on all our disagreements. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader writes:
I didn’t like your set-up of last week’s column. I thought you’d take time to reflect on the horrors of October 7 and refocus our efforts on eradicating barbaric extremists like Hamas and other groups of their ilk. Instead, you used it to, in effect, say that Hamas is evil but so is Israel. This moral equivalency is infuriating. Next, you’ll be saying the United States is the worst terrorist entity in the world.
Sigh. Even when I go out of my way to expose Hamas’ evil and call them demonic in the opening paragraphs of my column, it’s not enough. If I criticize Israel at all, I’m out of bounds. I have never said Israel is evil or the same as Hamas. But the collective punishment of women and children in Gaza was categorically evil; and what the settlers are doing on the West Bank is categorically evil. I stand by that.
Another dissent:
I know you are going to get a deluge of opposing opinion, and I’m sorry for the vitriol that you will be getting. I believe that Israeli guards are perfectly capable of torturing Palestinian prisoners. I think it’s likely that a lot of what Kristof says is true. I’m sad for that, just as I’m saddened by all the bad news about Jewish bad guys in the last few years.
But what am I to do with a column that is a mixture of fact and fiction? Kristof wrote things he could prove, things he couldn’t prove, things that are physically impossible, with people filling in blanks with made-up stuff to make it make sense. Maybe they spread peanut butter on their asses and dogs went at it? Sure, maybe, and maybe the cast of Family Ties was watching and jerking off to it. We can all just say stuff. We can all make stuff up. Serious journalism, that.
This is an American column in America. So, as life in this country becomes more and more intolerable for Jews, the last thing we need is more innuendo. The knee-jerk reaction is, “But think of the Palestinians” — and as my ex-couple’s therapist would say, “We can talk about that topic too, but right now we are talking about this topic.” And if you want a secular Jewish person like me, whose life has been irrevocably been altered by the last three years, to read this and say, “These Israelis are the bad guys, time to put on a mask and yell at strangers,” I am amenable, but the two-truths-and-a-lie approach is not it. It’s just throwing more kindling on the fire.
Kristof’s sloppy reliance on anti-semitic sources left an out for pro-Israel people and it gave more libel for pro-Palestinians to hang their hat on. Is it too much to ask the NYT to have recognized this before publishing? Would it have killed them to only print what they could prove? Seems like it’s just the worst of all worlds. Imagine how much more effective it would have been if he conducted a fact-checked news report? It’s just a mess, man.
If, as you believe, Israel is hideously torturing its prisoners, why are you more concerned about an allegedly partly inaccurate column that airs the scandal than about the torture itself?
More dissents are over on the pod page, and you can always send your own criticism to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Trump in China, ebola, and kids as “YouTube piggybanks.” Examples:
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From a sleuth last week:
This is my first time entering the contest, since I immediately recognized Bull Mountain in the distance. The photographer appears to have been standing on a third-floor northwest-facing window of the SpringHill Suites Marriott, just off Highway 66 — which, by the way, celebrates its centennial this year
The Marriott wasn’t there when I went to high school in Kingman in the 1990s. My dad moved us there in the 1980s to take a job as a pressroom manager at the local paper, the Kingman Daily Miner (the surrounding mountains are pockmarked with mostly defunct copper, silver, and turquoise mines). Though I didn’t spend my whole childhood there, I did spend my teen years at the town’s only high school. Having a dirt bike and wide-open deserts kept my spirit fed when I was missing the rest of the world. Despite the town’s working-class core and relative remoteness from cities and universities, many of my classmates went on to attend top universities and pursue successful careers.
I haven’t lived there since I left for college in 1999, but my love for the desert remains burned into my soul (and my skin, it seems, which I’m reminded of every time I visit the dermatologist). Oddly enough, Kingman was also my closest brush with Hollywood.
In 1996, Tim Burton filmed parts of Mars Attacks! — a comedic star-choked homage to Cold War monster films — in a dry lakebed just outside town (Red Lake). In the view photo, that would be off to the right (northeast) of the prominent Bull Mountain. My friends and I were chosen to be extras in a scene in which hundreds of idealistic humans gathered to await the arrival of the aliens. The costume crew dressed me entirely in lime-green polyester (complete with a chunky green beaded necklace and green John Lennon glasses). I recall a couple of hundred dollars and free catered lunches as payment. For three days, we were excused from school and sat under big tents that struggled in the high-desert wind.
In my scene, a huge throng gathers at the alien welcome ceremony, and we were told to imagine the human ambassador releasing a dove into the air as a sign of peace. We then had to pretend the aliens responded with lasers, from which we ran maniacally away — a bloodbath on Red Lake. Sadly, I don’t think you can see me in the film, and I didn’t get to keep the polyester.
Thanks for prompting the memory!
See you next Friday.