Make New York Post a Preferred Source U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a "Ballots Over Billionaires" rally in Los Angeles on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026. Getty Images I recently came across a news item that made me reflect on our strange political environment —always a painful experience.
Bernie Sanders, the ancient socialist senator from Vermont, delivered a tirade against artificial intelligence, claiming that it had provided the tools for unscrupulous hackers to break into unauthorized bank accounts.
Even as he railed about an “evisceration of our privacy rights,” Sanders introduced legislation to “ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development.”
It turned out that Sanders got his facts wrong. There had been no AI-induced assault on bank accounts, just a new way of accessing these accounts that was authorized by the users but not the banks.
But I was left wondering: Did Sanders really think you could stop the global spread of a revolutionary new technology by passing a law?
And if you could — which you can’t — why on earth would you want to do it?
Why would a politician who considers himself “progressive” declare war on the future?
When one delves into the matter, a pattern emerges.
Virtually all AI doomers — from politicians like Sanders and fellow senator Elizabeth Warren, through tech barons like Sam Altman, to “effective altruism” practitioners like Sam Bankman-Fried — hail from the left side of the political spectrum.
They are progressives against progress. They are terrified of change.
Perceived objectively, without preconceptions, the left turns out to be radically conservative – trying, in case after case, to freeze our restless society in place.
A good example is the curious hostility towards data centers — the server farms that stand upstream of the AI platforms.
My state of Virginia is pretty much the galactic headquarters for data centers, with hundreds of installations that have created tens of thousands of jobs and generated billions in revenue for the Commonwealth.
Yet Abigail Spanberger, progressive governor of Virginia, early in her tenure signed an executive order dumping a raft of regulations, a more restrictive approval process, and a bureaucratic task force on potential builders of new data centers.
Spanberger evidently views the data centers with suspicion.
Many of her followers, however, look on them with open hostility and want a “pause” in their construction, very much like Sanders’ freeze on AI development.
Since Spanberger appears eager to please the progressive base, that may be the dismal end-point for this issue in Virginia.
Again, one is compelled to ask: Why would you smother to death a technology in which your state leads the world?
Spanberger cites environmental concerns and the industry’s “secretiveness,” but the chief charge lodged against data centers is that they consume massive amounts of electricity.
Mostly, this is a pretext — but if it really is the case that the US electric grid is too flabby and under-juiced to support data centers, you should know the reason why.
Starting in 1957, American electric companies built around 130 nuclear power plants that produced a safe, clean, and sustainable form of energy.
At their peak, these plants generated 20% of the total electricity in the country.
Today, less than half remain online, with just a single plant under construction.
Well, nuclear power was the AI of its day — cutting-edge technology that mortified the innate conservatism of progressive elites.
Regulation, litigation, and propaganda, conducted by progressive individuals like Ralph Nader and advocacy groups like Friends of the Earth, implying dangers ranging from cancer, the “China Syndrome,” and Godzilla, struck a fatal blow to this robust source of electricity.
Progressives want to pause data centers today because they killed off nuclear power decades ago — a chain of causation that can lead, quite literally, to the dark ages.
The best illustration of the horror of change and lack of forward-thinking by this sect can be found in their favorite means of transportation: trains and bicycles.
I mean, these are 19th-century technologies: the first steam-powered locomotive made its appearance in 1804 while the bicycle was invented in 1817.
Nevertheless, progressives spend enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money to promote these comfy old machines.
The socialist mayor of Paris, France, spent hundreds of millions of euros and destroyed her perfect city to install bike lanes.
Now, the French government is broke, French people are rioting and burning stuff in dozens of cities — but by God everyone finally has the opportunity to take their lives in their hands and ride a bike down the streets of Paris.
At least the bike lanes were largely completed.
The state of California has blown $15 billion to build a bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in the 18 years since this project began, not a single mile of track has been laid down.
This disaster brings us to a wonderfully hypocritical manifestation of progressive conservatism, usually labeled Not In My Back Yard, or NIMBY.
Progressives are in the habit of loudly demanding intrusive government mandates, affordable public housing, and mass transit — but not in their backyards.
In those pristine spaces, every brick and every bush must stay as it has always been, forever and ever, amen.
Against the mighty wall of NIMBY, the bullet train project bounced harmlessly off and soon lapsed into a mere funding boondoggle.
A similar change-related neurosis afflicts the progressive attitude towards nature.
Here the conserving impulse runs something like this: even though thousands of species, maritime and terrestrial, have vanished and now inhabit our natural history museums, we must freeze the process of extinction so that every stickleback, honeybee, and axolotl hang around until the end of time.
It’s like NIMBYism for animal species. Or adopting all organic life as a rescue pet.
The great Los Angeles fire of January 2025 began as a minor burn in Palisades that was allowed to smolder until it flared again, to protect endangered plant species.
More than 30 persons died so that Braunton’s milkvetch might live.
Once we perceive the error of the notion that the left stands for progress, and have diagnosed progressives as the political version of your timid Aunt Bessie (who mutters at loud music), the reasons behind their visceral loathing of capitalism become apparent.
It isn’t the injustice or exploitation, although those are the words they throw at us.
It’s the perpetual motion. It’s the hell-raising noise.
Here is probably the most famous description of life under capitalism:
“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation … All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned …”
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The author of those words was Karl Marx. The quote is taken from the Communist Manifesto.
Marx leaves no doubt how he would feel about — I’m picking a capitalist at random — Elon Musk.
The socialism he preached is many things, but the simplest way to conceive of it is as an attempt to freeze and subdue the turbulent productive forces unleashed by capitalism.
The socialist craves a return to the communal womb — to a society as unchanging and dogmatic as anything experienced by our medieval ancestors.
The dream is of Utopia, but what you get is Cuba, a place where the population is too hungry and too cowed to worry much about data centers.
That, in brief, is my complaint and concern about progressive conservatism of the Bernie Sanders kind.
Look, the wish to preserve is a perfectly legitimate outlook.
The urge to escape the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” of the digital age is, I think, understandable.
But by confusing their hopes with reality, progressives have tumbled into a fallacy and seem determined to drag us there with them.
Like Goethe’s Faust, they believe they can “pause” society in a perfect moment of universal harmony and sustainable prosperity.
Human societies are dynamic, complex systems, assembled through a historic process of trial and error and always adapting to changed conditions.
They can’t be paused, any more than one can pause a Cat 5 hurricane — but they can be made maladaptive, contradictory, and ultimately self-destructive.
In parallel with those endangered species that weigh so heavily on progressive minds, liberal democracy and the Western way of life, capitalism included, will either evolve or die out.
If we don’t keep pushing forward, we will slip back into the abyss.
The effect of a progressive conquest of our American civilization can thus be compared to the fate of those Pleistocene carnivores that waded happily into the La Brea tar pits.
At first, I imagine, the animals told themselves that they were taking a nice break — a pause in this strange black pond from the many activities filling up their day.
Sadly, however, they were stuck in the muck. They would perish there in large numbers, and their bones would eventually be displayed as a lesson and a warning to us all in the museum exhibits of the distant future.
