Against nothing-newism

What to do about people who tell us there is nothing new?

I can’t prove nothing-newism is on the rise, but it is. Here are a few examples for illustration—you can decide whether I’m cherry-picking:

• “Donald Trump’s fixation on tariffs is, of course, nothing new.”¹ Of course not. Table stakes nothing-newism.

• The real players are at the New York Times, where Sarah Isgur declares, “There’s very little that Donald Trump has done — in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything — that is wholly unique.”²

• In an Atlantic article about recursively self-improving artificial intelligence, which will lead to a superintelligence explosion that is literally known as the “singularity,” the authors write, “The idea of self-improving bots is nothing new.”³

• Job disruption caused by AI is a “nightmare,” but this too is “nothing new.”⁴

• Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio contends that if you zoom out enough, there is nothing new about world war. Today’s conflicts around the globe, he argues, “make up a very classic world war that is analogous to past ‘world wars.’”⁵

• Get ready for one more—here comes David Brooks to tell us that “History Is Running Backwards.”⁶ This cannot be outdone. Wait, well, one more.

• “Flesh-Eating Bacteria In Long Island Waterways—Is Nothing New.”⁷

Yes, there is nothing new about machines passing through the eye of superintelligence singularity while a sociopath inhabits the White House and the world order disintegrates. Been there.

There is, of course, nothing new about declaring that there is nothing new. Ecclesiastes 1:1. But I’m against reflexive nothing-newism. All too often, people throw the “nothing new” card to change the subject or downplay the significance of current events. This is my rant.

When we are trying to figure out what to do about a megalomaniac president, pointing out that FDR also had his clashes with the Supreme Court accomplishes nothing and pushes the problem away. Or if someone points out that smartphones are radically altering the way people interact with the world, the person who responds, “people have always overreacted to new technologies” just makes all the context and difference disappear into stratospheric levels of abstraction.

Fear and risk aversion also keep many people in the “nothing new” camp. The person who predicts the end of the world as we know it is often proven wrong, while the person who predicts that “this too will pass” is often proven right. For sure, if you know absolutely nothing, then the safest bet is to predict more of the same. But should we listen to people who are just taking the safe way out? We should not.

Even worse, some people claim that this is “nothing new” because they would prefer to judge the present by the standards of the past. By declaring that something is not new, and should be compared with something from the past, the commentator implies that the past context and present context are roughly similar. But they are not. They are apples and oranges. Comparing the present to the past imports a historical frame that is not relevant to current values or society.

The whole Trump-is-Hitler dynamic illustrates the point. One side will ask, “Is Trump an authoritarian, like Hitler?” and then the pro-Trump side will quickly say, “no, course not, Hitler killed millions of his own fellow citizens, while Trump has not. But that framing is too generous, because our moral concern for people is much different now than it was in the 1930s. Genocide was not acceptable then, of course, but mass killing was just not as shocking in 1930s as it is now. In 2026, initiating a war of choice merely for the sake of dominance or conquest is less socially acceptable than it was only decades ago. The deviation-from-baseline-social-values metric is more meaningful than the apples-to-oranges comparison of present versus past.

And if you are thinking about it right now, yes, changing historical context helps explain why originalism, as a legal doctrine, is inherently conservative. It conserves past political values by judging modern problems in light of original public meaning from long ago. The original public meaning of the Constitution or an ancient statute is quite likely to be misaligned with the present understanding of ideas like due process, equality, and liberty. Originalism differs from more routine nothing-newism only because it candidly announces its deliberate imposition of the past on the present.

For something newism

The nothing-new intellectual habit this essay has been criticizing is not merely annoying; it has a huge cost. It causes people to resist conclusions the evidence may support. Instead of comparing complex phenomena with past events, the better option is to be open to genuine newness and uncertainty. If the evidence suggests revolutionary change is afoot, or that values have changed dramatically, then the nothing-new reflex is a retreat from unwanted conclusions and will fail hardest when the stakes are highest, which is to say, right now.

1. Lee Jones, Trump’s Tariff Gamble and the Decay of the Neoliberal Order, American Affairs (Summer 2025), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/05/trumps-tariff-gamble-and-the-decay-of-the-neoliberal-order.

2. Ross Douthat, Trump Is the End of a 100-Year Experiment, NY Times, April 16, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/opinion/supreme-court-trump.html.

3. Matteo Wong and Lila Shroff, Silicon Valley Is in a Frenzy Over Bots That Build Themselves, The Atlantic, April 3, 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/04/ai-industry-self-improving-bots/686686.

4. Jacquelin Munis, WeWork and Upwork CEOs confirm the Gen Z hiring nightmare is real—but it’s nothing new, Fortune (May 19, 2026), https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/wework-upwork-ceo-gen-z-jobs-ai-freelance.

5. Ray Dalio, The Big Thing: We Are In A World War That Isn’t Going To End Anytime Soon, April 7, 2026, https://raydalio.substack.com/p/the-big-thing-we-are-in-a-world-war.

6. David Brooks, History Is Running Backwards, The Atlantic, April 16, 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/reactionary-traditionalism-worldview/686597.

7. Owen James Burke, Flesh-Eating Bacteria In Long Island Waterways—Is Nothing New, Surfer (May 1, 2026), https://www.surfer.com/news/flesh-eating-bacteria-long-island-waterways.