Democracy is in retreat and its adversaries on the rise

Among the most famous sayings of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph, is: “If you are in retreat and death is advancing, how swift the meeting must be.” I recalled this wise saying amid the clamor that accompanied the words of Jacob Coxon, the British researcher who resigned from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic — words I do not think he exaggerated. Coxon is anxious about the absenc