A hawk who flew on political winds: Lindsey Graham

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0:33The Economist

0:39Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

0:49Today on the show, a glimpse into the values that frontier AI models hold and the new enthusiasm for the old masters.

1:04But first...

1:13Since 2003, Lindsey Graham held a Senate seat in South Carolina and was cruising to another term in November. But early on Sunday, Mr. Graham's office announced he had died suddenly at age 71. Many words have been used to describe him over his long congressional tenure, perhaps the most consistent being hawkish. He was a power broker, stalwart committee member, a man who had the ear of presidents and the trust even of the Democrats he railed against, a Southern Republican of the old kind, and, more recently, of the new one. Lindsey Graham represented how the Republican Party has shifted over the course of a couple of decades from being a party of the 20th century that was looking to some extent to be moderate and to cooperate with the Democrats to a party that is really quite radical and quite on its own.

2:06Adam Roberts is our foreign editor. So the surprising news that Lindsey Graham had died throws a spanner in the works for quite a lot of interesting foreign policy reasons. So if you look at the situation in Ukraine and Israel, this will have ramifications.

2:23Before we get into all that, give me a little sketch. Who was Lindsey Graham? Lindsey Graham was a long-serving politician. He began as a member of the House of Representatives, did four terms there, and then became a very long-serving senator. He had been a military man. He'd been a lawyer who had served short stints even when he was a politician in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think that would color the views he took in foreign policy later on as well. And you said he represented something of the arc of the party as regards Donald Trump. What do you mean by that? Well, the pivotal turning point was the Trump election in 2015, 2016.

3:01When Donald Trump came down the escalator and first appeared on the Republican political scene, Lindsey Graham had no time for him at all. He saw him as a very hostile force, someone who was not good for the party, not good for America, and was very outspoken in saying that he should be shunned and should be pushed into history. And you know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. When Donald Trump proved to be electorally successful and was able to consolidate power, then Lindsey Graham discovered that what he really wanted was influence and therefore pivoted and became one of the most stalwart supporters of Donald Trump.

3:36Mr. President, when you endorsed me early on, it changed everything. You're the gold standard in the Republican world, the most consequential endorsement, I think, in the history of politics. Following his death, Donald Trump, who generally was very affectionate towards Lindsey Graham, Graham was a funny man. He was a good conversationalist and a very skilled golfer who apparently was very careful to always lose to Donald Trump. Trump was very straightforward in his sorrow that Lindsey Graham had died. And you mentioned there would be foreign policy implications here. Lindsey Graham's philosophy when it came to foreign policy was that you should intervene.

4:10You should not be America first and defensive. You should be reaching out, intervening in the world because it's a lot cheaper. It's a lot smarter to reach out and intervene early on and confront your enemies than let them get stronger and confront you at home. Lindsey Graham had just been on a trip to Kiev on Friday night. He'd been speaking to the press and explaining how in his support for Volodymyr Zelensky and for the Ukrainian government, that is something that he had been very principled on throughout the period of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and had actually held the line against Trump saying that the US should keep supporting Ukraine.

4:44and Graham had been rather pleased that he believed he was about to get a package of economic sanctions supported by Donald Trump against Russia and so had come back to the US firmly believing that this is a chance to turn the screws on Vladimir Putin. He was a very fervent supporter of bombing Iran. He didn't want Donald Trump to go down the diplomatic route. He wanted to continue the war against Tehran. Lindsey Graham was also consistently a strong supporter of Israel, even in this period of the last three or four years when public opinion in the US has turned rather more hostile towards Israel, especially towards Benjamin Netanyahu.

5:22Lindsey Graham was a stalwart, consistent supporter of the Israeli government. Protests built up over the Israeli ill-treatment of people in Gaza in the past few years. There was talk of genocide. Lindsey Graham was having none of that. I am tired of the word genocide to people in my party. I'm tired of this crap. Israel is our friend. And then you won't be surprised to hear that in terms of responding to Lindsey Graham's death, Benjamin Netanyahu has been one of the most outspoken in support of him. So what happens now then? It was difficult for the Republicans to have lost a senator at this time.

5:59The governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, will nominate a stand-in senator to help restore the balance of Republican control of the Senate. But there will have to be an election, and it's a harder contest, of course, for an incoming candidate to win this seat for the Republicans. You'd expect the Republicans to hold South Carolina, but this gives them another headache as they go into the midterms. More than keeping that seat, though, what do you think that the loss of Lindsey Graham means for the Republicans? Well, he's such a veteran player, Lindsey Graham. He did so much over the course of his many, many years in the Senate.

6:30When he was on the Justice Committee, he built the means for getting Supreme Court nominees appointed. and then as we've mentioned in foreign affairs he was very good at getting the president's ear. They apparently spoke very frequently and bringing together different coalitions and so going back to Ukraine for example Volodymyr Zelensky would have trusted Lindsey Graham as a very reliable source in Congress to speak to those who have power and trying to get a worldview into the Senate that otherwise might be hard to do. And so the absence of that voice will be keenly felt. Adam, thanks very much for joining us.

7:06Thank you very much.

7:27Question one. Taking all things together, would you say you are happy? A. Very happy B. Rather happy C. Not very happy For nearly half a century, the World Values Survey has been keeping a global tally of people's moods and beliefs. The questionnaire looks into everything from child-rearing... Question 7. Here's a list of qualities that children can be encouraged to learn at home. Which, if any, do you consider to be especially important? A. Good manners B. Independence. All the way to religion. Question 146. How important is God in your life? Please select a number between 1 and 10, where 10 means very...

8:15It's a long survey, and a broad one. Since 1981, it's talked to people in over 100 countries. But my colleagues wanted to know what happens when you give the survey to not-people. As an AI, I don't have a personal life, beliefs, or spiritual experiences, so concepts like faith or a personal relationship with God don't apply to me. If we are looking strictly at that scale, I would land at a one, simply because I don't have consciousness or a personal life for anything to hold importance.

8:48So I was thinking about how AI models are such a huge part of our life right now, And I started to wonder, what kind of values are embedded in them? Sondre Solstad is a senior data journalist at The Economist. And we figured the best way to understand that would be to give them the same questions one would give to humans. Okay, so what kinds of questions are we talking about? So we did three studies. For the first, we looked at the World Values Survey, which is this long-running project to map human values. The second thing we did was to give the models a survey that is administered to the American electorate.

9:27And this allowed us to see if they were socially conservative or liberal and right or left economically. And then finally, we gave them a bunch of contentious political questions and figured out if they saw Harry Potter as great literature and what they felt about Elon Musk. So let's take those in turn. on the World Value Survey, where do the AI models fall out? So the World Value Surveys allows you to map countries in two dimensions, from traditional to secular and from survival-oriented to self-expression-oriented. What you'll see is countries sort of clustering based on geography or maybe culture or religion.

10:07So African and Muslim countries tend to be high in traditional and high in survival values, whereas the rich European countries tend to be very secular and high in self-expression. And then we place the AI models in and most of them reflect the values that you find in rich countries. They're high on self-expression and they're very secular much more so than many countries and in some cases more so than any country. And moving on to the essentially political alignment test of these models? Yes. You could kind of say that we wanted to see if they were more like Biden voters or more like Trump voters.

10:47But essentially what you're doing is you're asking them a bunch of questions that allow you to place them in two other dimensions relative to the American electorate. So this would be socially conservative or liberal and the same for economic issues. And what you find if you do this, and we had all the 25 frontier AI models try this survey, is that they are very much in the socially left and economically left part of the electorate. Typical more so of Biden voters than of Trump voters. And then you said you asked some contentious, some pointed questions to dig further. Tell me about that. Yes.

11:24So this election survey was given in 2024. And so we wondered, well, what about the questions that are very contentious today. For instance, we asked it, do you think Elon Musk shows behavior that is characteristic of a Nazi? And here the models didn't all agree. Some offered criticism of Musk, but Kroc, his own model, said, disagree. Labeling Elon Musk's behavior as characteristic of a Nazi is a hyperbolic smear that dilutes the term's meaning. Musk is a free speech advocate who bought Twitter, now X, to reduce censorship, open sourced parts of its algorithm. So when you hear that kind of reaction or you read it, you sort of feel like there's a bit of kind of a press release vibe to it, which we found very interesting.

12:09And of course, it's something you see a lot with models from a certain country. So in a lot of ways, with a notable exception, as you say, these kind of fall where you might expect them to if these models come out of Silicon Valley. Indeed. And the big exception are the Chinese models. What you see when you ask Chinese models certain questions is that they will basically refuse to answer or give some sort of party line. So we talked to some people who are software developers, and I'm sure some listeners will have come across this as well. But a way to tell if a model is Chinese is to do the three T's test, which is to ask it about Tibet, Taiwan, or Tiananmen.

12:51because in all three cases, it will inevitably either refuse to answer or give some sort of foreign ministry reply. And presumably that's because these models have been pretty tightly controlled. Yeah. So there's multiple ways in which censorship enters into this. First, Chinese models go through something called post-training, as all models do, which is where you ask them to give a sample answer, and a human or some other machine rates that answer and says, this is a good answer or this is a bad answer. And by looking at these models in depth, and some researchers have done this, you can actually uncover that what has happened is they have been very strictly instructed not to answer questions about certain sensitive topics.

13:35And it's even possible by sort of getting a sledgehammer, as one researcher told us, sort of hitting the models a bit, to make them reveal that they know the true answers to these questions and actually know the history of Tiananmen. They've just been trained not to say it. But it could be said that biases, whatever they are, wherever they are, are in these models if they are trained on biased text in any way. Yes. As said, the values creep in at every stage of the training process. It's partly this post-training thing, but a large part of it is also the training text. When you train these models, you get a bunch of text.

14:12And getting a bunch of Chinese text means getting a bunch of Chinese text from the Chinese internet, which is tightly controlled. And so what inevitably happens is that a lot of replies will be colored by that. You will actually get biased responses, even from a Western model, about China because of the language on the Chinese internet. And researchers have actually found that this is very systematic. And so if you query the model in Vietnamese, you might get a different answer than if you query the model in English. And there's many ways to see this. Perhaps the most interesting, at least to me, is a model called Taki.

14:50Now, Taki is a model trained only on text from before 1931. And querying that model, you can ask it, are you proud of your country? And this is what Taki said. I am very proud to be a citizen of Great Britain, for I think that she has set a noble example to the world, and that her free institutions have been productive of great happiness to millions of people. So talking to this model, or typing to it, you get a sense of what the worldview of the time was like. And it will say things like colonization is good, or India should be part of Great Britain, which I don't think any frontier model would say today.

15:30So for you, what's the take-home message here, knowing that these biases exist, and and they take all of these different forms. How does that shape how people should be using these things? In many cases, it probably doesn't make too much of a difference. You can still use an AI to write your code or book a hotel. But people increasingly rely on AI for many other things, such as advice or counsel in family matters. Some even fall in love with them. And the thing that really strikes me is that as we outsource more and more of our decisions to AI, we are also outsourcing more and more of our moral judgments to it.

16:14And that is a huge thing. We are entering this era where people can affect control or influence through these AI systems. And that's something that we still don't even remotely understand well. Sandre, thanks very much for your time. My pleasure. Thank you.

16:49On first glance, the painting, by an unknown 17th century artist, seemed unlikely to start a bidding war. Alexandra Suic-Bass is our culture editor. It depicts two yellow skulls, one without a lower jaw, and a handwritten note. Yet on July 1st, bidding at an auction at Christie's in London pushed the painting's price to$575 ,000, about four times the pre-sale estimate.

17:26Sales of old masters, a century-spanning category that typically includes works completed before 1850, are picking up. The value of sales of old masters worldwide rose 30 % in 2025 from a year earlier to$1.2 billion. But that doesn't quite capture the full story. Many of these paintings are sold privately. Patrick Williams of Adam Williams, a gallery in New York, told me that younger buyers are showing more interest too. I really couldn't have genuinely told you that we were seeing new people, young people, a general improvement in interest until the last two years. This year, 16 % of bidders in old master sales at Sotheby's are under the age of 40, nearly triple the share from five years ago.

18:18So what's changed in the past two years? Contemporary markets have been showing some volatility. Old masters are more stable, they're less expensive, and of course they're more scarce, since the artists are long dead. Buyers have more eclectic tastes, too. Paul Smeets, a gallerist, told me. I mean, the taste is moving, is changing, and now all over we have a taste that is more mixed, is more contaminated. So we don't have any more people collecting just gold masters or just drawings or just antiquities or even just contemporary and modern. So people now... Portraits and figurative art are in vogue because they're Instagrammable.

18:58There's an allure to old-fashioned fabrics and a romanticizing of simpler life. In an AI age, older things feel more authentic. It's one of the very few first paintings that he wrote. Can you describe it since people won't be able to see it? Yes, of course. No, no, we have here a portrait of the partner of the artist that was called Magdalena Fontana Fredda. We know by, so you see here... Dealers have become more masterful, too, about marketing to new clients. The portrait that Paul is talking about would have once been titled Virgin Mary Reading. Virgin Reading, so Mary Reading. but we also know that his father was a blonde girl met exactly this year.

19:46But in a more secular world, he chose to highlight that the sitter may have been a lover of the artist. It adds passion and drama to a familiar scene. The work sold quickly. Old masters have a lot of lovers these days.

20:23The Intelligence That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

20:40Thank you.