George Packer | The Atlantic

The End of Human Rights

2026-03-24T07:00:00-04:00

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While bombs and drones explode across the Middle East, in Pakistan an Afghan family is hiding from the police. Saman; her husband, Farhad; and their two small children never leave their room, never see sunlight. They’ve been living as refugees in Islamabad since fleeing Afghanistan four years ago. Both Saman and Farhad (they requested pseudonyms for their safety) served in the Afghan special forces; because of their association with the American war in Afghanistan, and because each belongs to an ethnic minority targeted by the Taliban, in 2022 they were granted priority status in the United States refugee program. Extensively vetted, medically cleared, interviewed three times, the family was about to be resettled in this country when Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem came to power last year and barred the door to virtually all refugees, including those Afghans who have an urgent claim on American rescue.

So the same people whose policies led to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis now have Saman and her family on the run in Islamabad, one mistake away from deportation. If the couple stepped foot in Afghanistan, they would be recognized at the border by their biometric data as enemies of the Islamic Emirate. The children would be taken away. The parents would be sent to prison—and possibly executed.

I’ve written about Saman periodically since 2022, when we were put in touch by an American Army captain who helped Saman and Farhad escape from Afghanistan after they were threatened by the Taliban. The captain and a small group of other Americans have been providing support for the family, and for several other ex-military Afghan women in Pakistan. I’ve corresponded with many refugees since the fall of Kabul, but something about Saman’s story has a special grip on me.

She and Farhad are in their mid-20s. In pictures they look young, lovely, and hopeful. They were born into the generation of Afghans who were given a glimpse of freedom during the American war. They enlisted in the military to fight for their future and, in Saman’s case, to show that a woman could defend her country. But they had hardly begun to live when, with the Taliban victory in 2021, the world they had known collapsed and they had to leave the remnants behind.

[George Packer: No one can offer any hope]

Any thought of seeing their families in Afghanistan again vanished in July 2024, when Farhad’s brother was arrested and put in prison, where he’s remained ever since. A letter from the Taliban director general of intelligence to a provincial prosecutor made the reason clear. “His arrest is directly related to the activities and military background” of Farhad, it read. “According to available information, if the aforementioned individual returns to the country or is identified, he must be arrested without delay and placed under serious security investigation.”

The couple’s children—a 4-year-old daughter, born in Kabul and named Victoria, after the American Army captain who helped them, and a 2-year-old son, born in Pakistan, named Yusuf—are growing up isolated and afraid in a hostile city under self-imposed house arrest while the family waits for the delivery of a promise that America will never keep.

For months, Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fighting a low-grade war, and it recently escalated. To punish its neighbor, Pakistan is deporting Afghan refugees en masse—almost 1 million in 2025, and the pace has only increased this year. Any encounter with the police, even if a refugee has a valid visa, is risky.

On January 7, Saman wrote me that two of her Afghan neighbors had just been arrested and sent to a deportation camp that was rumored to be filthy, cold, and overcrowded. Early on the morning of January 30, while Saman and her family were still asleep, police officers knocked loudly on the door and demanded entry. They searched everywhere, even inside a wardrobe, as if someone might be hidden there, and left with a warning: Unless the family renewed their visas, which were due to expire in a week, they would be deported. But Pakistan was no longer renewing Afghans’ visas, even for the extortionate prices that Saman and Farhad had always paid—not unless the family returned to Afghanistan and presented their passports at the Pakistani embassy in Kabul.

Forcibly sending refugees back into danger has a formal name: refoulement. It’s illegal under international law. No one in a position to help seemed to care. Saman had written to the Pakistani embassies of every country she could think of and never received a reply. Now time was running out.

“I am begging you from the bottom of my heart,” Saman wrote me, “if you know any strong, trustworthy people or any possible options in another country, please help us so that we can be freed from the problems we are facing here in Pakistan. I cannot fall into the hands of the Taliban. They have no mercy, neither for women nor for children.”

The message made me fear for the family, but I was also afraid for myself. She was asking me to take on a responsibility that I neither wanted nor believed I could fulfill. But if I couldn’t find an answer, they were doomed. In a sort of panic, I started looking for a way to get them out.

A retired German diplomat informed me that, after admitting nearly 1 million refugees in 2015, his country was essentially closed to asylum seekers—across Europe, the politics of immigration had changed utterly. A journalist in Lisbon couldn’t get anywhere with the Portuguese authorities. A woman at a Brazilian organization said that resettlement had paused for almost two years, and now the waitlist for Afghans was three years long. I asked a friend’s sister in Alberta—a Christian who had done years of humanitarian work in Afghanistan—if she knew people who could sponsor the family in Canada. After several weeks of looking, she reported apologetically that Alberta had taken in so many Ukrainians, it was full up.

Rumor of an exit ramp to Rwanda or Uganda turned out to be wrong, and India was a name, according to Saman, whose very mention in Pakistan could get you arrested. A few last-chance countries, such as Tuvalu, Comoros, and Haiti, issue visas upon arrival to Afghans, but Saman told me that Pakistan would never let them board a plane without one. Afghanistan’s passport ranks as the weakest in the world.

Last summer, a few Trump-administration officials with military connections began a quiet effort to compile a list of about 100 Afghans who’d been vouched for by American veterans or active-duty troops. The key to getting on the list and possibly admitted into the U.S. was the concept of moral injury: America’s failure to accept these Afghans would cause emotional harm—a sense of personal shame and dishonor—to a member of the U.S. military. With the support of the Army captain, I managed to get Saman and her family on the list. The effort’s success seemed to require that no one in the White House—certainly not Miller—could be aware of its existence. If the first try worked, there might be a second.

Then, on November 26, in downtown Washington, D.C., a mentally unstable Afghan asylee allegedly shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard, killing one of them, a 20-year-old woman. Immediately, the Trump administration announced the end of any visas for Afghans. Those already approved would be canceled and those printed would be destroyed. No Afghan nationals, not even those who had worked as interpreters for Americans and gone through the yearslong process of obtaining a congressionally mandated Special Immigrant Visa, would be allowed into the United States. Afghans already here, including with asylum, a green card, or even U.S. citizenship, could have their cases reviewed and might face deportation.

The backdoor resettlement effort died as quietly as it had lived. The moral injury to U.S. service members remains unhealed.

I kept thinking of Evian—the French spa town where 32 nations held a conference in the summer of 1938 to discuss what to do about German and Austrian Jews. The conference was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea, perhaps an attempt to deflect criticism from the American failure to meet even its tiny annual quota for immigrants from Germany. Evian ended in ignominy, with just one country—the Dominican Republic, later joined by Costa Rica—agreeing to increase the number of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution that they would receive. The conference was one of the last chances for the world to save the Jews of Europe.

Four months after Evian, the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish youth whose family had just been expelled from Germany became the pretext for the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht.

Last year, the Dominican Republic deported more than 100,000 Haitians back to their disintegrating country. Costa Rica received two planeloads of 200 deportees from the United States and sent them to detention centers. As for the country that convened the Evian Conference—the one that went on to create the most generous refugee-resettlement program in the world, and that fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan—that country has made it impossible for Afghans to come here and hard for those already here to stay. The shooting in downtown Washington gave the Trump administration an excuse to lock the door. For practical purposes, the global refugee system is dead—killed by a worldwide plague of nationalism.

Susie Ang for The Atlantic

On February 6, Saman’s and Farhad’s visas expired. The family was now illegal in Pakistan, and the police knew where they lived. Whenever Victoria heard a knock on the door, she grabbed her mother and cried, “Mama, don’t answer! It’s the police!” The hunt for refugees in Islamabad was growing intense, with house-to-house searches and checkpoints in the streets. Banners went up around the city offering a $35 reward for “patriotic” Pakistani citizens who reported the presence of Afghans in their neighborhoods, while police, using mosque loudspeakers, threatened imprisonment for Pakistanis who rent to Afghans. The government, recognizing that America was now closed, announced that it would expel all 19,973 Afghans with pending U.S. immigration cases.

“Unfortunately, it feels as if there is no such thing as human rights in today’s world,” Saman wrote me. “And if there is an office called ‘Human Rights,’ it seems its employees have closed their eyes and ears, only taking their salaries while innocent people suffer.”

On February 9, a Pakistani friend of Farhad’s with police connections warned that a raid on their building was imminent. The family spent most of the day and night in a nearby park, returning to their room only long enough to pack up and flee after midnight. Their landlord—who sympathized with the family because he was a Pakistani Shia, a co-religionist of Saman—drove them to a hotel in a different part of the city. But after a few days, the hotel began receiving visits from the police, and the family had to move several more times, always in the middle of the night. Finally, they found shelter in two rooms of a house owned by a friend of their former landlord.

The family never goes outside. They keep the door to their rooms locked, their voices down, their windows shut and curtains drawn, to prevent neighbors from hearing or seeing anything that could reveal their presence. Without natural light to go by, they lose track of day and night. Once a week, they pay their former landlord to buy food and supplies. On March 3, Victoria turned 4 without any celebration.

When Saman looks back at her life, she feels as if it has all been unreal. She tries to keep sane with a schedule of yoga, reading, writing, and endless cups of tea. “If tea could solve everything,” she wrote me, “I would already be the calmest person in the world!” And she spends hours and hours playing with the children: “I sometimes think no child in the world has ever experienced this much playtime with their mother.”

Saman and I exchange messages almost every day, as she keeps me apprised of practical difficulties and new threats, her sadness and hope, politely prompting me with questions about any chances of refuge. My attachment to this family I’ve never met eludes my understanding. Every American should have a bad conscience about Afghanistan, but my obsession with getting them to a safe place doesn’t feel like atonement. I can’t escape the fact that they have no one else—that their lives are at stake. And I keep hearing Saman’s voice in her messages, a distinctly human sound from halfway around the world.

When Kabul fell, my husband and I went to the airport. We spent days and nights at the airport gates, even sleeping there, trying desperately to reach the American forces. Unfortunately, due to the extreme crowds and chaos, we were unsuccessful. At that time, I was also pregnant, so I had to be very careful. My greatest fear was losing the child in my womb. In the final days, we managed to get very close to the airport gate, but then an explosion happened. We lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes, I found myself lying in muddy water. Those were some of the darkest and most painful days of our lives.

What hurts most is not only what we lost—our home, our work, our dignity—but the feeling of being unwanted by a world that once promised protection. To hear that even those who found safety may now be forced back into danger breaks my heart. It feels like justice itself is being undone. Still, despite everything, I try to hold on to hope. Hope that truth still matters. Hope that kindness like yours still exists. Hope that one day my children will live in a world that sees refugees not as a burden, but as human beings who survived the unimaginable.

We are only searching for a place where we can live without fear. But sometimes it feels as if safety is something that is sold at a very high price, and not easily given to people like us.

I try to hide my tears so that Victoria does not see them. We tell her that one day she will run freely in parks without looking over her shoulder. We hold on to that image as our hope.

[George Packer: Condemning millions for one man’s crime]

At last, a glimmer of good news: An acquaintance of mine who runs an international humanitarian organization spoke to a senior official in a European government about Saman and her family. Of two dozen long shots, this one made something move. I was told to have Saman send an application for asylum, with all the documentation she could gather about her case and the danger her family faced. A week later, she received an appointment for an interview at the country’s embassy in Islamabad. She and Farhad gathered visa photos, copies of their military IDs, a letter of support from me, and the record of their long and futile encounter with the U.S. refugee program.

The diplomatic quarter in Islamabad is heavily guarded, and no one can enter without an invitation. On the way, Victoria asked her mother where they were going and why. Saman’s answer filled the little girl with excitement, but whenever they passed a checkpoint, she said, “Mama, tell the driver not to stop near the police.” At the embassy, all of the other families in the waiting room were Pakistani—none was Afghan. The embassy officer asked Saman how she had managed to get an interview so quickly, when other refugees waited months or years. The Dari word for “connections” is wasita, and Saman didn’t conceal the truth. At the end of the interview, she was told to go home and wait for an answer that could take weeks. But Saman and her family are experts at waiting.

Now their fate is in the hands of a consular officer at the embassy in Islamabad, or a bureaucrat behind a desk at a ministry in a European capital. I would like to sit across from that person and look them in the eye. I would say that giving Saman and Farhad and their children asylum will make little difference to the other 42 million refugees who have nowhere safe to go, or to a world sunk in profound injustice. But it will make all the difference to this family.

I remind Saman that the chances are slim, and she reminds me that she knows this. Still, I can’t let myself believe that it won’t happen. I imagine meeting the family inside a gleaming airport. We exchange smiles and hugs, and walk out into the sunlight, and sit down somewhere to tell stories over cups of tea.

The College-Educated Working Class

2026-03-16T08:00:00-04:00

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This is an age of mutinies. For more than a decade in America, they’ve come so thick and fast that they trip over one another: the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Resistance, the anti-lockdown protests, the insurrection, the anti-ICE protests. The ur-mutiny, encompassing some of these, provoking and provoked by others, is MAGA. Even in full authoritarian control of the federal government, it still acts like a rioter laying dynamite at the foundation of a decayed establishment.

We understand these revolts in terms of the dominant political fact of our time, the forever war between red and blue. The mutinies are staged by one side or the other, and every high-profile trial, incendiary speech, and shooting caught on camera divides Americans instantly and predictably into two opposing camps, with apparently irreconcilable visions of what is true and of what the country is and should be: multicultural America versus heritage America. The former is inclusive, outward- and forward-looking; the latter is exclusive, inward-looking, and nostalgic for a past that it tries to recapture by tearing up traditions, norms, and the Constitution itself.

The obvious precedent for an age of mutinies is the decade before the Civil War—the years of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and John Brown—when pressure built up until it exploded in what future Secretary of State William H. Seward labeled “the irrepressible conflict.” The roll call of the present goes through the coronavirus pandemic, George Floyd, January 6, Project 2025, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti. Now that President Trump’s masked militias are battling residents in the streets of blue cities, our own conflict seems to be coming to a head.

But if we unfasten our gaze long enough from the riveting prospect of another civil war, a different historical period comes to mind. The fundamental sources of our troubles, going back half a century, are economic inequality, political paralysis, corruption, mass immigration, and cultural and technological upheavals. These were exactly the country’s great problems at the start of the previous century. In 1914, Walter Lippmann wrote in his manifesto, Drift and Mastery: “No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born into the twentieth century.” Several decades of populism, progressivism, and reaction led to the emergence of a new order with the New Deal.

What is life like for someone born in the 21st century? Your everyday reality is disorienting change—but not the kind that freed Lippmann and his generation to shape their era. Instead, your overwhelming feeling is that the game is rigged against you. You see the old as at best indifferent, if not outright predatory, and lacking the ability or the desire to solve the problems they’ve inflicted on you. The electronic air you breathe crackles with vituperation. Political and media elites hoard status and wealth by keeping you in a perpetual fever of resentment and fury. Meanwhile, tech giants addict you from toddlerhood to devices that alienate you from other people and the natural world, trapping you in a hall of mirrors, until you give up on the idea that truth is even knowable and surrender to the wildest images of unreality. Your sense of your own existence grows fragile, and your job prospects are as precarious as your mental health. Whatever your race or gender, it feels like a liability. The system is a conspiracy against your chance at a decent life.

Anger and helplessness drive some young people to Nick Fuentes, others to Hasan Piker, and others still to fentanyl or 20-hour days of Fortnite. They might revile one another, but they exist in the same frame, where they suffer many of the same afflictions. From this perspective, the culture wars momentarily recede. Perhaps the most important arena of struggle isn’t the internet, where the wars are fought and nothing is achieved except division, but the physical world, where certain problems are common to all ordinary people. Perhaps the deepest conflict is not between red and blue, but between power and powerlessness.

[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]

Compared with a vicious online duel, this conflict is hard to dramatize. It seldom becomes the focus of politics, except in grand rhetorical gestures or small fixes for the deterioration of everyday life. A congresswoman denounces monopolistic oligarchy; a senator rails against Big Tech; another congresswoman drafts legislation against the nuisance of overly bright headlights and for the “right to repair” your own truck or washing machine. A movement of 20-somethings embraces dumb phones. And even now, amid the head-spinning events of Trump’s second term, there’s a sense that nothing fundamental changes. In Lippmann’s time, the relations among citizens, corporations, and government underwent a historic transformation; in our time, new laws and civic reforms hardly ever arise. We spend our energy on the mostly online battles of the red-blue war, stumbling down the path of the 1850s, while the powerful entities that control our lives grow bigger and more corrupt.

The subtitle of Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class points to an unexpected group of young people who are toiling against concentrated wealth and power. A college-educated working class sounds like an oxymoron because socioeconomic status is generally defined by education and believed to rise with each academic degree. In recent years, a college education has become one of the most reliable indicators of both economic well-being and voting behavior. Americans with a college degree tend to make 75 percent more money over their lifetime than those without, and in the past three presidential elections, these better-educated, wealthier voters have moved steadily to the Democratic Party. In 2024, they voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 16 percentage points. As if according to some law of political dynamics, non-college-educated Americans have gone for Trump and the Republican Party by similar margins. The political alignment of the 20th century, when workers tended to favor Democrats and professionals Republicans, has been reversed in the 21st. The education divide is the most significant factor in American politics—sharpest among white voters, and increasing among Latino voters as well.

These trends are so glaring that the term working class is now used to describe both those without a college degree and the MAGA base. So in reporting on the college-educated working class, Scheiber, who covers labor for The New York Times, is like a zoologist whose fieldwork has revealed the existence of an animal that contradicts some long-standing theory of speciation.

His subjects, in their 20s or early 30s, came out of college with heavy debts and unrealistic expectations. A Grinnell grad, recipient of a prestigious postcollege fellowship, takes a job at a Chicago Starbucks to support himself while he tries to break into theater, only to find years later that the theater dream has died and he’s still making lattes, hectored by managers, hard up enough to apply for food stamps. After college, an “Apple fangirl” in Maryland is encouraged by a local Apple Store to think of her job in terms of passion and human potential. Hired to do one-on-one tech tutorials, she hopes to move up to designing the curriculum; instead, the company’s relentless focus on profit traps her as a glorified saleswoman in a retail mall, and she fails to keep up with her bills. Corporate America seduces these ambitious young people with exalted titles that bear scant relation to the reality of the work: Apple Store “creatives” and “geniuses” who have to wheedle customers into buying a $3,500 Vision Pro headset, Starbucks “partners” who prepare venti iced caramel macchiatos all day, Amazon “associates” whose moves around the warehouse are tracked to the minute, adjunct “professors” who earn sub-median pay with little hope of a career in their field.

It would be easy for an older, more comfortable reader, or a more truly impoverished one, to dismiss the grievances of Scheiber’s subjects. How sorry can you feel for an underemployed Hollywood scriptwriter who makes ends meet through a “sugar dating” app, as a companion for wealthy older men? These young graduates start out naive about the heartlessness of the corporate world and harbor illusory hopes for success in unforgiving professions. Culturally, they have little in common with meat packers or home health aides who never expect to do more than get by—who are toiling for their children’s futures, not their own. The college-educated are trained to expect that the world will make room for them, and when it doesn’t—when they suffer the indignities of wage work, with its unpredictable schedules and disrespectful bosses, and can see no way up or out—the blow isn’t just economic; it’s psychological. “They were often bourgeois in their tastes,” Scheiber writes. “They cradled sleek smartphones and expensive cups of coffee. They watched prestige TV on demand. But the previous decade and a half had bequeathed them the bank accounts—and the politics—of the proletariat.”

Illustration by Álvaro Bernis

The individual stories Scheiber tells sometimes feel like cases of bad luck or poor decision making, but he’s writing more broadly about a generation of graduates whose prospects have unquestionably dimmed. The price of a college degree is soaring while its comparative benefit is shrinking. The pay gap between college and high-school grads has stopped growing over the past two decades, partly because of the Great Recession and the pandemic. The number of jobs in some of the most desirable careers has dropped, creating intense competition due to what the scholar Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” Or, as Scheiber puts it, “too many people with expensive credentials chased too few jobs requiring those credentials.” When expectation and reality part ways for a cohort that’s been raised on the assumption of upward mobility—when elites start to sink, and reform is blocked—the political waters get very rough, often leading to social disintegration and unrest. Turchin’s historical examples include prerevolutionary France, Russia, and Iran; another is the United States in this decade.

Scheiber’s main interest is the development of a radical political consciousness in a generation of phone addicts and Netflix junkies. Mutiny follows a dozen or so employees at Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, Hollywood studios, and research universities who all come to the same epiphany: “They saw themselves as members of the rank and file. They grumbled about their supervisors and cursed their corporate overlords.” This new awareness, whether or not it qualifies them as bona fide members of the working class, leads them to join union-organizing drives, publicize corporate abuses, go on strike, and gradually find more purpose in labor activism than in their thwarted professional ambitions.

We remember the pandemic as a boiling point in the culture wars. The continuous battles over lockdowns, masking, police violence, expertise, conspiracy theories, and the outcome of the 2020 election have never really subsided. But the pandemic also exposed the grotesque unfairness of our economy and society in deeply personal ways, cutting across the red-blue divide. In the pandemic’s early days, before the crisis became completely subsumed by the cultural civil war, a memorable phrase appeared: essential workers, people whose livelihood required them to show up at work and risk their health. The difference between the fates of essential and nonessential workers was a profound injustice, and a healthy country would have made it a focus of public attention and policy. Jeff Bezos’s fortune increased by $24 billion in the pandemic’s first month. Meanwhile, his company’s treatment of its essential workers, and the firing of Chris Smalls, an outspoken employee in a Staten Island warehouse, triggered the creation of the first Amazon union—a milestone in the recent surge of labor activism in America.

[Steven Greenhouse: Is organized labor making a comeback?]

But Amazon turned out to be a more difficult case for labor organizing in the early 2020s than Starbucks, Apple, or Disney. Disagreements over tactics and strategy led to a power struggle that divided the union, damaging the cause of labor at Amazon. Smalls, the union’s first president, framed the division along lines of race and class; his leadership faction claimed to speak for the warehouse’s Black and brown workers who never went to college (though Scheiber points out that the opposition to Smalls also included nonwhite, non-college-educated workers). In his forthcoming memoir, When the Revolution Comes, Smalls accuses white college-educated organizers at the Staten Island warehouse of trying to take power away from the authentic working class. He insists that the Amazon union must be led by workers of color—only they have the experience of hardship to understand and speak for the rank and file. “If there is any mistake I made, any regret I have,” Smalls writes, “it’s the fact that early on we let people who didn’t see the importance of race and culture the way we did get into positions of power within our movement.”

In a way, Smalls is challenging the thesis of Mutiny. He’s implying that there’s something inauthentic, maybe flatly contradictory, about a college-educated working class, especially a white one. He’s saying that “race and culture” matter more than an hourly wage. The fracturing of the Amazon union at the Staten Island warehouse plays a relatively small part in Mutiny. Though Scheiber occasionally questions the wisdom of his protagonists, he’s plainly on their side. He considers their oppression real, their struggles just, and their activism the best way to achieve more stable, dignified lives. But he isn’t sufficiently aware of the insularity and fragility of their project.

Mutiny includes no college grads in dead-end jobs whose grievances have turned them toward MAGA rather than union activism—young men and women recruited by Turning Point USA while still in college. Instead, most of the book’s protagonists would feel at home at a Democratic Socialists of America convention. They’re the kind of progressive Zoomers and Millennials who use gender-neutral pronouns and post online about Palestine. Within two days of October 7, a Starbucks organizer called on X for “solidarity with Palestine!,” and even though the post was soon taken down, Gaza created such controversy for Starbucks that the company and union sued each other over social-media posts about the war. Joe Biden’s efforts to be the most pro-labor president in history didn’t spare him the wrath of young Starbucks employees who accused him of complicity in genocide. The war galvanized them in a way that haggling over wages and hours no longer did.

The point isn’t that the Starbucks union should have taken a different position on Gaza, or that Smalls was wrong to insist on the centrality of “race and culture” at the Amazon warehouse. But these episodes show how easily the culture war can insert itself into a righteous cause. At the Apple Store in Maryland, Black and white workers in the union maintained cohesion and were able to negotiate a decent contract by focusing on corporate greed, which required a delicate balance between acknowledging the differences in their life experiences and resisting the centrifugal pull of identity.

This decade has seen more union activism than any other in almost half a century. The overweening power of corporations and plutocrats has turned much of the country in favor of labor, and Scheiber believes that it doesn’t matter whether workers assemble automobiles, make upscale coffee drinks, or write television scripts. He seems sanguine that the college divide is fading as more and more Americans experience the whip hand of a heartless economic order. Scheiber cites polls that show college graduates drawing closer to the more conservative views of the working class on immigration and crime, and he takes this as evidence that “there may be a basis for an alliance between the two groups after all.”

But other polls suggest real disagreements between those with and without a college degree. For example, on whether to deport all immigrants in the country illegally, one poll found that the gap is almost 20 percentage points among non-Hispanic white people. In general, I’m more skeptical than Scheiber is that progressive baristas—let alone newly unionized doctors and architects—are going to be eagerly embraced by their working-class brothers and sisters. Plenty of Americans will dislike the attitudes and styles of Mutiny’s activists. There are important cultural differences between an internist struggling to treat patients in a private-equity conglomerate and a John Deere machinist on strike because of layoffs. That both belong to a union might matter less than that one voted for Harris, the other for Trump, and each has some reason to fear and loathe the other. The culture war is burning too hot for a class war to snuff it out anytime soon.

The radicalization of college-educated Americans who have begun to live the unpleasant realities of their less privileged compatriots—who can hardly afford rent, much less to buy a house and start a family—is an encouraging turn. They could form part of a broader social movement that finally addresses our deepest problems instead of dissolving them in electronic bile. A professional class that identifies with America’s multitudes of have-nots and votes on that basis would be a powerful force for greater equality and opportunity.

[From the November 2025 issue: George Packer doesn’t want to stop believing in America’s decency]

But to succeed, such a movement has to be aware of the fault lines that could make it fail, and take care not to widen them. Tread lightly around the identity traits no one chose and the beliefs no one will give up; instead, emphasize a common economic fate. The ground that unites the powerless against the powerful is always about to collapse. Our irrepressible red-blue conflict is always ready to set Americans against Americans in every conceivable way: education, race, religion, age, gender, region, even views of foreign wars. It’s better to be honest about these differences, and try not to rub them raw until they destroy the chance for a better country, than to assume that they don’t matter or wish them out of existence.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The College-Educated Working Class.”

Hubris Without Idealism

2026-03-02T07:00:00-05:00

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During the Gulf War, in February 1991, George H. W. Bush called on the Iraqi people to “take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Coalition aircraft dropped leaflets urging Iraqi civilians and troops to rise up. But when the country’s oppressed Shia and Kurdish populations followed that exhortation, Hussein’s surviving forces crushed them, killing tens of thousands of people, while the United States military stood by and did nothing.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, as U.S. and Israeli warplanes started to bomb Iran and target its leadership, Donald Trump recorded an eight-minute video message that echoed Bush. “When we are finished, take over your government,” he urged the Iranian people. “It will be yours to take.” Like Bush, he provided no further instructions.

Regime change on the cheap—by covert action, military coup, airpower, or short ground war—has tempted almost every American president since World War II. No wonder: It offers to solve a difficult foreign problem with little cost to Americans. We remember the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as prolonged, bloody, ultimately futile attempts to remake recalcitrant foreign countries as democracies. But President George W. Bush intended both wars to be brief and low-cost—regime change with a small footprint.

The original plan in Iraq called for a rapid transfer of power to a group of exiles in the spring of 2003, followed by early elections and the withdrawal of all but 30,000 American troops by summer’s end. This would be regime change without nation building, the best of both worlds, and it was really no plan at all, for it depended on magical thinking: Iraqis would be so hungry for democracy that they would build it for themselves. When looting broke out in Baghdad, and undermanned American forces without orders to provide security failed to intervene, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sniffed, “Freedom’s untidy.”

[Anne Applebaum: Trump has no plan for the Iranian people]

In early June 2003, a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, a retired general named Jay Garner, the first American proconsul of newly liberated Iraq, was recalled to Washington and met Bush in the Oval Office. Though Iraq was already descending into chaos, for 45 minutes they exchanged congratulations on a mission accomplished. Garner later told me that as the meeting ended, Bush asked, “You want to do Iran for the next one?” To which Garner replied, “No, sir, me and the boys are holding out for Cuba.”

The forever war that followed amounted to a belated attempt to assume responsibility for the disaster that an ill-conceived invasion had created. It was a tragic sign of getting serious. The Iraq War’s neoconservative architects suffered from a hubristic faith in American power and their own righteousness. But if their ideological commitments hadn’t included democracy, the war would have lasted just a few months.

The war had my reluctant support because I couldn’t imagine anything worse than Hussein’s totalitarian regime. But within a few years of the invasion, many Iraqis who had welcomed it began to look back with nostalgia. Today, it’s impossible not to feel happy for Iranians inside the country and overseas as they celebrate the deaths of their oppressors, above all that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose rule destroyed the lives of so many people, especially young ones. But the surest way for worse to follow is to fail to believe that it can.

Iran, with its deep history, its educated and relatively homogeneous population, and its unbreakable freedom movement, has always seemed a better bet for political transformation than Afghanistan or Iraq. But if recent decades have taught anything, it’s that the absence of tyranny is not freedom but chaos; that war is a likelier agent of disintegration than of renewal; that America knows how to destroy regimes but not remake societies. Democracy can’t be installed—it has to grow from within, over time, under delicate conditions. The U.S. can help support it, but last year Trump shut down every U.S. agency and bureau that promoted democracy and human rights, and defunded government media, such as Voice of America and Radio Farda, that could have communicated with the Iranian people during this crisis. Having done more than any president in our lifetime to destroy democracy at home, Trump has no interest in making it flourish abroad. His hubris resembles that of the neocons—like them, he believes in American supremacy and is fascinated by the overwhelming power of the U.S. military—but he shares none of their idealism. His only commitment is to himself.

[Arash Azizi: ‘Our resources are done’]

Trump came to office as a strident critic of the post-9/11 wars—“America First” meant no more U.S. troops killed in stupid interventions to change regimes in far-off countries. But Trump prizes his own untrammeled power more than consistency or peace. He’s become the latest advocate for regime change on the cheap—beguiled by the vision of “doing Iran for the next one” and resolving the 47-year conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic, imagining a final end to the regime’s nuclear ambitions, terrorism, regional wars, and savage repression of its people. “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday. “Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”

In January, the IRGC—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with the paramilitary Basij militia—killed as many as 30,000 Iranian protesters during the most brutal crackdown in the history of this violent regime. Most Iranians regard these forces with fear and hatred. No one can guarantee them the “complete immunity” that Trump offered over the weekend if they lay down their arms, and they won’t easily relinquish their power and corrupt wealth. His notion of spontaneous democratic combustion in a country of 90 million people, with its heavily armed military establishment still very much in control, shows sheer wishful thinking. Hopefully is the language of a leader without a plan.

And if “Greatness” fails to arrive—if the regime changes the name at the top but not its basic character, and its security forces slaughter thousands more Iranians who follow Trump’s videotaped advice to “take over” their country, and civil war breaks out in ethnic-minority regions, and the entire Middle East is in flames—who can believe that Trump will take any responsibility? Rather, he’ll claim the glory of war without owning the tragedy of all that it brings and move on to something else, while the Iranian people are betrayed again, this time by us.

What Should Americans Do Now?

2026-01-27T17:21:04-05:00

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The killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been compared to the murder of George Floyd, because they all happened within a few miles of one another, and because of the outrage they inspired. There’s an important difference, though: In 2020 the United States was in turmoil, but it was still a state of law. Floyd’s death was followed by investigation, trial, and verdict—by justice. The Minneapolis Police Department was held accountable and ultimately made to reform.

No one should expect justice for Good and Pretti. Today, nothing stands in the way of the brutal tactics of ICE and the Border Patrol. While President Trump seems to be trying to defuse the mayhem he’s caused by reassigning a top commander, he is not withdrawing the federal agents from the state or allowing local authorities to investigate, let alone prosecute, them for their actions.

Authoritarianism doesn’t disappear with the news cycle. The administration’s automatic lies about the killings and slander of the victims are less a cover-up of facts than a display of utter contempt for them. Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other top officials seem to invite incredulity as a way to flex their power: We say black is white. Agree or you’re a criminal. When Stephen Miller recently claimed that geopolitics is ruled by the “iron laws” of “strength” and “force,” he was expressing the administration’s approach to domestic governance as well. Those words are iron laws on American streets.

The prelude to the violence of January 7 and 24 came not in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, but in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Trump and his supporters were prevented from stealing an election and overthrowing the Constitution by democratic institutions—Congress, the courts, the police, the media, and public opinion. But the insurrection never ended. By the time Trump returned to power and pardoned the insurrectionists, almost half of the country believed that January 6 was a patriotic demonstration, a false-flag operation, or just no big deal. Throughout 2025, institutions that once restrained the presidency weakened or fell away one by one, until earlier this month Trump told The New York Times that the only limit to his power is his own mind. That same day, January 7, authoritarianism had its predictable consequence in freezing Minneapolis with the execution of Renee Good.

[Nick Miroff: Greg Bovino loses his job]

If rogue federal agents can shoot American citizens dead with total impunity, then it doesn’t matter whether state and local authorities, the courts, the media, the political opposition, and a mobilized public object. “ICE > MN,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media—an assertion of raw force, not constitutional authority. When Trump and his loyalists call protesters terrorists and warn that disobeying orders will get you killed, they strip away any illusion that the federal government respects the lives, let alone the rights, of those who oppose it—potentially half the population or more.

A lawless regime is an illegitimate one. If the country seems to have reached a breaking point in Minneapolis, this is why. And yet Minneapolis also offers a compelling answer to the question that democracy-loving Americans have asked for the past year: What can I do?

No historical precedent exists for where we are. Individuals and groups have often accused the U.S. government of denying their rights, and some of those accusations were irrefutable—as in the century between Appomattox and Selma, when the rights of Black Americans were denied throughout the South with the connivance of Washington. Some, though, were shams. In 1861, the Confederacy declared the government in Washington illegitimate and fired the first shots of the Civil War, not because any rights had been taken away from southern states—not even the right to hold human beings in bondage—but because they hated and feared Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party. After the 2020 election, MAGA tried to claim that the election had been stolen and a Biden presidency would be illegitimate; truth and the law prevailed.

The federal government has never declared itself immune to the law and the Constitution while explicitly denying protection to peaceful opponents, until now. Many Americans who thought they were living under the rule of law feel paralyzed. The vague exhortation to “do something while you still can” creates a sense of urgency but doesn’t provide a plan. Rather than inspiring action, the question of what to do more likely leaves you feeling depressed and alone. Not even the prospect of waiting out the year until the midterms provides much reassurance. Trump has made it clear that he will try to undermine any election that might cost him some of his power.

Without a constructive answer, the danger is that Americans who find themselves without legal remedies will turn to illegal and violent ones. That would be a catastrophic mistake, both strategically and morally.

So far, action has come in the form of either legal challenge or protest, including speeches and writings by politicians and public figures, and the occasional nationwide demonstrations known as “No Kings,” which draw on patriotic imagery and the historic American aversion to tyranny. The key to the popularity of No Kings lies in its unifying name. The focus is not a single issue, such as abortion, immigration, Ukraine, or Gaza, but a broad stance against autocracy and for democracy. Its demonstrations are orderly, peaceful, good-tempered, and irreverent, featuring countless American flags. No Kings hasn’t been hijacked by leftist groups with more extreme agendas, spouting strident anti-American language that’s bound to repel ordinary people. But No Kings has been inconspicuous since October. It will have to transform itself into something much more potent than a once-a-quarter day of demonstration.

[George Packer: Why the ‘No Kings’ protest moved me]

In Minneapolis, as the scale and intensity of oppression increased, the answer to “What can I do?” evolved from protest to something riskier and more demanding: nonviolent resistance. As my colleague Robert Worth has reported, networks of Minneapolitans that had formed after Floyd’s murder to protect their neighborhoods from both out-of-control police and rioters have been revived in the past few months to protect their immigrant neighbors from the invasion of federal agents. Residents undergo training in nonviolent resistance, which demands courage, wisdom, and restraint; they bring food to those hiding at home, escort children to school, and stand watch outside; they blow whistles and send out alerts on encrypted chats to signal the presence of ICE vehicles, and follow them; they try to de-escalate confrontations (sometimes with the opposite result), provide medical aid to the injured, and shame masked agents in military gear who seem poorly trained and undisciplined compared with the civilians.

Given the level of rage on the streets, the conduct of these local networks has been remarkable. One older suburban woman—nothing like the “lunatics,” “domestic terrorists,” or “assassins” Trump and his advisers see in Minneapolis—told Worth that she doesn’t even consider her involvement political. Her preferred term for what she’s doing is humanist. It could be a byword for the whole opposition to a cruel and predatory regime.

Minneapolis is setting an example for the rest of the country: a nameless, leaderless, self-organized movement. Self-organization is a term I heard from almost everyone I met in Ukraine shortly after the Russian invasion. It’s an inherently hard form of activism, requiring high levels of motivation and trust. These obviously exist in the neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, where civic spirit and personal connections run deep. But replicating them on a wider scale—essentially, creating a mass movement for basic decency—raises obvious problems. That movement’s energy might depend on the arrival of conspicuous federal oppression in other blue cities and states (which Trump has promised). It would have to remain decentralized and maintain its local integrity while creating a capacity for nationwide coordination. It could fall apart for lack of discipline, coherence, trust, and leadership—or, conversely, because of leadership that devolves into factionalism. The civil-rights movement confronted all of these problems, and overcame them.

No Kings or another group could consider organizing and training people in other parts of the country to join the kind of civic action on display in Minneapolis—to move from protest to nonviolent resistance. Beyond neighbor-to-neighbor support in a moment of crisis lies a wide range of means to withhold cooperation from an illegitimate government. The late theorist Gene Sharp laid them out, along with ideas for strategic planning, in books such as From Dictatorship to Democracy and Waging Nonviolent Struggle. Sharp’s work has been used as an essential guide for democracy activists under dictatorial regimes in countries such as Serbia, Burma, and Iran. Americans should pick up these books and absorb their lessons.

Sharp analyzed various “methods of noncooperation”—political, economic, and social—that stop short of more aggressive disruptions. They include boycotts and strikes (such as the widely observed general strike in Minneapolis last Friday); refusal to participate in administration-supported organizations and events; “quasi-legal evasions and delays” and “reluctant and slow compliance” with government edicts; and finally, nonviolent civil disobedience. Anti-ICE actions that try to thwart the brutal and indiscriminate enforcement of immigration laws can become a form of civil disobedience.

[Adam Serwer: Minnesota proved MAGA wrong]

Nonviolent struggle carries serious risks. It can lead to social ostracism, legal harassment, state intimidation, prison, injury, and, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, death. One sign of the authoritarian depth to which the U.S. has sunk under Trump is that none of these risks is hard to imagine. Examples accumulate every day. A movement of resistance against an illegitimate regime has a chance of succeeding only if it remains strictly nonviolent and avoids the familiar trap of sectarianism. It has to be democratic, patriotic, and animated by a sense of basic decency that can attract ordinary people—your TV-watching mother, your apathetic teen, your child’s teacher, the retiree next door, the local grocer.

I keep asking myself whether it’s wise to even consider these things. I don’t want to sound alarmist, or delusional, or needlessly provocative. For an American who grew up in the postwar order with its apparently permanent rules, in a democracy with obvious flaws that nonetheless seemed on a course of gradual, inevitable progress, I find it extremely hard to assess the peril. I’m tempted to believe that the country will somehow return to normal, because I want it to be normal. We’ve never been here before, and either the nervous system overreacts or the imagination fails. After Minneapolis, I fear the latter more. Trump is taking the country on a path to tyranny. The first obligation for each of us is to see it and name it. The next is to figure out what to do about it.

Iraq Was Bad. This Is Absurd.

2026-01-08T07:31:00-05:00

Two decades ago, Richard N. Haass, a senior foreign-policy official in the George W. Bush administration, confessed that he would go to his grave not knowing why the United States had invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made,” Haass told me. “A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.” I thought of this astonishing remark after Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.

Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?

If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe. If Trump wants to deport 600,000 Venezuelan migrants from the U.S., the political chaos left by a decapitated regime could increase the exodus to this country. If his concern was the intolerable oppression of the Venezuelan people, he would have demanded the release of political prisoners and planned for a democratic future rather than kept their tormentors in power. As for the oil that Trump craves, America doesn’t need Venezuela’s reserves, and tapping them would require years of investment in the country’s decayed infrastructure. In a New York Times report, Trump officials cited Maduro’s public dance moves to a techno remix as a final provocation.

Bush apparently decided to invade Iraq before he had settled on a specific cause. He wanted to assert American power after September 11, and a preventive war gave him a way. “Fuck Saddam,” he told a group of senators a full year before the invasion. “We’re taking him out.” The tragicomic improv act following the raid on Caracas suggests that Trump attacked Venezuela for the same reason: because he could. This is more often the case than we’d like to think. It would be comforting to believe that geopolitics is a nefarious conspiracy plotted by rational actors pursuing rational interests in a windowless room—but in the long history of human folly, we seldom know why events of the most momentous consequence even happened. “Foreign policy makes no sense,” the late foreign-policy expert Leslie Gelb liked to say.

The specter of Iraq hangs over Venezuela like a warning light. Trump seems to have taken Operation Iraqi Freedom as a guide to how not to conduct Operation Absolute Resolve: no year-long propaganda campaign to gin up public support; no congressional authorization; no speeches and votes at the United Nations; no coalition of the willing or of any other kind; no American troops on the ground for more than a few hours; no talk of human rights, elections, and postwar reconstruction; no change of regime at all. Iraq was a disaster in part because the Bush administration, wanting regime change without nation building, substituted wishful thinking for post-invasion planning. Now we might learn that wishful thinking is better than no thinking at all. The Trump administration appears to be making up the future of Venezuela on the fly.

The embrace of unilateralism, preemption, and torture in Iraq seemed to mark the start of a new era in U.S. foreign policy—endless, unrestrained war. A mountain of books, articles, and speeches declared America alone. But from the vantage point of the Trump era, we can see that Iraq was instead the last American war of the 80-year postwar period. Its architects might have been eager to break all constraints on their way to catastrophe, but Iraq was a final burst of hubris in an era still characterized by internationalism and democracy. Concepts such as humanitarian intervention and transitional justice were manipulated and abused by the Bush administration, but it wasn’t free to discard them. It felt compelled to hold several elections that were bound to give power to Iraqis who were aligned with America’s enemy, Iran.

In the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush declared: “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom.” Trump’s version of the same document, released in November, has nothing to say about any universal values, including freedom. It’s all about unilateral advantage, with a crudely transactional view of America’s relation to the rest of the world. It’s a clean break from the postwar years of internationalism that, although flawed, prevented another world war and created unprecedented conditions of freedom and prosperity, first in the West, then in the former colonial world.

Bush was guilty of being arrogant, reckless, naive, and incapable of self-judgment, but he believed in an American mission with enough zeal to start a foolish war on its behalf that did irreversible damage to the mission. To critics on both the right and the left, the post-9/11 “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan brought disrepute to the entire project of an American-led liberal international order. The left wanted America to be more like Norway, peaceful and humanitarian. The right wanted America to be a stronghold of isolation. But Trump has shown that neither of these was on the menu of a superpower. The likeliest alternative to Pax Americana is naked imperialism.

Just as Bush’s messianic National Security Strategy foretold the Iraq War, the crude cynicism of Trump’s produced the raid in Caracas, where it is facing its first practical test. Since Saturday’s military action, Trump and his aides have been spouting threats about the United States military dominating the Western Hemisphere wherever the president wants. What began in Venezuela might well be repeated in Greenland, Cuba, Panama, or even Canada. What the U.S. can do it is free to do. Force is its own justification. Trump’s strategy recalls the era before World War II—one of dollar diplomacy and gunboat imperialism, spheres of dominion, puppet dictators, resource grabs, annexations, and the threat of larger wars among great powers. Only now those nations are armed with nuclear weapons, and America in 2026 is incomparably stronger than America was in 1926, and Calvin Coolidge was no Trump.

The clearest expression of Trump’s thought here, as always, comes from the mouth of Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and his homeland-security adviser. Miller is more coherent than the president, less self-seeking than the vice president, and more openly hateful than any member of the Cabinet and Congress. He’s a genuine ideologue with no conventional political ambitions, and his words make it impossible not to think of the 1930s: “America is for Americans and Americans only!” “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.”

With Venezuela, Miller is taking a public role in foreign policy. Like the rest of the leadership circle, he seems unworried by the prospect of civil war, insurgency, or prolonged chaos in post-Maduro Venezuela, indifferent to the fate of Venezuelans under the regime left in power by Trump and untroubled by the possibility of an American quagmire. He seems to have limitless faith in the ability of U.S. warships to work the administration’s will on another country and people. On Monday, Miller explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper why Venezuela is going to be run by Trump: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

It’s a kind of candor that makes me miss the old American hypocrisy.

Condemning Millions for One Man’s Crime

2025-12-03T10:13:09-05:00

Most of us are lucky enough to avoid any direct encounter with the true nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. But over time, abstract nouns such as authoritarianism and xenophobia lose their hard edges with too much use. It can take some personal experience to bring home what the Trump administration is doing to human lives and values.

The solitary Afghan man who allegedly shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard near the White House last week, killing a 20-year-old woman and critically wounding a 24-year-old man, gave the president exactly the pretext he needed to crush the hopes of desperate people here and around the world. Trump started with Afghans, canceling all U.S. visas issued to Afghans abroad and barring visa holders from entering the country, including men and women who aided the 20-year American war effort in Afghanistan. He halted asylum hearings in the U.S. for all migrants; announced that green cards issued to migrants from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, would be reviewed; and promised to examine every asylum case approved under the previous administration. He wrote that any foreign-born resident of the U.S. found to be “incapable of loving our Country” or “non-compatible with Western Civilization” would be deported.

[Juliette Kayyem: A terrible and avoidable tragedy in D.C.]

This broad assault against the right of refuge is being staged on a heap of lies. Trump suggested that he would never have allowed the alleged gunman—who had served in a CIA-trained unit during the war—and others like him into the country; in fact Trump criticized President Joe Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind after the fall of Kabul in 2021, and the alleged gunman was granted U.S. asylum in April, under Trump. He said that Afghans were allowed into the U.S. “unvetted,” when they’ve been put through security screenings at every stage, from the original entry to the request for asylum and green cards. The claim by Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, that Afghanistan is now safe enough for her department to send Afghan refugees back there is a lie.

The argument that federal troops are needed in U.S. cities to end a nonexistent crime wave created by refugees and other migrants is a lie, as is the administration’s insistence that national security requires mass deportation. Trump himself has undermined that security far more by purging the FBI of agents deemed disloyal, cutting millions of dollars from counter-terrororism, and diverting thousands of federal law-enforcement officers to the dirty business of rounding up men in Home Depot parking lots and arresting married couples who have shown up to a green-card hearing. “If they are correct in characterizing the shooting as a terrorist attack,” Becca Heller, the founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me, “how come no one is talking about the intelligence failure that allowed a terrorist attack against U.S. troops on U.S. soil?”

All of these lies are built on a deeper one. Stephen Miller, the ideologue behind the foreigners-out policy, told it over the weekend in a social-media post: “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

If it were true that those fleeing horrifying violence are bound to inflict the same oppression on others, Miller might well have added: Just as Jews imported here from postwar Europe brought the industrial slaughter of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen with them and inflicted it on their innocent American neighbors in Scarsdale. Just as South Vietnamese who managed to flee the victorious North terrorized the peaceful streets of Galveston with civil war and torture. Just as multiple generations of Iranians and Sudanese have imposed the brutal tyrannies of their homelands on the good people of Los Angeles and Fargo.

Miller is justifying collective punishment and guilt by blood. I’ve witnessed those barbarisms elsewhere, in war-ravaged countries and in dictatorships, but never before during my lifetime as a matter of national policy here at home. Trump and his top aides are re-creating in America the conditions and terrors of failed states. They’re erasing the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of violence. They’re abolishing the essential value of the Western civilization they claim to be defending: the sanctity of each individual; the right of all men and women to be judged on their own merits, not as faceless carriers of the pathologies of entire societies and heritages.

[David A. Graham: Trump seizes back the spotlight]

Within hours of the shooting, I received a text from an Afghan woman I know, whom I’m calling Saman. (She asked that I not use her real name.) She’s a refugee in Pakistan, where she, her husband, and their two small children are barely surviving month to month as they try to escape deportation by the Pakistani authorities back to Afghanistan. There an ominous fate would await them. Both Saman and her husband served in the Afghan special forces during the American war. She is Hazara, a religious minority that has suffered severe repression under the Taliban; her sister in Afghanistan is hiding from Taliban attempts to force her into marriage; her husband’s brother is languishing in a Taliban prison. After years of repeated vetting by the U.S. refugee agency, the couple was about to be resettled here in January, when Trump returned to office and halted the program.

No other country is willing to accept them, and now they’ve been utterly abandoned by the country at whose side they fought. An administration that claims to be standing up for the U.S. military is inflicting moral injury on troops that have vouched for their wartime Afghan comrades, including Saman and her husband. I was still trying to find a way to tell her that their last hope of being allowed to come here had just died—that the president and his advisers have deemed her and her family incapable of loving America, incompatible with Western civilization, and certain to bring Afghanistan’s chaos and terror to the United States—when I heard from her. I can’t come up with any answer to the Trump administration better than what Saman said herself:

This tragedy was shocking, painful, and beyond anything words can truly express. I want to offer my sincere condolences to you and to everyone affected by this terrible event. I want to state clearly and with all my heart that I strongly condemn this attack. Such violence is inhuman, unjustifiable, and against every moral value I believe in. As an Afghan, I feel a heavy weight of sorrow and shame that someone from my country committed such a horrific act, even though I know very well that the actions of one individual do not represent an entire nation.

To be completely honest … sometimes I wish I were not Afghan. I wish I had not been born in Afghanistan so I would not have to carry the burden and the pain caused by the actions of people who do not represent the real, peaceful Afghan people.

I kindly ask you not to let this tragedy change the way you see me, or the many Afghans who believe deeply in peace, humanity, and mutual respect.

An Anatomy of the MAGA Mind

2025-11-24T07:00:00-05:00

“In the United States at this time,” the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Conservatives and reactionaries, Trilling added, had no ideas, only impulses—“irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Whether the point was true in mid-century America—the reactionary writer Richard M. Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, an attack on the modern West, two years before Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—today it is obviously false. For the past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on the right.

In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, the political theorist Laura K. Field organizes the ideas that have coalesced around Donald Trump into several schools of thought. At the Claremont Institute in California, the disciples of Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru to several generations of conservatives, combine Platonic philosophy, biblical teachings, and a reverence for the American founding into a politics of ethical and religious absolutism. Post-liberal Catholic thinkers, such as Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard, believe that the liberalism of the Enlightenment has led to civilizational collapse, and only the restoration of the beloved community under Christian governance can save the West. National conservatives, including a number of Republican politicians, base their policy agenda—anti-immigrant, protectionist, isolationist, socially traditionalist—on an American identity defined by ethnic and religious heritage rather than democratic values. In Silicon Valley, techno-monarchists such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin denounce democracy itself and dream of a ruling class of entrepreneurs. And in dark corners of the internet, media celebrities and influencers with handles such as “Bronze Age Pervert” and “Raw Egg Nationalist” celebrate manliness and champion outright misogyny and bigotry.

These tendencies come with various emphases and obsessions, but the differences matter less than the common project. The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s new ruling elite with any claim to having a worldview should be understood as offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism. More reactionary than conservative, their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right—Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan—rather than the forward-looking Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades. Their favorite philosophers are not Locke and Mill but Plato, Aquinas, or even Carl Schmitt, the Nazi theorist of authoritarianism. They believe that justice and the good life can be found only in traditional sources of faith and knowledge. They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán.

The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing. As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the “woke Marxists” of the left, and the cultural elites of the “soulless managerial class.” Vermeule writes of “the common good,” and R. R. Reno, editor of the Christian journal First Things, speaks of “a restoration of love,” but the mood and rhetoric of the MAGA intellectuals are overwhelmingly negative. Without enemies they would lose vitality and focus. Their utopia is located so high in the heavens or deep in the past that the entire project always seems on the verge of collapse for lack of a solid foundation. “The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best,” Field writes—“and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today.”

[Read: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

The author’s background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues. She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship—a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism. His approach has had a deep influence on leading conservative American intellectuals of the past half century, including Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, the godfather of the Claremont Institute. Nearly a decade in these academic circles makes Field a knowledgeable guide to a subject she takes seriously. She’s also a Canadian woman, a double identity that puts her at a skeptical distance from the more and more extreme world of the American right.

Her exodus, as she tells it, began in 2010, when she was a fifth-year graduate student, during a lavish banquet at the University of Virginia where she was seated next to an important member of the host organization’s staff, who described meeting First Lady Michelle Obama: “Very tall, very impressive. I’d really like to fuck her.” Field excused herself to go to the restroom. Gazing in the mirror, she wondered: “What on earth am I doing here?”

She didn’t flee entirely. In the ensuing years she lingered as a sort of spy, attending conferences where speakers took turns denouncing liberalism, secularism, feminism, and modernity itself—until, in 2024, she became persona non grata. By then something had happened to the sober, pious minds of the new right. That something was Trump.

Beginning with his election in 2016, anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. “Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes. But in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them. Field shows, for example, how the Claremont Institute became a nest of conspiracy theorists and election denialists, with one of their own Straussians—the constitutional scholar John Eastman—providing Trump with a bogus legal justification for overturning the 2020 presidential election. Or take Deneen, a serious philosophical mind whose widely influential 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, was a kind of 95 theses nailed to the front door of the Enlightenment. “Whereas in 2012, in addition to disdain and skepticism, Deneen showed some sensitivity to the attractions of elite modern urban life,” Field writes, “ten years later he was naming the American elite ‘one of the worst of its kind produced in history,’ calling to ‘replace’ them, and advocating for ‘regime change.’”

Subverting the establishment is a lot more thrilling than defending it. Many of those who trade in ideas that overturn the status quo are drawn to power and have a particular weakness for extremism. Whether the likes of Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Stephen Miller, and Tucker Carlson are driven by conviction, opportunism, personal grievance, or some combination of these motives is never easy to say. What’s clear is that MAGA ideologues—including the prize recruit to the anti-liberal right, J. D. Vance—have entered a downward spiral of ever cruder language and thought, usually with notes of bigotry and xenophobia, and sometimes blatant ugliness, as if to show their bona fides. They’ve abandoned tradition for radicalism, careful scholarship for vulgar discourse, reason for the irrational, universal truths for narrow identities, and philosophy for partisanship.

[Read: The intellectual vacuity of the national conservatives]

A few obscure figures—I wasn’t familiar with the name Julius Krein—recoiled and withdrew from the magnetic sphere around Trump. Others, such as Rod Dreher, have very recently begun to voice concern over the hateful trajectory of the American right. But reading Field, you can see something like the current wave of MAGA anti-Semitism coming from a long way off. Moral and intellectual descent is inherent in a political project that sets out to undermine liberal democracy, reject the inclusive egalitarianism of modern America, find enemies to demonize, and heroize a leader who defiles common decency. Such a movement might begin with Plato, but it will inevitably lead to Nick Fuentes.

The MAGA right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power, and democracy itself. A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer. The French cliché that the left thinks while the right governs has been nearly reversed in 21st-century America. Making the same mistake as Trilling, defenders of liberal democracy can hardly fathom any other framework for organizing modern life. “Liberals (and establishment types, too) have difficulty conceiving of perspectives and world views that differ so significantly from their own and seem so outlandish and extreme,” Field writes.

In the humanities, where the most profound questions about politics and life should be asked, many academics are so stuck in a calcified ideology of identity, with its ready-made answers, that they’ve ceased exploring fundamental moral arguments and stopped teaching the books where they can be found. In religion, progressives have a hard time admitting matters of faith as legitimate concerns in civic life. In politics, they debate policy ideas such as “the abundance agenda” and constitutional reform without confronting the deeper malaise of the modern West. To most of its adherents, liberalism means free speech, due process, rule of law, separation of powers, and evidence-based inquiry. It doesn’t join the quest for meaning and dignity that haunts our civilization.

Liberals are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent. They need their own theorists and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life.

We Are Not One

2025-11-06T09:00:00-05:00

When it came into view, Doctor Rustin was struck by its size. The platform rose on six-by-six wooden posts at least 12 feet off the ground, with enough room up top for a small deck party, and the staircase from the sidewalk was a steeply pitched ladder. This gallows had been raised to last—built not only by children but for them, since few adults would have the agility and daring to reach the top. Its height and solidity gave the sense of a play structure, the crossbar that loomed above the platform a climbing feature for the truly fearless, and the rope noose perfect for swinging and letting fly if only the gallows had been built over water.

A drop by the neck from 12 feet into midair would not be play. The designers of the Suicide Spot had been impressively serious. Rustin ran his hand over his own neck and forgot his mission.

About 30 people were gathered around the base, spilling from the sidewalk into the street. Most were teenagers skipping school, though there was a scattering of grown-ups and a couple of families with younger children. High up on the platform, two girls in yellowish-gray clothes stood on either side of a boy. He looked a year or two older than Rustin’s daughter, Selva, with a wild thicket of hair and a tough face. He was tugging at the rope as if to test its strength, eyes narrowed, lower lip jutting out in a kind of defiance, while the two girls leaned close and spoke to him in voices so quiet that Rustin, keeping back and half concealed under the red awning of a tavern called the Sodden Spot, couldn’t make them out.

But he knew they were Guardians—specially trained peers, there to help confused young people break free from life as they’d known it before the Emergency, in particular from their parents, and become unconflicted agents of Together. Mere weeks after the empire had collapsed, that word appeared on posters glued to the walls of public buildings and on banners strung from lampposts along the central avenues. What Together meant as a philosophy or program, Rustin wasn’t sure, but as a passion, it had quickly spread among the city’s Burghers, especially its youth, and created hairline fractures in his family. The Rustins were no longer the tight foursome that played word games at dinner. Selva no longer returned on the tram after school, but instead disappeared into the city, attending the daily gathering in the main square called We Are One, staying out for hours. This morning, Rustin—marooned at home since being exiled from the hospital in disgrace—had followed her through the streets until he lost her in the Market District.

In front of him a bickering couple, huddled under an umbrella—though it wasn’t raining—made it even harder to hear what was happening on the gallows.

“You didn’t have to come,” the woman said. “I could have come by myself.”

“You were afraid to. ‘What if one of them really does it?’ ” the man said, mimicking her panic.

“I never said that.”

“Shh!” Rustin hissed. The Suicide Spot belonged to the young, and he didn’t want to be associated with the disrespect of the middle-aged.

The boy’s shoulders rose and fell. He looked down to check the position of his feet over the trapdoor, then draped the noose around his neck. A murmur that sounded almost like satisfaction passed through the audience.

A Guardian placed her hand on the lever connected to the trapdoor. In a voice clear enough to carry over the crowd, she asked: “Do you want to leave this world?”

Rustin saw the boy’s face tighten. His eyes twitched in rapid blinks, his lips disappeared as if cold fury were coursing through his body. Then his features crumpled and he exploded in tears. He sobbed openly, without shame, like a little child, his whole body shaking. Several times he tried to master himself, but he couldn’t stop.

Keeping a hand on the lever, the Guardian reached with her other and touched the boy’s heaving shoulder. “Hey—we’re here with you. We’re suffering with you. We love you.”

The boy buried his face in his hands, and the thick nest of hair shook as if in a wind, and the sobs, though muffled, grew louder. Sighs of pity rose around the gallows.

“What do you want to say to your parents?” the other Guardian asked.

The boy looked up mid-sob, startled. “My—I—”

“If they were here, what would you say to them?”

He opened his mouth but no words came out, only a stuttering sob.

“This is pointless,” the woman under the umbrella said.

“You were the one that wanted to come,” the man said.

“Why don’t you both leave?” Rustin asked. They turned around to glare, but their talking stopped.

“Mama!” the boy suddenly cried out. “I’m sorry!”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” said the first Guardian, her hand still gripping the lever.

“Do it!” the boy wailed.

The Guardian didn’t move.

“Talk to us,” the other Guardian said. “We don’t want to lose you.”

“Shut up and do it!”

“Talk to your parents. Why are you sorry? They should be sorry.”

“Mama will be when I do it!”

The Guardian on the lever, who seemed to be leading the session, nodded.

“Oh, Mama will be sorry. But what about us? You’re gone, and we needed you. Do you know what’s on the other side of that door?”

The boy looked down at his feet. He shook his head.

“A great big empty hole. When you went through that door, the hole got bigger than you can imagine. That hole is bigger than this city.”

The crowd drew in its breath as if the boy was already dangling broken-necked from the noose.

Rustin tried to imagine this girl and boy talking in someone’s bedroom, which was where teenagers used to have difficult conversations. Talking face-to-face in private was supposed to allow you to open up, but maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe it was easier to say everything like this, with a crowd at your feet and a rope around your neck.

“Please just do it,” the boy said in a voice strained from sobbing, but softer, losing conviction.

“And we were about to try something that has never happened before,” the Guardian went on. “We were going to make a new city! Make ourselves new, too! We were young and dumb enough to think we could do it. How can we now without you?”

The boy murmured something Rustin couldn’t hear.

“And what about your Better Human? All that work you did. What’s going to happen to him now that you’re gone?”

The woman under the umbrella tugged at the man’s coat sleeve. “What did she say? Better what?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Rustin didn’t understand either.

The Guardian went on talking while the boy listened. He began to nod, and after a few more minutes he lifted the noose off his neck. She let go of the lever, and the crowd broke out in cheers and applause, as if its team had scored a winning goal. Startled, the boy looked down at his new fans. No adolescent defiance or child’s anguish was visible on his face now. Wide-eyed, grinning, he climbed down the ladder like a boy who never in his life had expected to win first prize.

The ground was undulating under Rustin’s feet, the tavern awning about to collapse on his head, the gallows the only fixed thing in sight. He had seen enough.

As he turned to go, a girl began to mount the scaffold. She wore the same clothes as the Guardians, with a bag slung over her shoulder and goggles dangling from her neck.

Found you! was his first thought, and then: She’s going to replace a Guardian. That’s how it works—short shifts. He watched his daughter come out onto the platform. She took her place between the two girls and planted her feet apart. Then, with the same decisiveness he’d seen from the moment she left the house, Selva reached for the noose and draped it over her head.

His stomach dropped as the trapdoor opened beneath him, plunging him into a void of air. No! He must have said it aloud, because the couple under the umbrella turned around: “Shh!” His neck was tingling, his knees barely held him upright.

“Do you want to leave this world?” the Guardian asked.

No! This time a silent cry. He would run to catch her legs before the rope went taut, but she would be just out of reach, her head listing forward in the choke hold of the noose.

“Possibly,” Selva said.

“What do you want to say to your—”

“Listen, Papa,” Selva said before the Guardian could finish. “The other night you asked why I’m angry.”

She was speaking in her debate voice—quick, strong, a little tremulous with effort. He knew that she had carefully prepared what she was going to say, and from his hiding place under the awning, he was listening. He had never listened so closely to anyone.

“As usual, I didn’t think of an answer fast enough. Well, here’s my answer, Papa: because you never believed the world could be better or worse than the one you gave me. And that breaks my heart.”

A rumble of approval from the crowd.

“Oh, this one’s good,” the woman under the umbrella said to the man.

That’s my girl up there, Rustin wanted to tell her. Our pride and joy. It had been a favorite phrase of his, until Pan came along and Annabelle asked him to stop using it, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself, because even Selva with the noose around her neck was exactly that. Those eyes! Their intelligence shone all the way from the gallows. And didn’t she have a point? Even here at the Suicide Spot he couldn’t imagine any life for his daughter other than the one that had always awaited her under the empire.

“The world was worse than you ever knew, Papa. Remember the exams?”

He would never forget them. Every year in May the whole empire came to a stop for three days while 14-year-old Burgher kids sat for their comprehensive exams. In the city by the river the authorities raised banners across buildings and lampposts to proclaim pride in their children and wish them luck. The rituals were ancient, unchanged since Rustin had sat for his. The night before, Annabelle had made the traditional meal of baked rabbit, asparagus, and custard. Rustin drilled Selva one last time on complex equations and imperial history. Pan touched his sister’s forehead with a sprig of rosemary, and the family held hands around the table and solemnly recited the Prayer for Wisdom and Success: “If it cannot be me, then let it not be me. But let it be me.”

The next morning, Burgher parents—oblivious to the fighting that had broken out in the capital—had lined the walkways and cheered as their children filed into schools with pencils and notebooks and tense faces, some bravely managing a smile, others rigid with fear. A few of Rustin’s colleagues were on hand in their professional capacity in case a child fainted. As Selva walked past her parents, she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Look at her,” Rustin whispered to Annabelle. “She’s going to murder it.”

“I had to place in the top 5 percent,” Selva went on from the gallows. “Not just to qualify for provincials and have a shot at the Imperial Medical College. But for you to still love me.”

Someone in the crowd loudly booed.

Selva, no! Not true!

“I didn’t look at you, because I was afraid I’d see it in your eyes. Being your daughter, I did what I had to.”

Illustration by Lauren Peters-Collaer. Sources: Vladimir Godnik / Getty; Wirestock / Getty.

As always, the results had been announced in the main square two days after the last exam, with practically the entire city in attendance. It was a gorgeous spring day, dry and fragrant, lilac and chestnut trees coming into bloom. One of the old councilors mounted a temporary stage erected in the middle of the square, next to the statue of a historic Burgher that stood on a pedestal surrounded by a gushing granite fountain, and for an hour he read from a long scroll of paper, while the children who had taken the exams lined up at the foot of the stage facing out toward the crowd. When they heard their name called, they stepped forward and shouted, “Here for city and empire!”

The names were read out in order from first rank to last. The family of Selva Rustin did not have long to wait. Out of 179 children, she was third.

“You beat your papa and your grandpa,” Rustin had said that night over the most expensive bottle of wine he owned. “What a day for the Rustins.” On their coat of arms, in the quadrant with the caduceus, next to his own initials he carved SR, welcoming his daughter into the family guild. She was set for life. And as he stood now in the shadow of the gallows, he thought: We sat around the kitchen table and sang our favorite songs. You pretended Zeus was your patient. Was that world so bad?

“The next day, the boy who sat beside me in class wasn’t there,” Selva continued. “We all knew why. He was down around 170.”

Everyone in the square had been keeping a rough count as the councilor approached the bottom of the list. Burghers with no family interest in the results were there just to see who had fallen into the bottom 10 percent—that was a bigger draw than honoring the top 5 percent, who would sit the following month for the provincial round. Even if you lost track of the count, the cutoff point became clear as soon as the shouts of “Here for city and empire!” started to come out weak and choked. A few children didn’t even answer when their names were called.

“Iver was an Excess Burgher.”

Everyone knew what future lay in store for the bottom 10 percent. They, too, were set for life. No prohibition had been announced, but they would never be allowed to join a guild. They would finish the school year and then look for work. The lucky ones would find a job in one of the markets, or learn a trade in the Warehouse District, or, with the right family connections, go to work for the city as a street sweeper or trash collector. Some of the girls were hired as servants in the homes of higher-status Burghers, though Rustin refused on principle to consider it. A few sank into the underworld of prostitution.

But the great majority of Excess Burghers would end up like the ones who drank and fought all night at the Sodden Spot, lay around the main square asleep at midday, and spent most of their foreshortened adulthood in the city prison. Rustin’s next-door neighbor thought they should be sent directly from school to compulsory work gangs. Some disappeared from the city and were swallowed up in the Yeoman hinterland. Most Burghers considered it more respectable, more in the natural order of things, to be a Yeoman than an Excess Burgher.

When Rustin was a boy, there had been no such people as Excess Burghers. Every child in the city was admitted into a guild—of course, some at lower status than others. But around the time he was studying at the Imperial Medical College, he’d heard that children who had not done well on their exams were leaving school and falling out of view. No ordinance was passed that declared the bottom 5 percent of Burgher children (later raised to 10) superfluous, but this was the beginning of a long period of economic contraction throughout the empire, and competition for a dwindling supply of guild positions became intense. That was when the practice began of parents withholding food from children who performed badly on their pre-exams as an incentive to study harder. (Rustin personally thought this was taking things too far, though he kept the opinion to himself.) The first accounts of cheating and payoffs during exam week surfaced—a blow to the belief in fairness on which the whole system of guilds depended. Excess Burghers became a fixture of imperial life, the answer to a chronic social problem, the unfortunate result of simple arithmetic.

“Do you remember what you said that night?” The tremble in Selva’s voice was thickening; she was coming to her purpose. “I told you about Iver, and you said—”

That’s just the way it has to be, Sel. She had come home from school troubled, and he’d wanted to comfort her. He hadn’t wanted poor Iver’s fate to take away from her magnificent achievement. She hadn’t replied, but a cloud had passed over her face.

“That’s just—the way—it has—to be.” Selva raised her chin, causing the length of rope above the noose to go slightly slack. She closed her eyes and shook her head and stamped her foot on the platform just as if she’d reached the end of endurance during one of their arguments that had escalated far beyond his wishes. When she opened her eyes, they pierced his chest. “Why?” she cried. “Why was that just the way it had to be? Why in the world did you ever think that was just the way it had to be?”

More approval from her audience, shouts of “Why? Why?”

“Here’s what you should have said, Papa: ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but our whole life is a stinking pile of shit, that’s how it is, we live on it, we eat it, we fuck on it, we’ll be buried in it, but I love you so let’s not talk about it anymore.’ ”

The shouting grew wild. Even the two Guardians were shouting—they had become part of Selva’s audience. Her color rose and her throat quivered inside the noose and her lips tightened in expectation of a response that he wasn’t there to give. He felt as if he were letting her down by not standing beside her on the platform to receive the full force of her indignation, to coax out the last glimmer of her brilliance. One word of his and she’d finish him off, cut him to pieces. He was witnessing one of the greatest moments of her life, as great as that morning in the main square. That’s my girl, he thought again—but also: It wasn’t just me! Everyone believed it. In the old days beggars were drawn and quartered in that square. It sounds terrible now, but four months ago Excess Burghers were normal. You’d be surprised what people can get used to.

“If you’d said that, it would have helped me. But you didn’t have the courage.” Selva dropped her chin and lowered her voice. “So I kept going. I started cramming for provincials. My dream was to reach the imperial round. Instead, we had an Emergency.”

A cheer rose, half-heartedly—they weren’t sure where she was headed.

“That was the end of exams. To be honest, it felt like the end of me. I actually, literally, didn’t know who I was. Without the next round, why get up in the morning?” She gave a hollow laugh. “Then Together came, with the six principles. Suddenly people seemed happier, they started talking louder and laughing, even with strangers. The rules of Good Development came from the empire, from on high, but Together was our own creation. I thought: Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll join a self-org committee—even Iver’s in one. I’ll be the best damn Together girl in the city.”

Someone laughed too loud. Rustin knew from the tremolo in Selva’s voice that things were going wrong.

“Except Together wasn’t about that—it was the opposite of that. ‘I am no better and neither are you’—that’s the second principle!” Selva brought her hands to her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut as if a massive headache had just come on. “So here I am. I don’t have the right thoughts, I keep thinking things I don’t want to think, they go around and around and I can’t make them stop. I can’t stop being your girl!”

The woman punched the air with her umbrella. “Oh my God, she’s great!”

The Guardians spoke to Selva as they’d spoken to the boy, telling her what it would mean to leave the world, reminding her to think of her Better Human, but none of it worked, her silence was too strong for them. She stood there in the grip of unuttered answers that would have defeated their philosophy, and her father knew that she was struggling with the decision. But before she reached it, the Guardian released the lever and the second Guardian embraced Selva. She removed the noose from her own neck and descended the ladder into a swarm of cheers with failure in her eyes.

* Lead illustration sources: Mads Perch / Getty; Westend61 / Getty; MirageC / Getty.

This excerpt was adapted from George Packer’s novel The Emergency. It appears in the December 2025 print edition.

A Post-Literate Age

2025-10-30T07:31:00-04:00

A few days ago, my imagination converged in a disturbing way with Donald Trump’s. After the president posted an AI-generated video of himself piloting a fighter plane and releasing a flood of excrement onto thousands of demonstrators below, I heard from several people who had read my new novel, The Emergency, which will be published next month. They pointed out the resemblance of the video to a scene, near the novel’s end, in which human feces become a primitive weapon of civil war. Somewhere down in the dark, well below conscious thought, I had managed to intuit just how far the demonic urge in American politics to violate every taboo might go. Or perhaps the White House had gotten hold of an Advance Reader’s Copy.

The uncanny meld between my mind and Trump’s was a little sickening. It was as if this master conjurer had pulled a trick on me, saying: I’ll always beat you. I can always go lower. Back in the early ’60s—a time we now think of as relatively sane—Philip Roth observed: “You can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.” But I wasn’t trying to compete with reality. I didn’t write a novel to mirror or predict the course of American politics—if anything, the opposite. I wanted to get away from reality.

For a quarter century, I’ve been a journalist, and to be honest, I had begun to lose faith in my trade. The year 2021 marked a turning point in the history of facts: from poor health to near death. The insurrection of January 6 happened before our eyes and produced about three news cycles of almost universal horror before that consensus began to succumb to the assault of partisan revisions and elisions, lies, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories that dominate our media and pollute our minds. Sophisticates argue that there’s never been any agreement about reality, that news in the age of Walter Cronkite was simply the dominant “narrative” put forth by the three major television networks and establishment papers. It’s true that important facts have always been contested—but in August 1974, when the “smoking gun” tape revealed Richard Nixon’s central role in the Watergate cover-up, Republican politicians and conservative editorialists didn’t claim that the tape was a fake or the product of an opposition conspiracy. Instead, they told Nixon to resign. That elusive thing called reality brought down a president.

Today, with millions of social-media accounts and thousands of podcasts and channels to choose from, more than a third of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and a quarter believe that the pro-Trump marauders of January 6 were victims of an FBI trap. Many more Americans don’t seem to care much about the truth of what happened that day, and the president who inspired the mob to invade the Capitol is back in power.

The Trump era poses numerous threats to the free press: constant abuse, denial of access, intimidation by regulatory or legal means, criminal investigation. But the greatest threat, aided by this forever war on reality, is irrelevance. “Legacy media” has become an insult, but its fall from authority is an epistemic catastrophe. Most of the public has no idea how much effort and money newsgathering requires, how many rounds of reporting, editing, and fact-checking a story goes through before it reaches the public and drowns in the new media “ecosystem.” Serious journalism in America today is a little like the independent English-language papers in certain authoritarian countries that are allowed to go on publishing because they’re read by only a handful of elites and have no effect on the broader society. It’s not just that changing readers’ minds on important questions by presenting them with arguments and evidence has come to seem quixotic. Journalism can’t even establish what’s true, let alone what people should think about what’s true.

[Nancy A. Youssef: The last days of the Pentagon press corps]

Why do journalists keep at it? In most cases, not because they imagine that their reporting will strike a blow for justice or hold the powerful to account (the powerful are pretty much unbound), but because they still believe that facts matter; because it’s important to set down what’s going on in the world, for posterity if not the present; because they love the craft; because it’s what they do. But any honest journalist knows that this persistence has more in common with Camus than Cronkite. It’s a Sisyphean act of faith.

So in late 2021 or early 2022, around the time truth disappeared, I started to think about writing a novel.

Among the alternatives to journalism, fiction was not an obvious choice. I’d published two novels in the 1990s and, as the philosopher David Hume said of one of his books, they “fell dead-born from the press.” Trying again a quarter-century older seemed like bad odds. For one thing, did anyone still read fiction? I mean literary fiction, the kind that aspires to complex characters, subtle themes, and careful attention to prose style. Those novels are gone from the best-seller lists—it’s all sexy dragons now. The novel ceased long ago to occupy the cultural center, giving way first to movies, then TV series, video games, social-media posts, and AI content. The novelist as voice of a generation no longer exists. Literary fiction has become more like classical music—the eccentric taste of a diminishing set of the devoted. A book group that reads classic novels (I’ve been in one since the start of the Trump era) has the air of a circle of medieval monks solemnly bent over illuminated manuscripts, studying and preserving them through dark times until some future century rediscovers the literature of the past.

American fiction fell victim to the clamor of events. Starting around the 9/11 attacks, we began to live in a world of shocks, each one of them big enough to pull you out of the immersive state that writing or reading a novel requires. One benefit of this turn to the outer world of facts was a brief golden age of nonfiction books and articles—writing that aspired to the literary quality of the best fiction while informing readers about politics and war and poverty. People who once regularly read novels and stories began to abandon them for book-length journalism, memoirs, biographies, magazines, newspapers, and websites. Imagination began to seem a pallid substitute for reality. The meaning of a story shrank if it didn’t really happen.

This intense interest in the news of the world waned with the construction of the Tower of Babel that is the smartphone. People acquired the ability to absorb each shock of reality, each new mental stimulus, every second, anywhere. When, in 2018, Jonathan Franzen remarked, “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” he was criticized for being a highbrow snob, but he was onto something—and it’s true of reading fiction as well. You can flit back and forth between a nonfiction book and social media (though you’ll lose a lot), but the willing suspension of disbelief does not survive frequent interruption. Works of the imagination need unbroken attention. Mine has gotten worse; don’t tell me yours hasn’t.

[From the January/February 2024 Issue: Is journalism ready?]

By now we’ve moved beyond a post-literature culture into what some are calling a post-literate age, taking us back several thousand years to communication by images and symbols. Over the past two decades, the number of Americans who read for pleasure on a daily basis has dropped from 28 percent to 16 percent, and the trend among children and teenagers is even worse. In 2023 almost half of Americans didn’t finish a single book. Surveys show that a big loser is fiction. Perhaps this plague of illiteracy has played a role in the disappearance of truth and, with it, liberal democracy.

So why write a novel now? In my case, because it’s the literary form I know best and love most. I wanted to be a novelist from around the age of 14. Back in high-school English class in the late ’70s, nonfiction was never assigned—it wasn’t considered literature. I never heard of Hiroshima or The Fire Next Time; as far as I knew, the only way to be a prose writer was to be a novelist. This misguided notion kept me pounding away at failure until well into my 30s, when I finally accepted that fiction was not my strong suit.

I gave it up for journalism, and soon discovered that nonfiction could offer many of fiction’s narrative pleasures—scenes, characters, intricate structures, suspense, revelation. Dickens proved at least as useful to my job as the Human Rights Watch annual report. While writing a magazine article, and especially while writing a book, in my free time I tried to read only novels. I wanted to rid my head of the deadening language of politics and foreign policy in which I was immersed, and replace it with the sound of fiction. For a couple of my nonfiction books I even tried to base the voice and structure on a specific novel. But faith in a project always came from the solid material of interviews, research, experience—facts. Until it no longer did.

I didn’t turn to fiction for a complete escape from reality. I never cared for sci-fi, fantasy, or magical realism. Nor am I capable of producing a novel with finely wrought observations of daily life. Writing doesn’t pour out of me in an overflow of imagination, which is why those earlier efforts at fiction were not triumphs. Aside from sheer narcissism (always there, shoving me along), the main impulse that makes me sit down to write is political. A quarter century of journalism taught me that the sentences come out better when I feel strongly about the human rights and wrongs. The American situation is overwhelming, and I couldn’t force myself to push it out of my mind long enough to write a novel about something else entirely. But a roman à clef with stand-ins for Gavin Newsom and Steve Bannon was even less attractive than updating The Lord of the Rings for the digital age. I was dead tired of Trump’s name; I felt no burning desire to fictionalize gerrymandering or pageviews; the words polarization and meme made my brain go numb.

[Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner: Why a free press matters]

I wanted to get as far as possible from these exhausted particulars in order to explore their deeper reality. I wanted to evoke the feeling of being alive right now: the fragility of truth, the ideological pressures, the hatred among groups, the fractures within families, the radical idea that humanity itself might be ending. And I wanted to see every side of this drama. The Emergency is a political novel: A long-established society undergoes a collapse and upheaval in which extreme ideas take hold, dividing generations and classes and leading to violence. But I wrote it as a fable, set in an unnamed place and time, the more remote and weird, the better. You won’t encounter his name anywhere—it’s inconceivable.

Now that the novel is finished, there’s no barrier left between me and the facts. This excursion into fiction has begun to restore my appetite for them. Building a world that doesn’t exist and exploring it for a couple of years made the one in which I actually live more alive and urgent than the familiar facts had made it seem. And Trump is still there. His lower mind just erupted in imagery that seems to have sprung from my own darkest intimation. Fiction does that, if we let it, if we keep it. You wake up from a long and vivid dream to find that the world is clearer, closer.

Why the ‘No Kings’ Protest Moved Me

2025-10-20T15:27:00-04:00

Radicalized By Basic Decency read the sign of a middle-aged man in a ball cap and fleece jacket. Among the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people lining the main street of a small town in upstate New York on a perfect fall Saturday afternoon, this man and his words stuck with me. He was the sort of mild, ordinary-looking person you’d never notice in a crowd if not for his sign. And that was true of almost everyone. These were not the America-hating, Hamas-loving, paid street fighters that Republican leaders had dreamed up in the days before the countrywide “No Kings” rallies. Amid hundreds of American flags, I saw one Palestinian and several Ukrainian. The people were mostly over 40, many much older, some using walkers and wheelchairs, alongside parents with young children, like the woman with two small girls I saw standing slightly outside the crowd holding up a sign: So Bad Even the Introverts Are Here.

The tone of the protest was good-natured indignation, as if something these people cherished had been taken from them and defiled: This Is the Government the Founders Warned Us About; Make Orwell Fiction Again; Longtime Republican, First Time Protester; He doesn’t even own a dog; I ❤️ USA. So many signs referred to the patriotic events of 250 years ago that you might have thought you were at a Tea Party rally. There wasn’t a hint of unruliness, let alone violence. Three town cops looked on with nothing to do. (Down in New York City, 100,000 people marched without a single arrest.) At sunset in a nearby park, after listening to a gray-bearded man read out an updated Gettysburg Address beside a giant inflatable Donald Trump, the crowd began to leave. “Thanks, guys,” a woman called to the cops, who waved and wished her a safe trip home. By nightfall, the ruling party had changed its line, while keeping a straight face, to mocking irrelevant old white people.

[From the November 2025 issue: I don’t want to stop believing in America’s decency]

I don’t know if No Kings will transform from an intermittent day of protest into a political movement. But if anything can rouse the stupefied mainstream in time to stop the collapse of everything good about America, it’s a spectacle like this: dignified, irreverent, driven by old-fashioned love of country. No Kings has no celebrated leaders. It offers no political platform or strategy, but instead a reminder, an example, and a rebuke. It presents a vision—perhaps a mirage—of what once was and might still be. Hope in a dark time is enough to make you want to cry, and I found myself on the verge of tears. There was something moving about the modesty of the idea, and the quiet depth of feeling—anger, longing.

My wife and I were in town to visit our college freshman during Family Weekend. At the rally, he was sad to see relatively few people of his generation. “No one my age has any hope,” he said. I stifled a parental urge to argue him out of hopelessness—for he was right. To be young in America is to come of age with the old gods of democracy, equality, and upward mobility dead or discredited. At school and in the culture, his generation learned that the famous words of 250 years ago no longer mean anything and probably never did. The older generations, the “OK Boomer”s and Gen X ironists, took everything for themselves and left nothing for the young. Why fight for your country if all it stands for is power and greed?

[View: More ‘No Kings’ protests across the U.S.]

The dominating public figure of our son’s young life is counting on his generation’s cynicism. Trump has made a bet that Americans no longer think of their country in moral terms at all—that the words of the Declaration of Independence don’t stir them, that the specter of a king doesn’t appall them, that they expect their leaders to be corrupt and cruel. The day’s rallies were such unimpeachable displays of patriotism that Trump couldn’t possibly outdo them in honor and dignity, so he had to go the other way—as far down as his imagination could take him. That night, he released an AI-generated video of himself, flying a plane called the King Trump, dropping an immense load of shit on a crowd of protesters in a city street, covering his fellow Americans in his filth.

Even for this lowest of all presidents, the image was shocking—yet it makes perfect sense. This has always been and always will be Trump’s answer to basic decency. The question is whether the rest of us still care enough about our country to be radicalized.

The Depth of MAGA’s Moral Collapse

2025-10-17T14:06:00-04:00

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When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.

And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.

[Jonathan Chait: Why is Vance defending that racist group chat?]

Having been given permission from the country’s most powerful person, the Young Republicans received forgiveness from its second-most-powerful. Vice President J. D. Vance refused to condemn their words, explaining: “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—telling a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.” But the authors of the texts have already grown up—they’re men in their 20s and 30s, climbing the rungs of Republican Party ladders in Kansas, Arizona, Vermont, and New York, firm in the belief that the viler their language, the higher they’ll go. One is already an officeholder.

For Vance, ethical judgment has become a pure matter of partisanship, to the point of overcoming his most personal bonds. When a DOGE member was revealed to have posted “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance—married to an Indian American—scoffed at the ensuing outrage and demanded that the offender be rehired. But when private citizens anywhere said something ugly about Charlie Kirk, the vice president went after their livelihood. Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way and the fall into nihilism is swift.

The abandonment of a universal morality isn’t just philosophically wrong—it’s politically stupid. Any successful opposition to Trump has to begin with a lucid understanding of what’s at stake: not just past and present harms done to the marginalized, but everything that Americans once believed they cared about, including the values that were co-opted by the right before MAGA abandoned them—respect for law and custom, patriotism, family ties, common decency. To some liberals and progressives these values came to sound old-fashioned, corny, even dangerous. But anyone frightened by the country’s downward spiral has to believe that our society still shares them, and can still respond to them if someone makes the appeal.

[David A. Graham: It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it]

If the Young Republicans’ texts are seen merely as attacks on the groups they name, then they become the problem of Black and gay people, Jews, and women. But the texts represent a larger atrocity, one that has befallen all of America. Once you base moral judgments on group identity and political convenience, it becomes possible for people on the left to be anti-racist and anti-Semitic, and for people on the right to embrace Muslim haters in Israel and Jew haters in Germany. If moral values aren’t simple and universal—if they require a facility with the language of graduate seminars and single-issue activism—they won’t move the immobilized, alienated, numb Americans who still haven’t given up on their country’s promise. The dehumanization of any group dehumanizes everyone. There will never be an end to learning this lesson.

I Don’t Want to Stop Believing in America’s Decency

2025-10-14T05:50:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.

To be a patriot in Donald Trump’s America is like sitting through a loved one’s trial for some gruesome crime. Day after day your shame deepens as the horrifying testimony piles up, until you wonder how you can still care about this person. Shouldn’t you just accept that your beloved is beyond redemption? And yet you keep showing up, exchanging smiles and waves, hoping for some mitigating evidence to emerge—trying to believe in your country’s essential decency.

Patriotism is as various and complex as the feeling of attachment to one’s own family. It can be unconditional and unquestioning, or else move—even die—with the fluctuations in a nation’s moral character. It can flow from a hearth, a grave, a landscape, a bloodline, a shared history, an ethnic or religious identity, a community of like-minded people, a set of ideas. During his travels through the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville saw American patriotism as different from that of tradition-bound, hierarchical Europe, where an “instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling” connects “the affections of man with his birthplace.” In the young republic, Tocqueville found “a patriotism of reflection”—less a passion than a rational civic pursuit: “It is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen.”

For Tocqueville, this democratic patriotism depends on a belief in equality, inalienable rights, and the consent of the governed—in effect, on the beliefs and actions found in the Declaration of Independence. But that universal creed can’t exist solely in abstract nouns. To mean anything—to survive at all—it requires the participation of the governed as citizens. The purpose of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was to remind Americans that self-government would not endure without the efforts of patriots on its behalf. When ancestry defines national identity, patriotism requires nothing other than allegiance. But the blood of the Union dead and the soil of the cemetery that Lincoln had come to dedicate bore a larger meaning: the liberty and equality of all human beings. Patriotism was the devotion of Americans to these principles, and to preserving them through self-government.

Following the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Stephen A. Douglas tried to limit the truth that “all men are created equal” to one lineage—the original British colonists and their descendants. His Americanism excluded not just the enslaved but the foreign-born. During the 1858 U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois, Lincoln mocked Douglas for defacing the Declaration and excluding half the country’s citizens—immigrants from other lands, whose connection to the United States came not through a bloodline but through the founding itself: “They have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are,” Lincoln said. “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

The words of the Declaration shaped Lincoln’s patriotism and justified his politics. He called Thomas Jefferson “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” That truth gave Lincoln the basis for ending slavery and winning the Civil War.

The argument about whether patriotism comes from democratic idealism or American heritage has flared up ever since the founding. The argument doesn’t always fall neatly along the lines of left and right. Until the mid-20th century, much of the Democratic Party was defined by a combination of economic populism and white supremacy. The most important conservative figure of the past century, Ronald Reagan, swore by the Founders’ civic religion.

Almost 250 years after the Declaration, we’re in the midst of another fight over the meaning of being American. This one is particularly dispiriting, because neither side seems capable of mustering a patriotism based in active citizenship. Gallup regularly asks Americans how proud they are of their country. For the past quarter century Republicans have answered “extremely” or “very” proud at a fairly consistent rate of about 90 percent. In the same period Democrats have slipped from the mid-80s to the mid-30s, with the percentages generally rising during Democratic presidencies and falling under Republicans, most dramatically this year with the return of Trump. In June the number was 36 percent for Democrats and 92 percent for Republicans—the largest partisan gap since Gallup began asking the question, in 2001. Republicans remain highly patriotic while their party hollows out America’s democratic institutions and their leader flirts with kingship, as if their love of country has nothing to do with its founding principles. Democrats have a hard time feeling proud of their country unless one of their own is in office, pursuing their favored policies, as if their patriotism goes no deeper than their politics.

Both types of patriotism described by Tocqueville have led Americans into dead ends. In the age of Trump the instinctive kind accepts authoritarianism, while reflective patriotism creates cynicism, alienation, and civic passivity. Neither produces the citizens that Lincoln, Walt Whitman, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., and other American democrats believed were essential to preserving a free country.

American patriotism is a volatile substance, never able to settle into a quiet, modest love of country. It swings wildly between “All are welcome” and “Beware of dog.” Drain from it the universal principles of equality, freedom, and self-government, and it turns into a snarl. The Republican Party has abandoned Reagan’s city on a hill for the blood-and-soil nationalism of Europe’s old monarchies and new dictatorships—Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary. At a rally in Madison Square Garden just before last year’s election, Trump’s chief ideologue, Stephen Miller, expressed an idea in seven words that he might have adapted from the German Ausländer raus! (“Foreigners out!”): “America is for Americans and Americans only!” The meaning of for is unclear, but the important word in the sentence is only.

[Read: Are you a ‘Heritage American’?]

Trump’s America is defined by those who belong and those who don’t. Its essential act is exclusion. Back in power, Trump is showing that mere citizenship isn’t enough. The president and his circle determine who the real Americans are, and if they don’t like your origins or your views, they’ll try to take away your constitutional birthright and deport you. Vice President J. D. Vance has become the administration’s chief spokesman for a version of American identity similar to the one that Stephen Douglas championed and Lincoln derided. During a July speech for the conservative Claremont Institute, Vance set out to “redefine the meaning of American citizenship” as stingily as possible. To Vance, the founding creed should be no basis for Americanness. “Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence” fills the vice president with horror, because it would include those he wants to leave out, and exclude those he wants to leave in. The billions of people around the world who believe in democracy would suddenly have a right to come here. And the 100 percent Americans—the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and extremist white nationalists—would be stigmatized, even if their ancestors fought in the Civil War.

As it happens, the founding creed doesn’t require everyone on the planet who believes in the equality of all human beings to be put on a plane and brought here as candidates for citizenship. But leaving Vance’s illogic aside, his purpose is to remove democracy from our national identity and open the way to the authoritarianism that comes with blood-and-soil nationalism. He defines American identity by where your ancestors lie moldering in their grave—an idea that he first presented in 2024, at the Republican National Convention, in a paean to the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where five generations of Vances are buried.

Because his wife’s parents come from India, Vance is obliged to allow a carve-out for certain immigrants—but it’s conditioned on a gratitude test. According to Vance, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, failed the test when, after years of apparently ignoring Independence Day, he released this statement on July 4: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” Vance convicted this anodyne cliché of rank ingratitude. A Ugandan immigrant “dares to insult” the country that gave his family a safe home “on its most sacred day? Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Vance is proposing a hierarchy of citizenship. If you trace your ancestry back to Shiloh or Yorktown, you can ignore the Constitution, embrace the Justice Department as the president’s police, pal around with white nationalists, and still call yourself a patriot. But if you just got here, you’d better be grateful and keep to yourself any critical thoughts about America’s failure to live up to its own ideals. Patriotism is the right to dress in red, white, and blue and wave the flag on July 4 while defiling its creed.

This shrunken, desiccated corpse of patriotism has its own ancestry. It comes to life when large numbers of aspiring Americans arrive on our shores, and it almost always brings an odor of racial or religious bigotry. In the 1850s, the nativist and anti-Catholic American Party, also called the Know Nothings, had a brief career in opposition to German, French, and Irish immigration. The wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries finally crashed against legal restrictions from Congress and the extralegal actions of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Then, following the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the system of national quotas and bans created in 1924, people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America came here in such numbers that, today, immigrants make up a seventh of the U.S. population, about the same as the historical high in 1890. One result is MAGA.

Ahead of Flag Day in June, Representative Chris Deluzio, a Navy veteran and two-term Democrat from a competitive district in western Pennsylvania, handed out American flags to colleagues and announced the creation of the Democratic Veterans Caucus. He had already helped form a group of anti-corporate House Democrats calling themselves the “New Economic Patriots.” “It ties into our goal of aggressively pushing back every chance we can when someone in the MAGA movement, up to and including Donald Trump, acts as though they have a monopoly on loving this country,” Deluzio told me. “I will take that fight as often as we can.” He added, “We need more of that in our party. I think there is a huge opportunity to contrast the selfishness, the cravenness of the MAGA movement and its disconnect from the true love of country.”

The nationalist right’s rejection of the creedal definition of Americanness leaves an opening for Democrats to reclaim patriotism as a core identity. But for decades now, going back to the Vietnam War, many liberal and left-wing Americans have been skeptical of, even hostile to, patriotic symbols and emotions. This aversion has come at a high political cost.

I grew up during the ’60s and ’70s in a household that never raised an American flag—not out of any anti-American feeling, but because it would have sent the wrong message. It would have associated us with the jingoistic party of Nixon and Reagan. It would have meant “America—love it or leave it,” regardless of war and racism. There’s no denying that our reluctance also reflected social snobbery. Waving a flag was something that working- and lower-middle-class Americans did, like repairing their own cars.

The college-educated professionals who began to take over the Democratic Party in the 1970s prided themselves on having a sophisticated grasp of American history. They recoiled from the Republicans’ crude, coercive patriotism, which demanded a kind of national idolatry—a celebration of America that was blind to slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War. In Republican politics, love of country became a negative force, almost the same thing as hatred of compatriots in the opposition. National symbols such as the flag, the anthem, and the Pledge of Allegiance turned into partisan weapons. In 1988, the performance of patriotism constituted most of George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign and might have cost Michael Dukakis the election.

“The Republicans learned to own the flag and own the symbols,” the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, who has written numerous books on the American left, told me. At the same time, an influential strain of thought from the ’60s anti-war movement became left-wing orthodoxy: the idea of the U.S. as an almost uniquely awful nation, the source of most of humanity’s ills—white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, militarism, settler colonialism, environmental destruction. Howard Zinn’s immensely popular A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, taught several generations of young Americans on the left to see patriotism as an embrace of something evil.

“I wouldn’t say the New Left took over the Democratic Party,” Kazin said, “but some of the ideas did percolate, and the Trump people are right that the universities moved to the left.” The American Studies Association—the principal academic organization devoted to understanding American history and identity—came under the control of a faction so hostile to its own subject matter that in 1998 the organization’s president suggested removing American from the name. In 2017, the organization’s national council explained that “American studies scholarship teaches us that rubrics of ‘law and order’, patriotism, and ‘traditional values’ are discourses of retrenchment. We must illuminate the ways their use criminalizes and stigmatizes struggles for empowerment, self-determination, and dignity.” And in 2019, its executive committee announced: “We strive to model forms of solidarity, sustainability, and social justice that foster alternative visions and practices to supplant the rotting empire bent on destruction.”

In the past decade, profound pessimism about the American experiment has grown beyond the niche viewpoint of American-studies professors. With the universities came important sectors of the public. The popularization of academic ideology peaked in 2019, when The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project” declared that U.S. history began with slavery. The notion immediately spread through schools, universities, workplaces. According to the project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the country’s founding principles—the ideas of Jefferson and Lincoln—were specious.

For very different reasons, in recent years the progressive left and the nationalist right have reached the same conclusion: The “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” is a mirage, a trap, a lie. It doesn’t define us as Americans.

Few politicians say this out loud, or even articulate it to themselves. “Maybe some part of our coalition has become less comfortable with outward displays of love of country,” Deluzio said—but lawn flags are uncontroversial in western Pennsylvania. Most Republicans still think that the flag has something to do with democracy. Most Democrats would never release a social-media post on Independence Day like this one from Cori Bush in 2021, when she was representing Missouri’s First Congressional District: “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.” But J. D. Vance and Cori Bush might simply be ahead of their parties, speaking for younger, more skeptical Americans.

For the right, now in power, the abandonment of the American idea is license to build an authoritarian regime. The left, having spent decades proving that the idea is a sham, can hardly protest its dismantling.

In 1998, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country: “Each new generation of students ought to think of American leftism as having a long and glorious history” and to see “the struggle for social justice as central to their country’s moral identity.” He was referring to the kinds of American reformers who embraced patriotism while urging their country to live up to its creed: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the feminist Susan B. Anthony, the poet Walt Whitman, the socialist Eugene V. Debs, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and finally Martin Luther King. Theirs is the democratic patriotism that Tocqueville saw in America almost 200 years ago, rooted in the revolutionary promise of the Founders and the active work of self-governing citizens to realize it. Rorty urged leftists of his time to remember the “civic religion” of their predecessors, identify with their country, and work toward the fulfillment of its moral vision.

Nearly three decades later, what are the grounds for patriotism? The institutions created at the founding no longer work well. Our elected leaders have sunk to abysmal depths of selfishness, corruption, and cowardice. The words of the Declaration bring tears to your eyes and the taste of ashes to your mouth. “It’s not easy to defend the American ideals, because there’s so much cynicism about how they’ve been used and politicized,” Kazin said. “Young people are much less enamored of the ideals as they understand them, much less willing to be proud of the country. They’ve been tainted by fierce ideological conflict.”

Liberals—the last believers in institutions and incremental reform—cry “Democracy, democracy, democracy!” But when the Supreme Court puts the president above the law, the president uses his office for shakedowns, the White House defenestrates speakers of inconvenient facts, the State Department flirts with dictators while shutting the door on dissidents and refugees, Justice Department lawyers lie to the courts, Congress votes liars onto the bench and pours money into a masked secret police force, and most Americans don’t seem to notice or care, then what good is democracy? The country and its government belong to us, so the most honest response is self-disgust.

But I don’t want to stop believing in my country’s essential decency. I don’t want to conflate America with one president, one party, or both parties. I want to feel, as Whitman did, that America and democracy are inextricable; and, as Dewey did, that democracy makes us agents who can always act to better our country and affirm our self-respect.

Tocqueville wrote: “In the United States it is believed, and with truth, that patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance.” In a democracy, that observance takes the form of participation in public life. Harder still, it requires a vision of that life with everyone in it. We cannot wish away the other party, the other states, the other faiths, the newest arrivals, the oldest tribes. In his Claremont speech, Vance said one true thing: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common.” A nation—especially this one, with its short memory and incomprehensible diversity—can’t cohere simply as a geographic boundary and a set of laws. It needs a common language and culture—a way of life.

The intersectional multiculturalists of the left think that there is no common American culture, that the notion itself is a form of oppression—there’s only a collection of groups, dominant or subordinate. Vance and the nationalists of the right think that American culture comes from the dirt and the past, “a distinctive place and a distinctive people”—by which they mean a race and a faith that came here long ago, bringing a way of life to which all others must adapt. Both of these views are wrong—unpatriotically wrong.

American culture is as distinct as that of any other nation, but it’s the only one that comes from an idea. That idea is the equality of all human beings; their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the form of self-government that secures their rights, including the right to change their government if it becomes tyrannical. This idea produced a mass culture famous for loud voices, informal address, innocence and ignorance, generosity and violence, bluntness and cluelessness—a culture of individualists who refuse to accept that anyone is their better, any station fixed for life, any possibility closed to them. It is the easiest culture in the world to join, and if the first generation can’t then the second will. It absorbs, changes, and is changed by each new one, blatant and accessible enough to provide a lingua franca in which they can all understand and be understood. It has no elaborate rules or ancient secret codes. It flattens and simplifies other cultures into music, clothing, food, and words whose vulgarity appalls and seduces the rest of the world. It is stronger than any religious orthodoxy or class rank. What Americans have in common is a way of life made by their creed.

If you still believe this creed matters—if the idea and the culture and institutions that it created still keep you attached to this country—you’re holding on in a hard wind. Around the globe, autocracy is on the march and democracy’s reputation is in decline as its leading light extinguishes itself. In America, most of your fellow citizens in both parties think democracy has stopped working on their behalf. You have to make the case that all the promised shortcuts to greatness are roads to hell—that there is no path toward a more decent life except through the common effort of free and equal citizens. And you have to keep believing it in the face of their utter folly. The only way to be a patriot is to work together with those fools, your fellow Americans, to stop this growing tyranny so that we have a chance to redeem ourselves.

This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “America Needs Patriotism.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

America’s Zombie Democracy

2025-09-24T12:33:00-04:00

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We are living in an authoritarian state.

It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing. Yet it’s true.

We have in our heads specific images of authoritarianism that come from the 20th century: uniformed men goose-stepping in jackboots, masses of people chanting party slogans, streets lined with giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements, interrogations under naked light bulbs, executions by firing squad. Similar things still happen—in China, North Korea, Iran. But I’d be surprised if this essay got me hauled off to prison in America. Authoritarianism in the 21st century looks different, because it is different. Political scientists have tried to find a new term for it: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism. In countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and India, democracies aren’t overthrown, nor do they collapse all at once. Instead, they erode. Opposition parties, the judiciary, the press, and civil-society groups aren’t destroyed, but over time they lose their life, staggering on like zombie institutions, giving the impression that democracy is still alive.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal—until it doesn't]

The blurred line between democracy and autocracy is an important feature of modern authoritarianism. How do we know when we’ve crossed it? These sorts of regimes have constitutions, but the teeth are missing. Elections take place, but they’re no longer truly fair or free—the party in power controls the electoral machinery, and if the results aren’t desirable, they’ll be challenged and likely overturned. To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. Independent government officers—prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers—are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise, and their opinions, cloaked in neutral-sounding legal terms, predictably give the leader what he wants, endorsing his most illiberal policies and immunizing him from accountability. The rule of law amounts to favors for friends and persecution for enemies. The separation of powers turns out to be a paper-thin gentleman’s agreement. There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.

Does an ideology drive these regimes? Would they sacrifice everything for the survival of some almighty ism? Doubtful. Instead of ideologies, they have slogans without much content. Fascism, like communism, was a serious ideology—one that mobilized populations in some of the most advanced countries of the 20th century to throw away their freedoms, go hungry and work themselves to the bone, give their lives in struggle and war. Fascism was serious enough to produce a mountain of corpses.

Today’s authoritarianism doesn’t move people to heroic feats on behalf of the Fatherland. The leader and his cronies, in and out of government, use their positions to hold on to power and enrich themselves. Corruption becomes so routine that it’s expected; the public grows desensitized, and violations of ethical norms that would have caused outrage in any other time go barely noticed. The regime has no utopian visions of a classless or hierarchical society in a purified state. It doesn’t thrive on war. In fact, it asks very little of the people. At important political moments it mobilizes its core supporters with frenzies of hatred, but its overriding goal is to render most citizens passive. If the leader’s speech gets boring, you can even leave early (no one left Nuremberg early). Twenty-first-century authoritarianism keeps the public content with abundant calories and dazzling entertainment. Its dominant emotions aren’t euphoria and rage, but indifference and cynicism. Because most people still expect to have certain rights respected, blatant totalitarian mechanisms of repression are avoided. The most effective tools of control are distraction, confusion, and division.

These regimes thrive on polarizing the electorate into us and them. Us is defined as the “real” people—often working-class, rural, less educated—who think of themselves as the traditional backbone of the country and the victims of rapid economic and social change: globalization, immigration, technology, new ideas about race and gender identity. Them are the elites who benefit from these changes, who have no loyalty to the country and its traditions, along with the aliens and minorities whom the elites use to undermine the national way of life. The leader speaks directly for the people and embodies their will against the people’s enemies. As defender of the nation, he claims the right to override any obstacles, legal or otherwise. Whatever he does is the rule of law.

Over time, society is hollowed out. Civic organizations that engage in public affairs hesitate to get too political for fear of drawing unwanted attention. Universities, churches, NGOs, and law firms mute themselves to stay in the good graces of the state, which has tremendous financial and regulatory power over them. The press isn’t silenced, but it is intimidated by demagogic rhetoric, investigations, and lawsuits, so that journalists are constantly asking themselves what the negative consequences of a particular story or opinion will be. Over time, the major media fall under the control of the leader’s friends, leaving a few independent outlets to struggle on in pursuit of the truth.

Authoritarian regimes and their allies flood the internet and social media with such a tide of falsehoods, so much uncertainty about what is true, so much distrust in traditional sources of information, that the public throws up its hands and checks out. While partisans on both sides use incendiary language in the endless battle for algorithmic attention, normal people who aren’t particularly engaged or informed grow numb and exhausted. And this social context allows authoritarians to exert control without resorting to terror. Unable to know the truth, we risk losing our liberty. “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt said near the end of her life. “And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

These are the features of the modern authoritarian state. Every one of them exists today in this country. Checks on President Donald Trump’s power, whether in the framework of law and constitutional government or in the broader society, have grown so weak that he can do pretty much what he wants. He sends masked police to pick people off the streets without probable cause for arrest, disappear them into secret prisons, and ship them off to random countries. He fires experienced, patriotic civil servants and replaces them with unqualified toadies. He takes open bribes from foreign countries and American business interests in the form of a luxury jet or a meme coin. He tells media companies to stop criticizing him, or else—and many of them do.

Some of these acts have been temporarily blocked by lower-court judges, but in case after case the Supreme Court has made itself the firewall against presidential accountability, while the Republican-led Congress embraces its own impotence. It sometimes seems as if the only check on Trump’s power is his own attention span.

[Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism]

A small incident can reveal a larger truth about a country’s real condition. Last week I was in Ohio to give a talk, and at dinner a professor mentioned a recent letter from the Department of Education announcing that federal work-study funds will no longer cover nonpartisan civic jobs, such as voter registration, because they are “political activity.” The government rationalized the ban by stating that work-study jobs should provide “real-world work experience related to a student’s course of study whenever possible.” But as the professor put it to me: “Nonpartisan voter engagement is ‘real-world work experience related to the course of study’ of someone majoring in political science—or anyone studying to be an active citizen in a free society.” The Trump administration isn’t just withholding federal money to blackmail institutions of higher education into suppressing ideas and policies it doesn’t like. It also wants to discourage any civic activism it doesn’t control.

The next morning, a local librarian told me of a disturbing change at work. The town library was generally a noisy place, but in the days following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, people had suddenly begun speaking in whispers. Across the country, Republican elected officials and online enforcers were creating blacklists of speech criminals. Vice President J. D. Vance suggested that the First Amendment should be suspended for academic wrong-thinkers. Trump threatened journalists and comedians for insufficiently respecting Kirk and him. A palpable chill set in, and even the patrons of a small-town Ohio library worried about being overheard.

This mental atmosphere reveals as much as anything happening in Washington. You can feel the onset of authoritarianism in your central nervous system: shock, disbelief, fear, paralysis. Familiar norms and rules disintegrate every day, but the ultimate consequences remain unclear, and Americans don’t know how to assess the danger. We haven’t lived under authoritarianism. We haven’t experienced this level of sustained polarization and vitriol since the run-up to the Civil War. During the McCarthy era, careers and lives were ruined, but the White House didn’t lead the pursuing hounds.

Yet the Founding Fathers warned over and over about the arrival of an authoritarian demagogue. They wrote a Constitution that they thought would be the best defense against one. In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln said that the republic would never be overthrown from abroad: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” How did it come to this? How have we let it come to this? Because it’s not just being done to us. We are doing it to ourselves.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who came here in the 1830s to study this new form of government, wrote that the key to maintaining democracy in America, beyond the country’s physical advantages and wealth, beyond the wisdom of its Constitution and laws, was the “mores” of its people: their customs and ideas; their choices; their active participation in civic life; their emotional capacity for restraint, responsibility, and tolerance—what Tocqueville called their “habits of the heart.” These habits have to be acquired and practiced, and they’re just as easily lost as learned. In many ways democracy is not a natural form of government. Throughout human history it’s been the exception. Most societies have been ruled, have allowed themselves to be ruled, by a single class, faction, or person. Self-government by the whole people is counterintuitive, just like freedom of speech for repellent ideas, and it’s hard. Walter Lippmann once wrote: “Men will do almost anything but govern themselves. They don’t want the responsibility.”

Today, in public life, and especially in the hellscape of social media, our habits of the heart tend to be unrestrained, intolerant, contemptuous. With the help of Big Tech’s addictive algorithms, we’ve lost the art of self-government—the ability to think and judge; the skills of dialogue, argument, and compromise; the belief in basic liberal values. Five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, I helped write a rather anodyne statement in defense of open inquiry, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, and intellectuals. Without using the phrase, it criticized cancel culture. Almost immediately upon its publication in Harper’s, the statement became the “notorious” Harper’s Letter—the object of furious condemnation by journalists and academics as the pearl-clutching of elites and an excuse for bigotry. This torrent of abuse came from the left, which no longer believed in open inquiry. Those on the right raged against left-wing puritans and declared themselves militants for free speech, even—especially—hatred and lies.

Since Trump’s return to office, and with Kirk’s murder, the roles have completely reversed. The left, which not long ago perfected mob-sponsored silencing, is (rightly) outraged at the Trump administration’s top-down cancel culture. Meanwhile, those former free-speech absolutists Trump, Vance, and Stephen Miller have become lord high executioners of thought crime. If a new Harper’s Letter defending the value of open inquiry were written today, many of the original letter’s fiercest critics would rush to sign it. Free-speech hypocrisy is a symptom of the democratic decay that makes authoritarianism possible.

[Graeme Wood: The cowardice of open letters]

At the same time, political violence is rising like a dark storm around the country—in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, in Washington and San Francisco and Atlanta, and now in Utah. The shot that killed Charlie Kirk as he debated a crowd of college students represented the worst kind of failure in a democracy—a bullet silencing speech. Only the shooter bears the guilt. In a text to his roommate and partner, the suspect wrote about Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” So he erased the line between word and deed that keeps us from destroying ourselves.

The relation between our degraded discourse and this epidemic of attacks is not simple or direct. A public square in which a minority of Americans, separated into mutually hateful camps under the malign spell of power-hungry leaders and profit-seeking influencers, routinely dehumanize one another is an obvious setting for a few lost souls to cross the line into murder. But most Americans still know the difference between words and violence. Most responded to Kirk’s assassination with horror and grief, along with the dread of an impending downward spiral. Most people are still sane, still decent, don’t want to see their opponents killed, don’t want a civil war.

[Adrienne LaFrance: Strawberries in winter]

Yet the logic of algorithmic polarization seems inescapable. Within hours of the assassination, some individuals predictably justified, even celebrated, Kirk’s death online. Then the Trump administration did what never happened after JFK and Martin Luther King were killed or Reagan was shot. It used a terrible crime as a pretext to silence dissent and crush the opposition—exactly what you would expect from an authoritarian regime. Last Sunday, when tens of thousands of people from around the country gathered in Arizona to remember Kirk, a religious service turned into a state-sponsored rally for hard-edged Christian nationalism. Kirk’s tearful widow, Erika, forgave his killer—but Miller, the president’s senior adviser, snarling and flexing his neck, promised revenge against nameless evil “enemies,” and Trump himself proudly declared his hatred for his opponents. Whose words mattered more? Was it all just an ugly show, or the start of a campaign of widespread repression?

Perhaps what we’re seeing, in this country and around the world, is a return to the norm. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that, after two and a half centuries—about the length of the Roman republic in its glory—American democracy is disappearing. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, the universal ideas of the founding documents no longer seem to have their hold on many Americans, especially younger ones.

For many years prominent figures on the left, especially in colleges and universities, have dedicated themselves to revealing all the ways in which those ideals were never universal: The abstract truths of the Declaration were falsehoods, covers for structures of oppression that endure to this day. On the populist-nationalist right, the greatest words in political history—“all men are created equal”—are now qualified with so many reservations that they might as well be deleted. Vance wants to “redefine American citizenship” as a hierarchy in which the universal ideas of the Declaration count for less than the number of dead generations lying in your family plot. This makes me want to say, as Lincoln said of the reactionaries of his time: “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The philosopher John Dewey believed that democracy is not just a system of government but a way of life, one that allows for the fullest realization of every human being’s potential. I was granted more than half a century to benefit from it in the country that practically invented democracy. It makes me heartsick that my children might not have the same chance. What can we do to prevent authoritarianism from becoming our way of life? How can we change the habits of our heart and our society?

Foreigners are baffled that Americans are allowing an authoritarian to rob them of their precious birthright. I’m baffled, too—but I also recognize that we have no experience resisting this kind of government. So we can study what ordinary people living under other modern authoritarian regimes have done. Witness, protest, speak out, and mock in creative ways that catch the popular imagination. Politicians can run for office, lawyers can sue, journalists can investigate, artists can dramatize, scholars can analyze. Americans are already doing these things, but so far none of it has made much difference because the public isn’t engaged, and without the public on their side opponents of authoritarianism are too weak to win.

The greatest temptation and danger is to withdraw into some private world of your own and wait it out.

Sam Altman, a co-founder and the CEO of OpenAI, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. When Rogan floated the idea of an AI president, Altman envisioned a system that would be able to talk to everyone, understand them deeply, and then “optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S. That’s awesome.”

I’m suspicious of anyone who suggests being governed by a machine that’s made him a multibillionaire. I remember Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian dream of a platform that would create a more open and connected world, uniting humanity across tribal lines, perhaps even ending wars in the Middle East. The unforeseen damage that social media has caused democracy seems likely to be dwarfed by that of artificial intelligence. It won’t just substitute an algorithm for our ability to make decisions. It’s coming to replace us—to be our therapist, our doctor, our teacher, our friend, our lover, our president. But if one day a chatbot writes a poem better than Frost or Bishop, it will still be worthless—because it’s only the human intention, the search for meaning and effort to reach others, that give a poem its value. There’s no art without us.

Chatbots feed on some longing we must have to be relieved of our humanity, as if being human is too hard, too much trouble to have to think and judge for ourselves, to define who we are and what we believe, to suffer the inevitable pain of consciousness and love for another human being. This longing seems especially acute today.

So artificial intelligence promises to do what an authoritarian regime does: take our place. They’re two sides of the same coin—one political, the other technological—both forfeitures of human possibility. We’re surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we’re building machines that take away our ability to think and feel.

[Listen: AI and the rise of techno-fascism in the United States]

The Declaration of Independence and the other founding documents were based on a philosophical faith in human reason and freedom. Near the end of his life, Jefferson wrote in a letter, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

What does it mean to be educated for a free society? This used to be the mission of American schools—to produce a special kind of person, a democratic citizen. In many ways our colleges and universities have failed at this task. They’ve become prohibitively expensive, while creating a new aristocracy of the credentialed that has worsened economic inequality and political polarization. They’ve spent their money on administrators and fitness centers while cutting whole programs in the humanities and social sciences. Those programs share some of the blame for their own demise. They grew so opaque and politicized that they seemed irrelevant, if not hostile, to the larger society. Some things are true even though the Trump administration says they’re true—the academy has become inhospitable to conservative views. When more than half of your classmates are afraid to say what they think, there’s too much orthodoxy and not enough free expression.

To be educated for democracy means hearing different, even disturbing views—seeking them out, engaging and arguing with them, learning from them, maybe letting them change your mind, without giving an inch of ground to democracy’s erosion. It takes practice, and I believe it’s likeliest to happen when we come face-to-face with friends, strangers, and even enemies. There’s no getting away from our phones, just as AI will soon seep into every fold of our lives, no doubt doing both good and harm. But we have to resist their tyranny, which threatens our freedom as much as the authoritarian regime now taking hold.

*Source: Graphica Artis / Getty; Herbert Ponting / Royal Geographical Society / Getty

The Tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s Killing

2025-09-10T23:07:04-04:00

In December 2023, I spent half a minute with Charlie Kirk in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center. Turning Point USA, the youth organization that he founded in 2012 and built into a right-wing juggernaut, was holding its annual convention in the city that the Chicago-born Kirk had made his home. Tall and dark-haired, he was moving quickly with a group of aides through a crowd of admirers. He had just exercised his considerable rhetorical talents in an opening address to 14,000 mostly young, wildly enthusiastic people from all over the country, whipping them up into a mood of ebullient, aggrieved hostility toward the various groups that he warned were trying to destroy America, telling his audience: “This is a bottom-up resistance, and it terrifies the ruling class.”

“Charlie,” I called out, “would you talk to The Atlantic?”

Kirk turned around and looked me over. For a moment, I had his amused attention. “The Atlantic? I don’t know,” he said with a not-unfriendly smile. “If you want to know what elite opinion is on any issue, read The Atlantic.” He delivered another insult or two, then he reached out to shake hands, as if this was all a bit of a game. “Sure, check with my people. Thanks for being decent about it.”

His people never got back to me, but Kirk spent the next year playing a central role in mobilizing young voters—especially men—to elect Donald Trump. And now this 31-year-old father of two is dead.

His murder is a tragedy for his family and a disaster for the country. In an atmosphere of national paranoia and hatred, each act of political violence makes the next one more likely. Last year, Trump came within a couple of inches of being assassinated. In June, two elected Democrats in Minnesota were shot, one fatally. President Trump has ordered flags across the country to be lowered to half-staff in Kirk’s honor, but he wasn’t a statesman like John F. Kennedy, or a moral leader like Martin Luther King Jr. (whom Kirk called “not a good person”). I won’t pretend that I believe America just lost a great man. In the long history of American political assassinations, Kirk belongs in the company of charismatic provocateurs such as Huey Long and Malcolm X, cut down before their time. Like them, he had a feel for the political pulse of his moment, a demagogic flair, and the courage to take on all comers in argument, which exposed him to the sniper who ended his life.

Kirk was killed on a college campus in Utah, seated under a tent with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong,” facing a crowd of several thousand people, debating anyone who wanted to approach and challenge him. He kept up this practice—part recruitment, part provocation, part entertainment—throughout his years as Turning Point USA’s leader. He was using his freedom of speech, and if his style was aggressive, divisive, sometimes mocking, losing his life this way was no less an assault on everything that democracy’s remaining believers should hold dear. Those who disagreed with Kirk ought to be able to deplore what he stood for and also the violence that killed him.

Words are not violence—violence is violence. After Trump’s brush with death, before anything was known about his would-be assassin, J. D. Vance and others blamed the shooting on the rhetoric of his political opponents. Within hours of Kirk’s killing, with the shooter still at large, Elon Musk posted on X: “The Left is the party of murder.” Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, wrote: “You called us Hitler. You called us Nazis. You called us Racists. You have blood on your hands.” Some right-wing activists are calling for the Trump administration to crack down on leftist organizations—in other words, to use Kirk’s death as a pretext for political repression, which is just what an authoritarian government would do. No one should feel anything but horror and dread at the murder of Charlie Kirk. And no one should use the killing of a man known for his defense of free speech to muzzle others or themselves from speaking the truth about the perilous state we’re in.

How Not to Fix American Democracy

2025-08-11T08:00:00-04:00

Is America a democracy? Reactionaries, such as the activist Charlie Kirk and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, say it is not, never was, and shouldn’t be. They justify the antidemocratic features of the Constitution and contemporary politics—the Electoral College, the gerrymander—with the label republican, meaning a representative system with guardrails that protect political minorities (and happen to keep their side in power). Some progressives agree that the United States has never been a true democracy, but they would very much like to change that. They trace the country’s ills to this original failure and imagine the fulfillment of America’s promise in a democratic rebirth that puts real power in the hands of the people.

This is the thesis of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, a new book by Osita Nwanevu, a writer for The New Republic and The Guardian. Nwanevu wants more collective decision making, more equality and freedom, for ordinary American voters and workers. Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, he argues that genuine American democracy would be a good thing, but that creating it would require “the transformation not only of our political institutions but of our economy.”

Nwanevu wields journalism as a cutting tool that’s well oiled with contempt (I’ve been on its receiving end)—a style refined in the social-media polemics of the past decade’s progressive orthodoxy. After Kamala Harris’s defeat in last year’s election, Nwanevu wrote in an X post: “Yep, time to break from the left. Next time, Dems should try saying they’ll do more to crack down on immigration than Republicans. Instead of ‘Defund the Police,’ run a prosecutor. Talk about having a gun and wanting a strong military instead of your identity. Just some ideas.” Habitual sarcasm toward fools who can’t see why you’re right is usually a sign of political weakness, suggesting that you have no hope or intention of convincing the unpersuaded of anything. Contempt is a style of proud and perpetual defeat.

In The Right of the People, Nwanevu subdues his own journalistic reflexes long enough to construct a sweeping argument out of history and political theory. He says at the outset that he’s “dog-tired, already, of the habits of mind that shape American political journalism” and jaded by all the talk about threats to “our democracy” from pundits who don’t know or care what it really is. Democracy in America doesn’t just need to be defended, Nwanevu believes—it needs to be articulated, affirmed, and built: “Democracy has become a specious and suspicious platitude, equally useful to marketers and would-be dictators—a hollow idea for a hollow, unserious time.”

The Right of the People is his ambitious response. Nwanevu describes democracy as collective self-government by equals in which decisions are made by majority rule; explains why this, of all systems, is the one most worth pursuing; answers democracy’s critics, beginning with Plato; argues that democracy has been betrayed in the United States since the country’s founding; and proposes ideas and policies to make democracy an American reality. A subject on this scale doesn’t lend itself to savage takedowns. In the slower, more demanding form of a well-researched, carefully reasoned book, especially in its first half, Nwanevu takes democracy’s opponents and its own vulnerabilities seriously.

[George Packer: The end of Democratic delusions]

And yet, despite the ringing title and subtitle, little in Nwanevu’s “new American founding” is new. The thesis that the Founders drafted an antidemocratic Constitution to protect their own political and economic interests dates back to the groundbreaking work of the Progressive historian Charles Beard, first published more than a century ago and contested ever since. (Nwanevu’s version relies heavily on Michael J. Klarman’s 2016 book, The Framers’ Coup, also much debated.) When Nwanevu leaves theory and history for current politics and policy, he moves onto even more familiar ground. Yes, the Senate is grotesquely unrepresentative, and unless its structure is radically changed (a constitutional near-impossibility), the people of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico deserve senators of their own. The filibuster exaggerates the Senate’s anti-majoritarianism, giving each resident of Wyoming a far louder voice than a Californian. The unelected, life-tenured Supreme Court upholds laws that take power from common people and give it to corporations. Inequality is at Gilded Age levels, and some CEOs make several hundred times more than their employees. Amazon’s destructive effect on workers’ wages, bodies, and communities has been well documented—the journalist Alec MacGillis wrote an excellent book about it. Far too much power is concentrated in far too few hands. If you don’t think so, you haven’t been following the career of Elon Musk.

Nwanevu’s proposals for a new founding amount to a progressive wish list: End the Senate filibuster, expand the House of Representatives, oblige the states to abide by the national popular vote, impose Supreme Court term limits, raise taxes on wealth, break up monopolies, remove obstacles to unionizing, give workers more say in the running of companies, etc. I’m for most of it. None of it is very original.

What’s the point of saying we need more equality and more democracy? The question is how to get them, beyond simply laying out an agenda. Other progressives, such as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy, want a second Constitutional Convention; some of them would scrap the 1787 text as hopelessly flawed and start anew. Nwanevu doesn’t place much faith in this constitutional Hail Mary. The idea of a new convention first gained traction more than a decade ago among conservatives, and Nwanevu rightly realizes that they’re better positioned than liberals to determine the outcome. “We are still perhaps generations away from a truly democratic Constitution,” he acknowledges. “But the work toward it—and the work to build a more democratic country—must begin now.” In other words, there’s no escape from politics—from “decades of political persuasion and organization.” Exactly what that effort would look like, Nwanevu leaves to others, noting that “there are details here that political professionals and organizers are going to have to work out.”

But this is where his aspirations run up against the shortcomings of his politics. Though most of the book is a nonpartisan brief for democracy as a good in itself, in the end Nwanevu leaves no doubt that a more democratic America will be a more left-wing one. “Our frustrations with our false democracy have corroded faith in the ideal to the benefit of antidemocratic figures on the right,” he concludes. “Beyond being worthwhile on their own merits, the political and economic reforms we’ve examined constitute a democratic agenda that stands a better chance of defeating the right than the flimsy and predictable rhetoric their opponents have offered up so far.” These “opponents” are left vague, but they seem to be mainstream Democrats who are too timorous to embrace his agenda and take the fight to the right-wing adversary. According to Nwanevu, giving more power to the people will eventually bring the country around to his worldview.

This belief—that ordinary Americans are closer to New Republic and Guardian readers than most of us realize—is a besetting vice of the left, an undisturbable illusion from inside the bubble that forms around political isolation and defeat. It’s based on assumptions about what goes on in the minds of ordinary people Nwanevu shows no sign of having talked to. And it’s belied by election after election, including last year’s.

[Adrienne LaFrance: A ticking clock on American freedom]

In The Right of the People, Donald Trump is barely a minor character. Nwanevu has almost nothing to say about right-wing populism—the strongest current in electoral politics around the world. He can’t explain (and doesn’t try to) why working-class Americans of all ethnicities currently seem to feel more strongly about stricter immigration enforcement than paid family and medical leave. He can’t account for the fact that those Americans who were so alienated from our fake democracy that they didn’t bother voting last year would have been likelier to have gone for Trump than for Harris.

Now that Republican populism, in complete control of government, is showing itself to be a defender of plutocracy, Democrats have a chance to earn the trust of voters as the party that represents the interests and values of the majority. But to do so, Democrats have to know what country they’re living in. Nwanevu’s analysis of the original Constitutional Convention, in which conservative elites thwarted the democratic will of ordinary people for their own selfish ends, remains his vision of our America. It’s a satisfying story, but it doesn’t explain important aspects of 1787—for example, that populists in small states secured the grossly unequal structure of the Senate against the egalitarian arguments of large-state nationalists. And it gets American politics today, with a left-leaning party supported by professional elites (such as Nwanevu and me) and a right-wing party supported by less educated wage workers, nearly backwards. Persuading and organizing your fellow citizens begins with trying to understand how they think. But this is just what Nwanevu’s approach to politics never does.

For Nwanevu, democracy is ultimately about the distribution of power. Distribute it more equally, and the result will be more and better democracy. He has almost no time for Alexis de Tocqueville, who understood self-government as not just collective power to be used but a difficult art to be practiced, mastered, and easily lost. The illiberal atmosphere of the past decade, with a political culture of hostile mobs and mass delusions, doesn’t seem to trouble Nwanevu, as if it has nothing to do with democracy. He likes to quote Walt Whitman and John Dewey, but his own language never conveys their sense that democracy is a spirit, a mode of life—the only form of government that allows human beings to realize their full potential.

Nwanevu is right that democracy’s advocates have to do more than earnestly ring an alarm bell about authoritarianism. They also have to diagnose and fix what’s wrong with an American system that most Americans think has failed them. Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans have recently expressed the view that democracy is under threat and that self-government isn’t working. But if half the country thinks that Trump is the reason for those problems and the other half thinks that he’s the solution, arguing that more democracy will change America for the better isn’t convincing. You first have to put away sentimentality about “the people.” We’re as capable of hating one another and believing lies and making terrible decisions and using power to take away one another’s rights as we are of governing ourselves with clarity and wisdom. “We know more than the Founders did,” Nwanevu asserts in his last pages. “We are more practiced at governance. We are more moral, more just.” At a time of widespread indifference to the destruction of the most basic values that deserve to be called democratic, I’d hesitate to flatter Americans with these claims.

No One Can Offer Any Hope

2025-06-04T13:50:00-04:00

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Every month or so I get a desperate message from a 25-year-old Afghan refugee in Pakistan. Another came just last week. I’ve written about Saman in the past. Because my intent today is to write about her place in the moral universe of Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, I’ll compress her story to its basic details: During the Afghan War, Saman and her husband, Farhad (they requested pseudonyms for their own safety), served in the Afghan special forces alongside American troops. When Kabul fell in 2021, they were left behind and had to go into hiding from the Taliban before fleeing to Pakistan. There the couple and their two small children have languished for three years, burning through their limited cash, avoiding the Pakistani police and Taliban agents, seldom leaving their rented rooms—doomed if they’re forced to return to Afghanistan—and all the while waiting for their applications to be processed by the United States’ refugee program.

No other country will provide a harbor to these loyal allies of America, who risked everything for the war effort. Our country has a unique obligation to do so. They had reached the last stage of a very long road and were on the verge of receiving U.S. visas when Donald Trump came back into office and made ending the refugee program one of his first orders of business. Now Saman and her family have no prospect of escaping the trap they’re in.

“The stress and anxiety have become overwhelming,” Saman wrote to me last week. “Every day I worry about the future of my children—what will become of them? Recently, I’ve developed a new health issue as well. At times, my fingers suddenly become tight and stiff—almost paralyzed—and I can’t move them at all. My husband massages them with great effort until they gradually return to normal. This is a frightening and painful experience … Please, in this difficult time, I humbly ask for your help and guidance. What can I do to find a way out of these hardships?”

I’ve brought the plight of Saman and her family to members of Congress, American activist groups, foreign diplomats, and readers of this magazine. No one can offer any hope. The family’s fate is in the hands of Trump and his administration.

[George Packer: ‘What about six years of friendship and fighting together?’ ]

And, after all, their story is just one small part of the suffering caused by this regime. A full accounting would be impossible to compile, but it already includes an estimated several hundred thousand people dead or dying of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria because of the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the starvation of refugee children in Sudan, migrants deported to a Salvadoran Gulag, and victims of domestic violence who have lost their shelter in Maine. In the wide world of the regime’s staggering and gratuitous cruelty, the pain in Saman’s fingers might seem too trivial to mention.

But hers is the suffering that keeps arriving in my phone, the ongoing story that seems to be my unavoidable job to hear and tell. And sometimes one small drama can illuminate a large evil. Since reading Saman’s latest text, I can’t stop thinking about the people who are doing this to her and her family—especially about Musk and Vance. As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He’s a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don’t hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay—which the American people failed to do. Musk and Vance function at a higher evolutionary level than Trump. They have ideas to justify the human suffering they cause. They even have moral ideas.

Musk’s moral idea goes by the name longtermism, which he has called “a close match to my philosophy.” This reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number of human beings who will ever live. By this reasoning, the fate of the hundreds of billions of as-yet-unborn people who will inhabit the planet before the sun burns it up several billion years from now is more urgent than whether a few million people die of preventable diseases this year. If killing the American aid programs that helped keep those people alive allows the U.S. government to become lean and efficient enough to fund Musk’s grand project of interplanetary travel, thereby enabling human beings to live on Mars when Earth becomes uninhabitable in some distant era, then the good of humanity requires feeding those aid programs, including ones that support refugee resettlement, into the wood chipper.

Refugees—except for white South Africans—aren’t important enough to matter to longtermism. Its view of humanity is far too large to notice Saman, Farhad, and their children, or to understand why America might have a moral obligation to give this family a safe home. Longtermism is a philosophy with a special appeal for smart and extremely rich sociopaths. It can justify almost any amount of hubris, spending, and suffering. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, was a longtermist.

It isn’t clear that Musk, during his manic and possibly drug-addled months of power in the Trump administration, applied moral reasoning when hacking at the federal government. His erratic behavior and that of his troops in the Department of Government Efficiency seemed driven more by destructive euphoria than by philosophy. But in February, on Joe Rogan’s show, Musk used the loftiest terms to explain why the cries of pain caused by his cuts should be ignored: “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Here is another category of the long view, with an entire civilization in place of the planet’s future inhabitants. Musk’s sphere of empathy is galactic. In its cold immensity, the ordinary human impulse to want to relieve the pain of a living person with a name and a face disappears.

Vance once called himself “a proud member of both tribes” of the MAGA coalition—techno-futurists like Musk and right-wing populists like Steve Bannon. But when Vance invokes a moral code, it’s the opposite of Musk’s. The scope of its commitment is as narrow and specific as an Appalachian graveyard—the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where five generations of Vances are buried and where, he told the Republican National Convention last summer, he hopes that he, his wife, and their children will eventually lie. Such a place is “the source of America’s greatness,” Vance said, because “people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” Politically, this is called blood-and-soil nationalism. Religiously, Vance traces his moral code to the Catholic doctrine of ordo amoris, the proper order of love: first your family, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News, then your neighbor, your community, your nation, and finally—a distant last—the rest of humanity.

But Vance’s theology is as bad as his political theory. Generations of Americans fought and died for the idea of freedom in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, and other conflicts. And Christian doctrine does not say to keep out refugees because they’re not your kin. Jesus said the opposite: To refuse the stranger was to refuse him. Vance likes to cite Augustine and Aquinas, but the latter was clear about what ordo amoris does not mean: “In certain cases, one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need.”

[From the March 2022 issue: The betrayal]

It’s a monstrous perversion of both patriotism and faith to justify hurting a young family who, after all they’ve suffered, still show courage and loyalty to Vance’s country.

Starting from opposite moral positions, Musk and Vance are equally indifferent to the ordeal of Saman and her family. When empathy is stretched to the cosmic vanishing point or else compressed to the width of a grave, it ceases to be empathy. Perhaps these two elites even take pleasure in the squeals of bleeding-heart humanitarians on behalf of refugees, starving children, international students, poor Americans in ill health, and other unfortunates. And that may be a core value of these philosophies: They require so much inventing of perverse principles to reach a cruel end that the pain of others begins to seem like the first priority rather than the inadvertent result.

Think of the range of people who have been drawn to MAGA. It’s hard to see what political ideology Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Loury, Nick Fuentes, Bari Weiss, Lil Wayne, Joe Rogan, Bill Ackman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kanye West have in common. The magnetic pull is essentially negative. They all fear and loathe something more than Trump—whether it’s wokeness, Palestinians, Jews, Harvard, trans people, The New York Times, or the Democratic Party—and manage to overlook everything else, including the fate of American democracy, and Saman and her family. But overlooking everything else is nihilism.

Even if most Americans haven’t abandoned their private sense of empathy, many don’t seem terribly bothered by the rancidness of their leaders. I confess that this indifference astonishes me. It might be the ugliest effect of Trump’s return—the rapid normalization of spectacular corruption, the desensitization to lawless power, the acceptance of moral collapse. Eventually it will coarsen us all.

The Talented Mr. Vance

2025-05-19T06:00:00-04:00

J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J. D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.

Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-century novel—Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He’s the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country’s—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He’s tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined.

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With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe.

At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt?

Still only 40, Vance is likelier than anyone to be the next president. (The biggest obstacle, for several reasons, is Trump himself.) His rise has been so dramatic and self-dramatized that he calls to mind those emblematic figures from history who seem both out of a storybook and all too human, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Huey Long. In the end, the question of Vance’s character—whether his about-face was “authentic”—is probably unanswerable. Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it’s rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.

What’s more important than Vance’s motive is the meaning of the story in which he’s the protagonist. More than any other public figure of this century, including Barack Obama (to whom his career bears some similarities), and even Trump, Vance illuminates the larger subject of contemporary America’s character. In another age, his rise might have been taken as proof that the American dream was alive and mostly well. But our age has no simply inspiring and unifying tales, and each chapter of Vance’s success is part of a national failure: the abandonment of American workers under global neoliberalism; the cultural collapse of the working class; the unwinnable forever war; a dominant elite that combines ruthless competition with a rigid orthodoxy of identity; a reaction of populist authoritarianism. What seems like Vance’s tragic wrong turn, the loss of real promise, was probably inevitable—it’s hard to imagine a more hopeful plot. After all, the novel is about a society in which something has gone deeply wrong, all the isms have run dry, and neither the elites nor the people can escape blame.

The power of Vance’s story depends on the image of a hick struggling to survive and escape, then navigating the temptations and bruises of ascent. At the start of his memoir he describes himself as an ordinary person of no real accomplishment who avoided becoming a grim statistic only by the grace of his family’s love. This self-portrait shows the early appearance of Vance the politician, and it’s belied by the testimony of people who knew him. Friends from the Marine Corps and Yale described to me an avid reader, confident and well-spoken, socially adept, almost universally liked—an extraordinary young man clearly headed for big things. (Vance himself declined to be interviewed for this article.)

As an enlisted Marine, Vance worked in public affairs, which meant that he saw no combat in Iraq during some of the most violent years of the war. Instead, he acquired a sense of discipline and purpose in a fairly cloistered milieu. He was already interested in political philosophy, and on the sprawling Al-Asad air base, in Anbar province, Vance and a close friend discussed Jefferson and Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Christopher Hitchens and the “new atheists,” even Locke and Hobbes. He was also a conservative who revered John McCain and was, the close friend joked, the only one on the base who wasn’t disappointed when a mystery visitor turned out to be Dick Cheney rather than Jessica Simpson. But Vance began to have doubts about the war before he ever set foot in Iraq. In a chow hall in Kuwait, officers on their way home to the States described the pointless frustration of clearing Iraqi cities that immediately fell again to insurgents. The ghost of Vietnam had not been vanquished by the global War on Terror.

Courtesy of Curt Keester

In 2003, still in his teens, J. D. Vance enlisted in the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, where he read thinkers such as Locke and Hobbes, who had influenced the American Founders.

“I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance wrote years later. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.” Whether that ideology was called neoconservatism or liberal interventionism, its failure in Iraq led in a straight line to a new ideology that was also old: “America First.” On foreign policy Vance has been pretty consistent for two decades. When, while running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, he remarked, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” you could hear the working-class Iraq vet taking a shot at elites who send others to bleed for abstractions and are indifferent to the human collapse of Middletown, Ohio.

“America First” wasn’t the only available response to disillusionment with Iraq. Other veterans who’d entered politics—Dan Crenshaw, Jason Crow, Tammy Duckworth, Seth Moulton—continued to be concerned about human suffering and the fate of democracy abroad. Nor have they abandoned liberal democracy for blood-and-soil nationalism. Vance is a politician with an unusual interest in ideas and a combative nature fed by an old wound. The combination makes him capable of going a long way down an ideological road without paying attention to the casualties around him.

Raised loosely evangelical, Vance became a libertarian atheist in his 20s—the stance of many smart, self-taught young men of the aughts in search of totalizing positions that could win mostly online arguments. “I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic,” he wrote years later. “There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually.” Both Rand and Hitchens took him away from the community of his upbringing—from a poor white culture of non-churchgoing Christians whose identification with the Republican Party had nothing to do with tax cuts. Libertarianism and atheism were respectable worldviews of the new culture that Vance badly wanted to enter.

“I became interested in secularism just as my attention turned to my separation from the Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil,” he would write in 2020, after his conversion to Catholicism. “Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.” This ability to socialize himself into new beliefs set a pattern for his career.

Vance took just two years to graduate from Ohio State, and in 2010 he was accepted by Yale Law School. Entering the Ivy League put him through what the sociologist J. M. Cuddihy called “the ordeal of civility”—repression of one’s class or ethnic background in the effort to assimilate to the ways of a dominant culture. As Vance later wrote, he had to get used to the taste of sparkling water, to learn that white wine comes in more than one variety. In an earlier time, the dominant group would have been the WASPs. In the early 21st century, it was a liberal multiethnic meritocracy for which a Yale law degree opened the way to power.

In this world, there was nothing odd about a descendant of several centuries of native-born white Christian Americans taking as his “Yale spirit guide” the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India. The route to New Haven is in some ways shorter from Andhra Pradesh than from the hills of eastern Kentucky. What counts is class, and class is largely a matter of education and credentials. Usha Chilukuri had all the right qualities to civilize Vance: raised in a stable, high-achieving family of California academics; Phi Beta Kappa at Yale College; master’s degree from Cambridge University; even-tempered, politically opaque, hyper-organized, mapping out her work and life with Vance on Post-it notes, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. When Vance’s friend from the Marines visited New Haven, Usha told them both that they’d done a good job of “course correcting” their lives. In Vance’s memoir she’s a kind of life coach, counseling him to unlearn hillbilly codes and habits—helping him talk through difficult subjects without losing his temper or withdrawing, expressing pride when he resists going after another driver who flips him off in traffic.

[David Frum: The J. D. Vance I knew]

Hillbilly Elegy—both book and film—makes much of a scene in which Vance is so baffled by the complicated tableware at a Yale dinner with recruiters from a white-shoe law firm that he has to leave the room and call Usha for guidance. “Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes,” she tells him. “Oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.” The picture of a raw youth going from outside to inside with the help of his super-striver girlfriend is a little misleading. “I never got the sense that he was worse off because he hadn’t gone to Yale or Harvard, just because he was so well-spoken,” a law-school friend of Vance’s and Chilukuri’s told me. “He was intriguing to Usha, and to the rest of us too.” Being a chubby-faced working-class Marine from the Midwest might have brought cultural disadvantages, but it also conferred the buoyant charisma of a young man who made it out. Regardless of place settings, Vance quickly mastered the essential Ivy League art of networking. Classmates picked him out early on as a political leader.

Everyone who met Vance in those years seems to have been impressed. He didn’t have to put on Ivy League airs, or wave a hillbilly flag, or win sympathy by reciting the saddest chapters of his childhood. He kept stories of his abusive mother and her checked-out partners almost entirely to himself—a close friend was surprised by the dark details of his memoir—but he didn’t cut himself off from his past. He watched Ohio State football every Saturday with another Buckeye at Yale, and he remained close to his sister, Lindsay, and to friends from his hometown and the Marine Corps.

In the early 2010s, when he began to publish short articles on David Frum’s website FrumForum and in National Review, they were mainly concerned with the lack of social mobility in the working class. His voice was perfectly tuned to a moderate conservatism, strengthened by his authentic origin in heartland hardship—skeptical of government programs for the poor, but with a sense of responsibility to the place he came from. I’m making it, he said, and so can they if they get the right support. In an early essay, from 2010, he defended institutions like Yale Law School against a rising right-wing populism that saw a country “ruled by perniciously alien elites.” This burn-it-down politics was a luxury that poor people couldn’t afford. His “political hero,” according to Hillbilly Elegy, was Mitch Daniels, the centrist Republican governor of Indiana. His choice for president in 2012 was Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, who made Mitt Romney seem a bit extreme.

[Read: How the ‘Tiger Mom’ convinced the author of Hillbilly Elegy to write his story]

Vance planned to write a policy book about the problems of the white working class. But when he came under the wing of the professor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who fostered his relationship with Usha and recommended him for coveted jobs, she urged him to write the story of his life.

Lloyd Bishop / NBCUniversal / Getty

In 2017, when Vance was still a progressive darling due to his ability to explain Donald Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters, he went on Late Night With Seth Meyers to promote Hillbilly Elegy.

At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes a recurring nightmare, going back to childhood, in which he’s pursued by a terrifying antagonist, a “monster”—in at least one dream his unstable mother. While he was at Yale she became addicted to heroin, and he later had to drive to Ohio to keep her from ending up homeless. The nightmare returned just after he graduated—but this time the creature being chased is his dog, Casper, and the enraged pursuer is Vance. At the last moment he stops himself from hurting his beloved pet, saved by his own capacity for self-reflection. The dreamer wakes to a bedroom filled with all the signs of his happy new life. But the past is still alive, and the nightmare leaves a haunting insight: “I was the monster.”

Reading the book today is like the reversal of roles in Vance’s dream. The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at “childless cat ladies,” peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X. Vice President Vance is the pursuer. So it’s a little disorienting to return to Hillbilly Elegy and spend a few hours in the presence of a narrator who can say: “I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people portrayed. For there are no villains in this story.”

As a writer, Vance passes the most important test in a work of this kind: He’s honest enough to show himself in an unfavorable light—hotheaded, cowardly, often just sad. He’s wary of any simple lessons or wholly satisfying emotions. He loves his family and community, but he is unsparing about their self-destructive tendencies. He rejects the politics of tribal grievance and ostentatious piety that now defines the populist right. If the book has a message, it’s the need to take responsibility for your own life while understanding the obstacles and traps that blight the lives of others—to acknowledge the complex causes of failure without giving in to rage, self-pity, or despair. “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government,” Vance warned, “and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

[From the January/February 2024 issue: George Packer on what the working class really wants]

It’s not a message to impress the MAGA mind. The author’s nuanced analysis and policy ideas might well make Vice President Vance retch. In countless interviews and talks related to his New York Times No. 1 best seller, Vance spoke movingly about his childhood, criticized the low standards that both right and left impose on his people, and offered no easy answers for their desperate lives, only a kind of moral appeal to self-betterment and community that sounded like the centrist commentary of David Brooks. In his open-collar shirt and blazer, with smooth cheeks and boyish blue eyes, a fluent delivery and respectful responses, Vance appeared to be living proof that the meritocracy could take a self-described hillbilly and make him one of its own, creating an appealing celebrity with an important message for comfortable audiences about those left behind.

So Hillbilly Elegy is a problem for right-wing populists—and also for Trump opponents who now loathe Vance, because it takes an effort not to sympathize with the book’s young hero and admire the eloquence of its author. By 2020, when Ron Howard’s movie was released, at the end of Trump’s first term, critics who might have turned to the book for insight had soured on the white working class, and they excoriated the film. (Tellingly, it was far more popular with the general public.) By then it was no longer possible to have an honest response to a book or movie across political battle lines. Hillbilly Elegy, published four months before the 2016 election, came out at the last possible moment to shape a national conversation. It belongs to an era that no longer exists.

Other than learning how elites get ahead, Vance made little use of his law degree. He spent a year clerking for a Kentucky judge, and less than a year at a corporate firm in D.C. Even at Yale he knew that practicing law didn’t interest him. What he later called “the most significant moment” of his law-school years was a talk in 2011 by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. I spent time with Thiel for a magazine profile that year, so I’m familiar with the pessimism of his thinking: America is going through a period of prolonged stagnation; supposedly revolutionary digital technologies like the iPhone and social media have turned out to be trivial, while chronic problems in the physical world—transportation, energy, bioscience—haven’t improved; and this lack of dynamism drives elites like the ones in Thiel’s audience to compete furiously for a dwindling number of prestigious but ultimately meaningless jobs.

This analysis of a soulless meritocracy in a decadent society held more than intellectual interest for Vance. Thiel was describing what Vance had already begun to feel about his new life among the credentialed: “I had prioritized striving over character,” Vance later wrote. “I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.” The talk gave an abstract framework for the psychological conflicts besetting a refugee from decline: burning ambition, and the char of guilt it leaves; longing for elite acceptance and resentment of elite disdain (the professor who scoffed at state-school education, the classmate who assumed that Marines must be brutes); what Vance called the “reverse snobbery” that a poor boy from flyover country feels toward the Yale snobs who know about butter knives while he alone confronts a belligerent drunk at the next table in a New Haven bar. In an interview with Rod Dreher of The American Conservative upon the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said, “It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.” He added, “But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.”

Elite anti-elitism—contempt from a position of strength, the ability to say “Thanks but fuck you”—offered a way out of the conflicts. This was the first of many gifts from Thiel, and Vance would go on to indulge it every bit as destructively as his new mentor could wish. But not yet. He was still hard at work earning his credentials and preparing to enjoy their fruits.

The author of Hillbilly Elegy could only have a complex view of Donald Trump: an intuitive grasp of his appeal for people in Middletown, and horror at his effect on them. In an essay for this magazine published just a few weeks after the memoir, in the summer of 2016, Vance called Trump “cultural heroin”—the most apt metaphor possible. Trump was an overwhelmingly tempting drug that brought relief from pain but inevitably led to self-destruction, enabling all the ills—resentment, bigotry, coarseness, delusional hope—of a white working class in rapid decay. Shortly before the election, Vance warned that a refusal by Trump to accept its results would further alienate his supporters from politics, saying he hoped Trump “acts magnanimous.” Late on Election Night, when Trump’s shocking victory appeared imminent, ABC News, suddenly in need of an authority on Trump voters, pulled Vance from Yahoo News into its main studio as a native informant. “What are they looking for from Donald Trump?” George Stephanopoulos asked. “What do they want tangibly?” Vance replied that they wanted a change in direction, and that if Trump failed to bring one, there would be “a period of reckoning.” Then he added with a slight smile: “I do think that folks feel very vindicated now, right? They believed in their man. They felt like the media didn’t believe in their man.”

What did Vance believe in?

Trump’s win brought the author of Hillbilly Elegy to new prominence as a national voice. It also placed a roadblock directly in the path of his ambitions. He had identified himself as a Never Trump conservative, privately wondered if Trump was “America’s Hitler,” and voted for neither major-party candidate. Suddenly the establishment that had embraced him and elevated him beyond his dreams could no longer offer means of ascent. Just about everyone who knew Vance assumed he intended to enter politics, but the Daniels-Huntsman-Romney species of Republican was halfway to extinction.

In January 2017, a week after Trump’s inauguration, a group of about a dozen conservatives—adherents of “reform conservatism,” a modernizing, more inclusive strain that took seriously issues such as inequality and the environment—gathered with Vance at the Washington offices of the Hoover Institution to advise him on his political future. These were policy intellectuals who had encouraged and validated young Vance. They discussed what their agenda should be now that a Republican few, if any, of them had supported was president. Were there positive aspects to be gleaned from Trump’s populism on issues like immigration? How far should Vance go to accommodate himself to the cultural-heroin president? One thing was certain: The people in the room were already losing their value to Vance.

A week later, on February 3, he spoke about Hillbilly Elegy and Trump at David Axelrod’s Institute of Politics, in Chicago. He gave one of his most thoughtful performances, trying to tie the unraveling threads of the country back together, urging his audience to see the common ground between working-class Black and white Americans, arguing that both the cultural left and the racist alt‑right represented a small number of mostly coastal elites. But he also made a startling claim about Trump that he would return to in the coming months and years: “If you go to one of his rallies, it’s maybe 5 percent him being really outrageous and offensive, and 95 percent him talking about ‘Here are all the things that are wrong in your community, here’s why they’re wrong, and I’m going to bring back jobs.’ That was the core thesis of Trump’s entire argument.”

Never mind the tone, Vance was saying, it’s trivial—pay attention to the content. But his percentages weren’t remotely accurate, and he was ignoring the inextricable bond between inflammatory language and extreme policies that held Trump’s speeches together and thrilled his crowds: What’s wrong in your community is them. Vance, too intelligent not to sense the hollow core of his claim, was taking a step toward Trump.

He also informed his audience that he was moving back to Ohio.

According to a classmate, while still in law school Vance had gotten in touch with Thiel, who extended an open invitation to come see him in Silicon Valley. After graduation, marriage to Usha, and short stints in the legal profession, he moved to San Francisco and, in 2016, started working at Thiel’s venture-capital firm Mithril. But technology investing seemed to hold little more interest for him than corporate law. What excited him was politics and ideas. Thiel was preparing to endorse Trump and was mounting a radical attack on America’s sclerotic and corrupt institutions—universities, media, corporations, the regulatory state. His rhetoric became extreme, but his goals remained vague. Trump was an experiment: Thiel wanted to blow things up and see what happened, and if it all went wrong he could move to New Zealand, where he’d invested millions of dollars and acquired citizenship. The alliance between Thiel (monopoly advocate, cognitive elitist, believer in supermen, admirer of the antidemocratic thinkers Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss) and Vance (son of the common people, who get screwed when things go wrong and have no way out) shows that reactionary populism is capacious enough to appeal to every resentment of the liberal status quo.

With prolonged exposure to the master class—the junkets in Aspen and Sun Valley—Vance collected disillusioning stories that would later help justify his political transformation: the tech CEO whose answer for the loss of purpose among displaced workers was “digital, fully immersive gaming”; the hotel mogul who complained that Trump’s anti-immigrant policy made it harder for him to find low-wage workers. One feels that these clueless capitalists, like the condescending Yalies of half a decade earlier, played a genuine role in Vance’s turn away from the establishment, but that he enlisted them disproportionately. Incidents like these provided a kind of indulgence that allowed him to feel that he wasn’t with the elites after all, wasn’t betraying his own people while explaining their pathologies over dinner to the superrich—a role that was becoming more and more distasteful—and under the table he and Usha could quietly signal to each other: We have to get the hell out of here. These people are crazy.

The Vances moved first to Columbus in 2017, then bought a mansion in Cincinnati the following year and filled it with children while they both pursued the extremely busy careers of the meritocracy. Vance explained his return to Ohio as a desire to give back to his troubled home region and help reverse its brain drain; his political ambitions went unmentioned. He announced the creation of a nonprofit to combat the opioid epidemic, but the group, Our Ohio Renewal, raised almost no money and folded before it had achieved much more than placing a couple of op-eds. He put more effort into funding regional start-ups with venture capital, but one of his biggest bets, an indoor-agriculture company in Appalachia, went bankrupt. With seed money from Thiel, in 2019 Vance co-founded his own firm, Narya Capital, and invested in the right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble and a prayer app called Hallow. Like Thiel’s Mithril Capital and big-data company, Palantir, the name Narya comes from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—a novel that obsesses a certain type of brainy conservative, particularly younger religious ones, with its hierarchical social order and apocalyptic battle between good and evil. As Vance turned away from classical liberalism, Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers gave way to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. That same year, he became a Roman Catholic.

Around Easter 2020 Vance published an essay about his conversion in the Catholic journal The Lamp. It describes a largely intellectual experience, informed by reading Saint Augustine and the literary critic René Girard, driven by disenchantment with the scramble for credentials and consumer goods, and slowed by his reluctance to embrace a form of Christianity that would have been alien to Mamaw, his late grandmother. He finally made up his mind when he “began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims.” Vance hoped that Catholicism would help him to care less about professional prestige, “let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.” However he is doing in private, it’s hard to see the hand of Catholic humility at work in his public life. His conversion anticipated a sharp turn in how he went about pursuing power, and it coincided with a wave of high-profile conservatives turning to religion. The essay was titled “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Vance didn’t give up his former beliefs all at once. It took him four years, from 2017 until 2021, to abandon one politics for another—to go from Never Trump to Only Trump. Compared with the overnight conversion experiences of innumerable Republicans, this pace seems admirably slow, and it probably reflects Vance’s seriousness about political ideas. He took time to make them intellectually coherent; then the moral descent was swift and total.

[Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of J. D. Vance]

A close friend of Vance’s, another Ohioan, gave the most generous explanation of his political conversion. “His views have always been kind of rooted toward doing good for the working-class segment of America,” the friend told me. Progressives embraced an identity politics that placed Vance’s people somewhere near the bottom, and standard conservative policies hadn’t worked for them, especially on trade. In Ohio, Vance found that his people had become big Trump supporters. By 2018, the friend told me, Vance believed that Trump “was committed at least to doing the things he said and fixing the problems that J.D. also identified as problems”—the loss of jobs and decline of communities. In 2017 Vance had said that manufacturing jobs had been lost mainly to automation, and that protectionism wouldn’t bring them back. Before long he was blaming globalization, China, and the Republican donor class. “At that point J.D. realized he was very aligned with Trump on the issues,” the friend said.

In 2018, Vance told an acquaintance that he was thinking of voting for Trump in 2020. Onstage with Amy Chua that same year at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he said that people he knew in Ohio were angrier at Wall Street and Silicon Valley types than at ethnic- or religious-minority groups, and that Trump’s speeches, though “tinged with criticisms of Mexican immigrants or Muslims,” directed 85 percent of their vitriol at “coastal elites.” Another doubtful calculation—but it allowed Vance to align Trump’s more acceptable hostilities with those of his people and, by implication, his own. He wasn’t going to insult Mexicans and Muslims in front of an Aspen crowd, but the crowd itself was more than fair game.

The next year, at a pair of conservative conferences, Vance argued that libertarianism didn’t have the answer for what ails American parents and children, workers and communities. He championed a “pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American-nation conservatism,” and he said: “In my own life, I’ve felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son.” The policy implications weren’t entirely clear. He was against abortion, Facebook apps designed to addict children, pointless wars that got his Marine buddies killed, and CEOs who didn’t care about American workers and families; he was for mothers and kids. He ended one speech by saying, “Donald Trump has really opened up the debate on a lot of these issues, from foreign policy to health care to trade to immigration.”

By 2020 Vance had publicly turned away from the residue of Reaganism toward what came to be called “the new right,” “national conservatism,” or simply “populism.” In a sense, he was following the well-trod path of his generation of conservatives. The Republican establishment had failed, the reformers hadn’t amounted to much, the Never Trumpers had lost—here was the obvious alternative.

But what had Trump actually done for people in the postindustrial heartland? The fentanyl crisis raged on, manufacturing job growth remained anemic, and the president’s main achievement—a tax cut—benefited corporations and billionaires far more than the working class. Vance knew all of this, and in early 2020 he wrote to one correspondent: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” But the political winds had turned, and now he massaged his public remarks about Trump into vague approval while keeping his criticism private. Vance was getting ready to enter politics.

The generous account of Vance’s political conversion contains some truth. It still fails to explain what followed.

A change in his view of tariffs didn’t require Vance to go to Mar-a-Lago with Peter Thiel in early 2021 to seek the disgraced ex-president’s forgiveness, then start and never stop repeating the very lie about a stolen election that he had warned against in 2016. In moving away from the Enlightenment and globalist neoliberalism, he could have stopped at the reactionary writer Christopher Caldwell or the post-liberal scholar Patrick Deneen. He didn’t need to spend 90 minutes schmoozing with an alt-right podcaster and rape apologist who goes by Jack Murphy (his real name is John Goldman), insisting ominously: “We are in a late-republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

[Cassie Chambers Armstrong: ‘Hillbilly’ women will get no help from J. D. Vance]

Vance could have run for the Senate as a populist without maligning half his compatriots—liberals, immigrants, women without children—as hostile to America. He could have become a father without devoting a speech to mocking the “childless left.” The Catholic Church didn’t command him to stop caring about human beings in other countries, or to value Israel more than Ukraine because most Americans are Christian and Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Kyiv. He could have turned away from his Ivy League credentials after they stopped being useful without declaring war on higher education and calling professors “the enemy.” He could have put aside his law degree and still held on to what it taught him about judicial independence and due process.

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

The 2024 Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, where Vance became Trump’s nominee for vice president

After 2020 the prevailing politics on the right was apocalyptic, vituperative, and very online. Vance, ever skilled at adaptation, went with it all the way. If, as his patron Thiel argued, the country was under the control of a totalitarian, brain-dead left, almost any form of resistance was justified. When Vance argued that “the culture war is class warfare,” he was giving himself license to stigmatize large groups of Americans and flout the rule of law as long as he did it in the name of an abstraction called the working class.

But Vance never got away from elites. He simply exchanged one set of benefactors for another—traded Yale professors and TED audiences and progressive Silicon Valley CEOs for the money and influence that came with Peter Thiel, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. One elite elevated him to justify their contempt for the working class; the other championed him in order to burn down the first. Vance is interesting not only because he changed camps and was talented enough to thrive in both, but because the camps themselves, out of the lesser sin of decadence or the greater sin of nihilism, have so little to offer the country.

Vance transformed himself into the fullest incarnation of the Trump reaction—fuller than Trump himself, because Vance is more intelligent and disciplined, less likely to wander and stop making sense. He willed this change on himself because he had a lot to atone for and he was in a hurry. It won him Trump’s blessing in 2022 in a U.S. Senate race that Vance was losing, which gave him the Republican nomination and the election, leading to his choice as vice president in 2024, which could make him Trump’s 44-year-old successor in 2028.

Vance’s political transformation is so complete that it’s also physical. In the film adaptation of the Vance novel, imagine a scene in which the protagonist’s features in 2016 dissolve into a very different face circa 2025. The round cheeks and pudgy chin are now hidden by the growth of a Trump Jr. beard. The blue eyes, no longer boyish, are flatter, and they smile less. And the voice, which used to have an almost apologetic tone, as if he wasn’t sure of his right to hold the stage, now carries a constant edge, a kind of taunt. He’s more handsome but less appealing, and the loss of appeal comes from the fact that, like the movement that now runs the country, he’s animated by what he hates.

Like Trump, Vance shows no interest in governing on behalf of anyone outside MAGA. But the various phases of his life story make him—and him alone—the embodiment of all the movement’s parts. In a speech in March at a business conference, he called himself a “proud member of both tribes” of the ruling coalition—meaning of the populists like Steve Bannon, and of the techno-futurists like Elon Musk. He discounted the likelihood that they’ll fall out, and he insisted that innovations such as artificial intelligence will benefit ordinary Americans, because—despite the evidence of the past half century—“it’s technology that increases the value of labor.” MAGA can’t breathe without an enemy, and workers and innovators have “the same enemy”: the government. But MAGA is now the government, and the contradictions between its populists and its oligarchs are obvious.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Vice President Vance arrives in the Rose Garden for the president’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.

Vance’s transformation has another advantage besides the obvious one for his political prospects. When he grins slyly and says, “I’m gonna get in trouble for this” before launching an attack on some despised group, you can feel him shucking off constraints that he’s had to impose on himself since that recruitment dinner at Yale—or even earlier, since he was a boy in Middletown surviving the violence of adults. This more aggressive Vance has drawn closer to that hillbilly culture he long ago escaped. The vice president of the United States doesn’t let a challenge to his honor pass. He’s quick to anger, ready with a jibe, picks fights on social media, and brandishes insults such as “moralistic garbage” and “smug, self-assured bullshit.” He divides the world into kinfolk and enemies, with steadfast loyalty for those in the first category and suspicion or hostility for the great majority consigned to the second. He justifies every cruel policy, blatant falsehood, and constitutional breach by aligning himself with the unfairly treated people he grew up with, whether or not his administration is doing them any actual good. His idea of American identity has gone hard and narrow—not the encompassing creed of the founding documents, but the Appalachian dirt of the graveyard where his ancestors lie buried.

To succeed in the world of elites, Vance had to let himself be civilized, at a psychological cost. When that world no longer offered what he wanted, he found a new world of different elites. They lifted him to unimagined heights of power, and at the same time they brought him full circle, to a return of the repressed.

This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “The Talented Mr. Vance.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

*Lead-Image Sources: Stephen Maturen / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call / Getty.

Be a Patriot

2025-04-10T06:00:00-04:00

Professors Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley are leaving Yale for the University of Toronto. Some of their reasons might be personal and professional, but these well-known academics—two historians and a philosopher—aren’t just changing jobs. They’re fleeing America as they see it falling under an authoritarian regime. They’re watching the rule of law wither and due process disappear while a chill of fear settles over the country’s most powerful law firms, universities, and media owners. They’re getting out while they can.

So are thousands of other Americans who are looking for work abroad, researching foreign schools for their kids, trying to convert a grandparent’s birth country into a second passport, or saving up several hundred thousand dollars to buy citizenship in Dominica or Vanuatu. Many more Americans are discussing leaving with their families and friends. Perhaps you’re one of them.

When I heard the news of the Yale exodus, I wondered if my failure to explore an exit makes me stupid and complacent. I don’t want to think I’m one of the sanguine fools who can’t see the laser pointed at his own head—who doesn’t want to lose his savings and waits to flee until it’s too late. Perhaps I was supposed to applaud the professors’ wisdom and courage in realizing that the time had come to leave. But instead, I felt betrayed.

Snyder is a brilliant historian of modern Europe; Shore, his wife, is an intellectual historian focused on Eastern Europe; Stanley is an analytic philosopher who has refashioned himself as an expert on fascism. In the Trump era, Snyder and Stanley have published popular books on authoritarianism—How Fascism Works, On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom. All three professors have traveled to wartime Ukraine, tirelessly supported its cause, denounced Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and explained to their fellow Americans what history teaches about the collapse of free countries into dictatorships. Snyder says that his reasons for leaving are entirely personal, but Shore insists that she and her husband are escaping a “reign of terror” in America. Stanley compares the move to leaving Germany in 1933.

Snyder’s best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, is an instruction manual on how to resist authoritarianism. Lesson 1 warns: “Do not obey in advance.” It’s hard not to conclude that the Yale professors are doing just that. Cutting and running at a difficult moment, before the state has even targeted them, feels like a preemptive concession to Trump—a decision that Shore says she and Snyder made after his reelection.

Very few people are capable of heroism under oppression. For anyone facing death, arrest, or even persistent harassment, fleeing the country is the sane course. But the secret police aren’t coming for Snyder, Shore, or Stanley. Yale, like other top-ranking universities, stands to lose millions of dollars in federal funding, but its scholars—especially those with tenure and American citizenship—are still free to speak up on behalf of an unjustly deported immigrant, defend a trans student against bullying and humiliation, protest the destruction of the federal government, and even denounce Elon Musk on X. They can still write books about fascism—more urgently now than ever. Snyder, Shore, and Stanley are deserting their posts in this country just as the battle that they’ve warned us about and told us how to fight is coming to a head.

[Marc Novicoff: The Kennedy Center performers who didn’t cancel]

Following Trump’s first election, in 2016, a British journalist published an essay in The New Yorker explaining why, after decades in New York, she was returning to London. Having shown its best face during the Obama years, America had let her and itself down, so it was time to leave. She had obtained United States citizenship, but she was exercising her option to get out now that the going here was no longer good; if the winds shifted again, she might come back with her American passport. Abandoning a country that had treated her well at just the moment when it ran into trouble defined citizenship as a transactional relationship. The essay seemed written to confirm the right-wing stereotype of the coastal elite with no real commitment to this country.

You don’t have to be a dual citizen for your attachment to be transactional. Many Americans—I’m one—believe that our country’s identity rests on an idea, but an idea can be corrupted and betrayed, and then disillusionment might break the bonds of affection: I’ll stay with you as long as you’re beautiful, good, and true. Let yourself go, and I’m out of here. In an essay on the website Persuasion, a former government official, writing under the pseudonym William A. Finnegan, says that he is going to expatriate himself because America has broken its promise and his heart. His essay is a farewell love letter from an American who served his country for years: “And so we grieve—not just for what we’re leaving behind, but for the version of America we once believed in.” This pseudonymous public servant isn’t leaving because of any personal danger. His America was worth staying for only as long as it remained the America of the Declaration and the Constitution, Lincoln’s last best hope, Reagan’s shining city on a hill. Trump’s gargoyle nation is unrecognizable to William A. Finnegan, and it’s too late to do anything about it: “If you still believe change is possible from within, I envy you. I truly do.”

How will you know when it’s time to go? When Trump deports an inconvenient American citizen and ignores a court order to bring him or her back home? Or when Yale is intimidated into firing a law professor for teaching civil rights? Or the Justice Department invents a pretext for FBI agents to confiscate computers in the offices of an independent publication and take down its website? Or the 2026 midterms seem certain to be unfree and unfair? Or when none of these extreme possibilities happens, but life in America becomes so rotten with injustice and corruption, so colorlessly orthodox, so unavoidably compromising, so impoverished, so shitty, that you lose the will to stay here? When your children plead with you to move abroad?

[Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: Americans are buying an escape plan]

What if you decide the time has come to leave and find that it’s too late?

I can’t answer these questions for myself, let alone for anyone else. But I don’t believe the time has come—not even close. Americans are just beginning to find their voices against the destruction of our democracy. They’re raising them in town halls, city streets, schools, media, courts, Congress, and conversations across the country. The awakening is slow and incoherent because the assault is coming so fast and on so many fronts: constitutional, legal, bureaucratic, economic, cultural, moral. Above all, moral. Trump’s greatest weapon is his power to convince Americans that their country isn’t worth saving. Some public intellectuals already seem persuaded.

The belief that America stands for an idea beyond blood and soil makes its identity fragile, because an idea lives in people’s minds, where it is subject to lies, hatred, ignorance, despair, even extinction. But for this very reason, as long as enough Americans continue to believe in the idea with enough conviction to stick it out here and fight, the country that you and I once lived in will still exist for the generation after us. Even with Trump memes, tariff charts, Signal chats, and masked police, America will remain my desecrated home. Snyder’s Lesson 19 is this command: “Be a patriot.”

The Hollow Men

2025-03-25T08:00:00-04:00

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In George Orwell’s 1984, at the climax of Hate Week, Oceania is suddenly no longer at war with Eurasia, but instead is at war with Eastasia, and always has been. The pivot comes with no explanation or even announcement. During a public harangue, a Party orator is handed a scrap of paper and redirects his vitriol “mid-sentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.”

Republican politicians in Donald Trump’s Inner Party faced a similar verbal challenge when the president changed sides in Russia’s war against Ukraine. One morning in late February, Republicans in Washington greeted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero for continuing to resist Russian aggression. By afternoon, following Zelensky’s meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, the Ukrainian leader was an ungrateful, troublesome, and badly dressed warmonger who, if he hadn’t actually started the conflict with Russia, was the only obstacle to ending it.

After this new line was communicated to party leaders, a pro-Zelensky social-media post was taken down as swiftly as the banners denouncing Eurasia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Senator Lindsey Graham—all supporters of Ukraine—were sent out in front of the cameras like the Hate Week orator, not to explain a new policy but to pretend that nothing had changed while America switched sides. Using nearly identical language, Rubio, Johnson, and Graham declared that Zelensky must do Trump’s bidding, which is also Vladimir Putin’s bidding, and capitulate to Russia; otherwise, Johnson and Graham added, Zelensky should resign. America’s enemy isn’t Russia. America’s enemy is Ukraine.

[David Frum: At least now we know the truth]

The philosopher Henri Bergson observed, “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” The cause of laughter is the “deflection of life towards the mechanical.” This insight explains why there is something comical about politicians when they substitute programmed language for speech that reflects actual thought. They are besuited contraptions, like another orthodoxy-spouting ideologue in 1984 whose spectacles catch the light and seem to render him eyeless while his jaw keeps moving, as if “this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy.” Having emptied themselves of the capacity or will for independent judgment, they become extremely fluent automatons, able to put together whole paragraphs of logical-sounding arguments, but with no connection between brain and mouth. Every politician is required to speak like a robot some of the time; it takes a special talent to betray an entire worldview without missing a beat.

Graham’s mechanical style is to flit almost gleefully from one position to its opposite while remaining a party insider, which is his only consistent position and the justification for all his others. Johnson stares through his glasses and gropes for the appropriate words with the unease of a simple man trying not to screw up his lines: “I can tell you that we are—we are re-exerting peace through strength. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We knew that this moment would come, we worked hard for it to come, and now it’s here.” Rubio is a more complex case. He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.

But Rubio had already begun the process of mechanizing himself weeks before, when he shut down foreign-aid programs that he had always supported. Reappearing in public after the meeting with Zelensky, he denounced the Ukrainian president with the overzealous exasperation of a successfully hollowed policy maker.

When a leader requires his underlings to say what they know isn’t true—up is down, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, Ukraine is to blame—it’s a test of loyalty and a show of dominance. Ritualized humiliation is essential to an authoritarian regime. Trump forces aides, advisers, and the friendly press that he allows into the room to utter absurdities on his behalf in order to bind them closer to him, and thereby frees himself from any restraint. They know from the example of more courageous or less careful colleagues that any quiver of independence will doom them politically, and perhaps even harm them physically. Almost immediately, it seems, they cease to be troubled by conscience or even motivated by fear. As they become more machinelike, they forget that they ever held a different idea, or any idea at all. You can see it in their relaxed features and smoother delivery.

[From the October 2024 issue: Mark Leibovich on hypocrisy, spinelessness, and the triumph of Donald Trump]

Trump alone is allowed to say what he thinks. There’s nothing laughably mechanical about his abandonment of Ukraine, Europe, and American leadership of the free world; he doesn’t embrace Russia like an eyeless dummy. He never sounded more natural, or truer to himself, than when he told Zelensky of his bond of sympathy with Putin and mocked the Ukrainian president for the agony that Russia has inflicted on his country. And if, a week or two later, American policy on the war flipped again, it wasn’t because Trump’s worldview changed—he still prefers dictators and wants to be one of them. It only meant that the leader can declare that Oceania is at war with Eastasia or Eurasia on any given day.

At least from the time he was 5 years old and, according to Maggie Haberman’s biography, Confidence Man, threw rocks at a baby in a playpen, Trump has admired strength and despised weakness. Terms used by Ukraine’s defenders, such as sovereignty, democracy, and shared values, obviously disgust him, because they’re the language of the weak. For Trump, strength has nothing to do with the classical virtues of nobility and courage; it’s the raw power to humiliate another, whether a person or a country. Zelensky’s physical and moral courage, including his refusal to be belittled on camera in the Oval Office, enrages Trump, for he’s accustomed to endless subservience and flattery.

Trump’s decision in March to halt the flow of arms and intelligence to Ukraine doesn’t follow a foreign policy of isolationism. When Vance, running for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio in 2022, said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” he was expressing an isolationist sentiment. This indifference falls well short of Trump’s contempt for Zelensky and long-standing attraction to Putin. Trump wants Russia to win and Ukraine to lose.

Some analysts argue that Trump is turning American foreign policy toward “realism”: a cold calculation that Ukraine falls in Russia’s sphere of influence, not ours; that defending an embattled democracy against a much larger and more powerful dictatorship depletes American resources without serving its interests; that, in an ever more multipolar world, the United States is overcommitted; that the U.S. should stop trying to uphold global rules and democratic values, and start acting like a traditional great power that uses its immense strength to secure specific interests.

These sound like rational claims, but they don’t describe Trump’s words and actions. There’s nothing realistic about aiding a dangerous adversary, undermining allies, breaking agreements, extorting concessions, threatening annexations, and destroying an order that has expanded American influence and made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history. These are the policies of crude power worship, not realism. They are extensions of Trump’s character around the world, and they will destroy all that Americans and others value about this country, turning the United States into a shinier image of Putin’s Russia. It doesn’t matter whether Trump is an actual Russian asset; he’s already doing the work of one.

A poll in early March by the civic organization More in Common shows that Americans haven’t abandoned all the values that Trump and his sycophants are trashing. Nearly two-thirds of respondents still sympathize with Ukraine and more want to continue arming it. Even among Republicans, a majority believe that Russia is to blame for the war and consider Putin a dictator. Support for Russia is in the low single digits. The survey shows that years of propaganda and lies from Trump and the MAGA right have failed to poison the body politic with cynicism. Although the elites in power insist that might makes right and that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, most ordinary Americans haven’t yet thrown away a worldview of true and false, right and wrong. They might be America’s last best hope.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “The Hollow Men.”

‘What About Six Years of Friendship and Fighting Together?’

2025-03-17T12:49:18-04:00

Updated at 9:10 a.m. ET on March 23, 2026

Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan. Sixty thousand exhaustively vetted Afghan visa applicants and refugees, who risked their lives alongside the Americans in their country as interpreters, drivers, soldiers, judges, and journalists, and who now face imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Taliban, will have the golden doors to the United States shut in their face.

As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in the summer of 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio co-authored a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to “ensure the safety and security of Afghans who have worked closely” with American intelligence agencies: “Abandoning these individuals” would be “a stain on our national conscience.” After the Afghan government fell and tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport, trying desperately to be evacuated with the last American troops, Rubio excoriated Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind to be killed. Then-Representative Mike Waltz warned that “our local allies are being hunted down.” Kash Patel accused the Biden administration of “the stranding of US personnel and allies.” The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a damning report on the fall of Afghanistan, said that Biden’s “abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban—their brothers in arms—is a stain on [his] administration.”

As for then-ex-President Donald Trump, he was incredulous, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and others we want to try and help? But by the way, I’m America first. The Americans come out first. But we’re also going to help people that helped us.”

On Inauguration Day, President Trump signed executive orders pausing foreign aid and refugee processing. He turned off the flow of money to private agencies that helped Afghans start new lives in America and shut down the State Department office set up under Biden to oversee their resettlement. Since then, the number of Afghans able to enter the U.S. has dwindled to zero. The travel ban will make the halt official and permanent. All of the outrage at the Biden administration’s betrayal of our Afghan allies from the very Republicans who now command U.S. foreign policy will go down as sheer opportunism. The stain will be on them.

[David A. Graham: Biden’s ‘America First’ policy on Afghanistan]

“All these fucking people had a lot to say about what was going on in August 2021,” says Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations that help resettle Afghan allies in this country. Politically, Biden never recovered from the chaotic fall of Kabul and the terrible scenes at the airport, climaxing in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans. Biden deserved blame above all for failing to take seriously America’s obligation to vulnerable Afghans who had placed their trust in this country. But during the years following the debacle, AfghanEvac and other civil-society groups worked with the Biden administration to bring nearly 200,000 Afghans to America—a little-known fact that partly redeemed its failures. Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood.

VanDiver and his colleagues are scrambling to persuade their contacts inside the administration to exempt Afghans from the coming travel ban. Many of his military friends are stunned that the president they voted for is betraying Afghans they had to leave behind. “I wonder if President Trump knows that Stephen Miller is ruining his relationship with veterans because of what we’re doing to our Afghan allies,” he told me. According to VanDiver, Rubio and Waltz—now the secretary of state and the national security adviser, respectively—are sympathetic to the veterans’ appeal; but Miller, the hard-line homeland-security adviser, will have the final say with Trump.

Forty-five thousand Afghans have completed the onerous steps to qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as former employees of the U.S. government in Afghanistan and are ready to travel. Fifteen thousand more Afghans, most in Pakistan, have reached the end of refugee processing as close affiliates of the American war effort. They’ve been waiting through years of referrals, applications, interviews, medical exams, and security vetting. Some of them have plane tickets. Another 147,000 Afghans are well along in qualifying for Special Immigrant Visas.“We did make a promise as a nation to these people that if they stood beside the U.S. mission and worked with us, that they would have a pathway to come build lives here,” a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of a policy against speaking to journalists, told me. “If we don’t keep the promises we make to our wartime allies, then our standing globally should be questioned by any other future potential allies we might have.” Afghans who finally reach the United States, the official continued, “are so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be in this country. They believe in the promise of this country.”

One young Afghan couple—I’ll call them Farhad and Saman, because using their real names would expose them to danger—are both veterans of the Afghan special forces, and they spent years serving and fighting alongside U.S. Army Rangers and other special operators. After the American departure, they were hunted by Talibs and took shelter in safe houses around the country, while family members were harassed, arrested, and tortured. In 2022, with the help of a small group of American supporters, the couple crossed the border into Pakistan and found lodgings in Islamabad, where they waited with their small children for their refugee applications to be processed. Last summer they were interviewed by the U.S. embassy and passed their medical exams; but security screening took so long that, by the time it was completed, their medical exams had expired. On January 2 of this year, they passed their second medical exams and were told by the International Organization of Migration that they would soon depart for the United States. “But on January 24, we realized unfortunately that Donald Trump is in office and everything is stopped,” Farhad told me by phone. “It was at the very last minute, the last stage. I didn’t expect that this would happen. It made a very bad impact on me and my family.”

[George Packer: The betrayal]

Recently, stepped-up Pakistani police patrols and raids made the couple flee Islamabad to another region. Their 3-year-old daughter and infant son don’t have visas, and Farhad’s and Saman’s visas expire on April 17, with no prospect of renewal. Fear of being stopped at a checkpoint keeps the family inside their small apartment almost all the time, while their daughter wonders when she’ll be able to start school. They ask neighbors to buy food for them at the bazaar. The Pakistani government has begun to issue warnings over loudspeakers at mosques that local people who rent property to Afghan refugees will face legal consequences. “I’m stressed that the U.S. government is not going to relocate us and will not help us to continue processing our case,” Farhad said. He has sent letters of inquiry to embassies of other countries, with no reply. “I’m worried that eventually somehow I’ll be deported to Afghanistan, and deportation means I’ll be caught by the Taliban and killed. My wife will not be excluded. She will face the same consequences. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think what will happen to my kids—they’ll be orphans. It’s too much for me to take in.”

When Republican leaders were shaming the Biden administration for abandoning this country’s Afghan allies, they sometimes used the military phrase brothers in arms. Now, as those same Republicans in the Trump administration are betraying the same Afghans all over again, Farhad used the phrase with me. “I fought like brothers in arms with the Americans in uniform for six years, shoulder to shoulder, everywhere,” he said. “If this travel ban happens, the question is, what about the six years of friendship and fighting together? What about helping your friends and allies? That’s the question I have.”

This article originally stated that Farhad and Saman left Afghanistan in 2023. In fact, they left in 2022.

The Washington Post Is Dying a Death of Despair

2025-03-01T07:00:00-05:00

How does a free press in this country die? Probably not the way Americans imagine. It’s unlikely—though not impossible—that heavily armed police are going to raid newspaper offices, confiscate computers, and haul editors and reporters off to jail. Media websites probably won’t go dark under government bans. Pro-regime militias with official backing won’t light a bonfire of anti-regime books and magazines on Pennsylvania Avenue. The demise of independent journalism in the United States will be less spectacular than the notorious examples of other times and places—as much voluntary as coerced, less like a murder than a death of despair.

The Washington Post is dying not in darkness but by the light of noon, and by its own hand. Over the past few months, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shed a large part of the paper’s workforce, asserted control over the management of its newsroom, spiked a presidential endorsement for the first time in the paper’s history, and driven out some of its best writers and editors. On Wednesday, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages will exclude views that contradict his own libertarianism. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he wrote to his staff—missing the irony that he had just curtailed liberty of expression. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Anyone wanting a different idea, Bezos added, could find it on the internet. For an argument in defense of anti-trust enforcement, stricter labor laws, tariffs on foreign goods, or higher taxes on billionaires, readers can take a dive into the online ocean and something will turn up.

Aside from the mind-numbing monotony, why does it matter that the Post’s opinion pages will no longer allow pieces from, say, a social-democratic or economic-nationalist point of view? One reason is that “viewpoint diversity”—the airing of various and conflicting ideas—prevents the onset of orthodoxy, creates an atmosphere of open inquiry, and thereby comes closer to the discovery of truth. This argument goes back to John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

[Joshua Benton: Jeff Bezos’s hypocritical assertion of power]

We are likelier to reach the truth and understand why it’s true if we constantly subject our ideas to criticism. I dislike the opinion pieces of the Post’s arch-conservative Marc Thiessen, but I don’t want them killed—not just for the sake of free expression and lively debate, but because they force me to see my own views in a negative light and, once in a while, revise them. Even “personal liberties and free markets” aren’t self-explanatory or self-justifying. To mean anything, these ideas need to be challenged. Otherwise, Bezos’s twin pillars will petrify into dogma and eventually crumble.

But there’s something more profoundly dispiriting about the Post making itself the predictable mouthpiece of a single viewpoint. We don’t expect publications such as First Things, The Nation, and the Daily Caller to host ideological battles—their purpose is to advance a distinct outlook. But a national newspaper like the Post should speak to a democratic public and represent public opinion, which means publishing the widest possible range of thoughtful views. When it ceases to do so, it becomes more like the narrow, partisan, mutually hostile, and uncomprehending media that create most of the noise in America today.

At times in recent years, under pressure from staff and subscribers, the Post and The New York Times have edged closer to this model (one name for it was “moral clarity”). Bezos’s edict takes the Post a large step in that direction, just as it would have done had he ordered that all opinion writing must reflect the value of social justice. Whether Bezos is wounding the Post in this way to ingratiate himself with the new president or for some other reason, he has made his property less resilient and more like the kind of paper that Trump knows how to break. Its opinion pages will continue to criticize the administration, but the views it airs will matter less. In a landscape of dead and sick newspapers, Bezos is making his own less free, less intelligent, less surprising, and more balkanized.

This is exactly the kind of press with which an authoritarian ruler like President Donald Trump is comfortable. Trump doesn’t believe in the free search for truth; in his mental world there is no truth, only friends and enemies, his side against the other side. The purpose of media isn’t to bring information and ideas to the public, but to win the war for power. When he says that the news is fake, he doesn’t just mean that the Times or CBS is running false stories. He is signaling that truth is irrelevant because everything is rigged. In this game, Trump and his enablers and sycophants are learning to control the information space.

[Adrienne LaFrance: Intimidating Americans won’t work]

The First Amendment makes it hard for any president, even an openly authoritarian one like Trump, to kill the press, but he can create incentives for its owners—whether corporate or plutocratic—to bend to him. In December, Disney settled a weak defamation suit brought by Trump against ABC News, encouraging him to bring economic and political pressure on other news organizations. This week Paramount, which owns CBS, is in talks with Trump’s lawyers about an even more dubious lawsuit directed at the editing of a 60 Minutes episode. The outcome of mediation might affect the administration’s willingness to allow Paramount’s sale to the tech mogul Larry Ellison. In other words, CBS might be forced into a settlement to advance the business interests of its parent company and those of a multibillionaire who is close to the president.

Trump’s attacks on the press, as on other institutions, show how much democratic freedom depends on custom and restraint. These are always breakable if a president has the will. If an administration decides to give access only to news organizations that provide favorable coverage, the White House Correspondents’ Association can do little more than complain. If a president wants to sue a news organization, assert full control of the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, and use them to coerce a media owner to hand over money, the law and Constitution can’t prevent him. The only obstacle is the media’s willingness to say no, which partly depends on the public’s desire for a free press to exist.

Some news organizations will fight, in an atmosphere of constant anxiety, with the prospect of growing irrelevance. Others will count the cost and give in to pressure. And others will feel the direction of the wind and submit on their own, under no pressure at all, like the circus animal that doesn’t need a trainer to tell it to jump.

How Ross Douthat’s Proselytizing Falls Short

2025-02-27T07:30:00-05:00

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

[Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade]

President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.

The Trump World Order

2025-02-20T07:00:00-05:00

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudonyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminishment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing development assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking lifesaving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Modern Voice of War Writing

2025-02-05T07:30:00-05:00

Every war begins in blind folly and ends in unimagined suffering. This is true of all wars but especially of the First World War. Its catalysts were so trivial and its consequences so apocalyptic that they belong in a Swiftian satire of human stupidity: the shooting of a bewhiskered potentate, followed by a botched game of diplomatic chicken, armies mobilized across Europe and cheered on by delirious publics, a whole generation sent to die by the millions in industrial warfare—all for a few miles of mud and barbed wire. Between the assassination in Sarajevo, the mass slaughter in the trenches, and the stagnant front lines lie disproportions so immense that cause and effect lose all relation. The conflict is a sustained demonstration of war’s essential inanity. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” the critic Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory. By this standard, World War I was the most ironic war in history.

What did the soldiers of the Great War think they were going off to defend? King, kaiser, czar, empire, democracy, European civilization, national honor—the reasons, in hindsight, make no sense. By 1917, the meaninglessness of the sacrifice had become clear enough to the combatants, if not to civilians back home: French and Russian troops mutinied, tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides deserted, the British poet and captain Siegfried Sassoon made a public anti-war declaration, and English war poetry turned brutal and bitter. Yet most soldiers, including Sassoon, fought on, under intolerable conditions—rain-soaked and hungry; facing machine-gun fire, shelling, and chlorine gas; surrounded by the half-buried corpses of their comrades and enemies—until the last minute of the last hour before the armistice on November 11, 1918, when, to quote John Kerry, an unknown soldier became “the last man to die for a mistake.”

In some ways, the enormous casualty figures are less staggering than the survivors’ endurance. After all, the living soldiers had to withstand the example of the dead. Near the end of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldier-narrator, Paul Bäumer, says, “Isn’t it remarkable that … regiment after regiment heads into the increasingly hopeless fight, and one attack after another is launched, even as the line recedes and crumbles?” Why did they keep fighting?

Remarque—born Erich Paul Remark in 1898—was a lower-middle-class Prussian, conscripted into the Imperial German Army at age 18, and wounded in action in Flanders after a few weeks at the front in the summer of 1917. That was the end of his combat experience, but the emotions and images of the war haunted him for the next decade. Im Westen nichts Neues was a sensation in Germany in early 1929, and was translated into English later that year. Soon it was available in dozens of languages, and to date it has sold more than 20 million copies—the best-selling German novel ever.

[From the July 1929 issue: Edward Weeks’s review of All Quiet on the Western Front]

A few months ahead of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which appeared in September 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front invented a genre: the warrior’s anti-war testament. Even those who haven’t read the novel are likely to recognize its English title as a sort of requiem for the dead—not ironic like the original German (“Nothing New in the West”), but as sad as the playing of “Taps.” So much that’s become familiar about this genre can be found in Remarque’s book: the journey of the protagonist from youthful idealism through hard experience to bitter realism; the worm’s-eye view of the common soldier, with his narrow focus on danger, physical discomfort, and food, and his hatred of authority; the sense of immediacy, anxiety, and inescapability that comes with episodic, present-tense narration; the unflinching details; the band of brothers that slowly diminishes as they’re killed one by one.

A version of these literary features can be found in earlier writers—Homer, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Stephen Crane. But Remarque gave war writing its modern voice, understated and terrifying, harsh and tender, a voice that says: This is what it’s like. You may not want to hear, but I have to tell you. A passage such as this one in Remarque’s novel—where the first-person narrator is trapped in a watery shell hole with the corpse of an enemy soldier he’s stabbed to death—couldn’t have existed in earlier fiction about war, but it’s become almost standard ever since, without losing its power:

The sun is shining at a slant. I’m numb with exhaustion and hunger. Yesterday is like a fog to me, I have no hope of getting out of here. So I doze off and don’t even notice when evening comes. Dusk is falling. It seems to me it’s coming quickly now. Just one more hour. Three more hours, if it were summer. Just one more hour.

These sentences come from a new translation by Kurt Beals, which renders Remarque’s German in a colloquial register—sometimes caustic, sometimes lyrical—that is itself a product of the Great War. As he explains in his introduction, the original English version of 1929, by an Australian veteran of the war named A. W. Wheen, “is frequently stilted and labored,” as if its prose belongs to an earlier period and wasn’t forged in the fire of the story it tells. In this passage from Wheen, the soldiers have just been inspected by Kaiser Wilhelm II:

Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is blowing bubbles. “But look,” he announces, “I simply can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I have.”

Here is Beals’s translation:

Tjaden is completely fascinated. His mind isn’t usually so lively, but now it’s bubbling over. “Look here,” he announces, “I just can’t fathom that a kaiser has to go to the latrine just like I do.”

He gives us a version that can stand as Remarque’s contemporary.

The huge popularity of All Quiet on the Western Front is a tribute to its universal accessibility. The novel’s force is undiminished by either its familiarity or its historical distance; the story it tells is at once time-bound and timeless. It doesn’t require any interpretive feats—it simply demands that the reader not look away. The narrative is fragmentary, nonlinear, and as static, in a way, as trench warfare. Young Paul Bäumer and his classmates in a provincial German town are exhorted by their schoolmaster to go defend the fatherland. Half a dozen enlist in the same regiment, are trained by an abusive corporal named Himmelstoss (a mailman in civilian life), and soon find themselves under fire somewhere on the Western Front. They learn the specific noise and lethality of each type of artillery, how to find cover in the open, where to forage for piglets and turnips. When one of them dies of his wounds, the others compete for his excellent boots. By the end, only Paul is left.

At one point, Paul and his old schoolmates discuss the reasons for the war. Who started it? Did the kaiser want it? Don’t both sides think they’re right? Who stands to gain? Not the common people, only politicians and generals. “It’s more like a kind of fever,” one of them says. “Nobody really wants it, but all of a sudden it’s there.” Finally they agree to drop the subject. From their point of view, the biggest questions about the war are unanswerable and change nothing. All they know is that they have to keep fighting to stay alive.

[From the December 2013 issue: The war no image could capture]

This is true for soldiers in any war, including “good” ones. In his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” George Orwell, who fought in Spain against fascism, wrote: “A soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war … A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.” Accounts from eastern Ukraine suggest that even soldiers who go off to fight with high morale to defend their country and freedom are eventually overcome by disillusionment not unlike that of Paul and his comrades.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they banned All Quiet on the Western Front and later revoked Remarque’s citizenship, accusing him of being at least French and maybe Jewish. They had their reasons: The great success of an anti-war novel threatened German nationalism and militarism. Hitler, himself a veteran of the Great War, hated any view of it as pointless slaughter. And yet All Quiet on the Western Front has no clear politics; its pacifism, too, is never stated, only implied. “This book is intended neither as an indictment nor as a confession,” Remarque declares in an epigraph, but as “an account of a generation of people who were destroyed by the war—even if they escaped its shells.” The novel presents the Great War as a crime perpetrated by the old against the young, the powerful against the ordinary, and civilians against soldiers.

This last conflict is the one that matters most—more than that between opposing combatants or political outlooks. Before All Quiet on the Western Front, alienation from the home front was rarely a concern of war literature, but it’s become a central theme, as indicated by the title of the Iraq veteran Phil Klay’s collection of short stories, Redeployment. In Remarque’s novel, the horror of the trenches is so radically separate from the rest of life that Paul finds being at home intolerable. When he returns on leave, he can’t bear his mother’s sorrowful love, his sister’s forced good cheer, his father’s fatuous pride, or the bullying of a rear-echelon major whom he encounters by accident. The attitude of civilians amounts to “Thank you for your service” and “On to Paris.” Paul’s only pleasure is seeing his jingoistic schoolmaster, now called up in the reserves, humiliated by one of his former students in the same pointless marching exercises that Paul once suffered through in the name of defending the fatherland.

[From the July 1937 issue: A review of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades]

Paul is like a ghost revisiting his past. But as he moves through the world of his childhood, the identity that’s allowed him to survive the trenches—“indifferent, and often hopeless”—is undone by the feeling that surges back, by the pain of wanting his mother’s comfort. He can’t be both a son and a soldier, and he chooses the second. “I never should have gone on leave,” he thinks, and when it ends, he returns to the war with a kind of relief.

This sequence plays a key role near the end of the 1930 American film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. Its 13 minutes are the movie’s quietest and saddest, but the subplot never appears in the 2022 German production, which won several Academy Awards. The omission is strange, rendering a relentlessly, grotesquely violent film less wrenching. In our time, with military service in most democracies, including America, limited to a small professional army, the chasm between civilian at home and combatant at war has never been greater. One result is that a filmmaker seeking to represent the horror of war as intensely and immediately as Remarque did is likely to make the mistake of showing little other than blood and mud. But Paul’s return home is pivotal to the novel, because in Remarque’s telling, war’s ultimate crime is to make soldiers fit for nothing else. The survivors, winners and losers alike, will come back “tired, broken, burned out, rootless, and hopeless”; incapable of understanding or being understood by the previous generation and the generation to come; doomed to live in their own tortured memories; “superfluous to ourselves.”

[Read: The All Quiet on the Western Front remake flattens the complexity of war]

Here is a partial answer to why the soldiers of the Great War kept fighting long after it was hopeless. They fought to avoid punishment, they fought for their brother soldiers, they fought out of lingering patriotism, and they went on fighting because they saw no way back.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Warrior’s Anti-War Novel.”

The End of Democratic Delusions

2024-12-02T06:00:00-05:00

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The Roosevelt Republic—the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans—endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It’s been variously called the post–post–Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction. By the standard of its predecessors, we’re still at the beginning.

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.

For two and a half centuries American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics—which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn. Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.

This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate—in some cases, celebrate—Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes—not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people.

The triumph of the Trump Reaction should put an end to two progressive illusions that have considerably strengthened it. One is the notion that identity is political destiny. For a long time, the Democratic Party regarded demographic change in America, the coming “minority majority,” as a consoling promise during interim Republican victories: As the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue. In the past decade this notion was absorbed into an ideological framework that became the pervasive worldview of progressives—a metaphysics of group identity in which a generalized “people of color” (adjusted during the social-justice revolution of 2020 to “BIPOC”) were assumed to share a common experience of oppression that would determine their collective political behavior, driving them far to the left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights.

The 2024 election exploded this illusion. Nearly half of Latinos and a quarter of Black men voted for Trump. In New York City he did better in Queens and the Bronx, which have majority nonwhite populations, than in Manhattan, with its plurality of wealthy white people. M. Gessen of The New York Times called it “not a good night for solidarity,” but the presumption of like-mindedness among immensely diverse groups of voters should be retired, along with the term people of color, which has lost any usefulness for political analysis.

[Read: The cumulative toll of Democrats’ delusions]

Adjacent to the demographic illusion is a majoritarian one. By this theory, the Democratic Party is kept out of power by a white Republican minority that thwarts the popular will through voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislating, the filibuster, the composition of the Senate, and the Electoral College. By this thinking, the ultimate obstacle to the American promise is the Constitution itself. The United States needs to become less republican and more democratic, with electoral reforms and perhaps a second constitutional convention to give more power to the people. This analysis contains some undeniable truths—the public’s voice is thwarted by structural barriers, partisan machinations, and enormous quantities of plutocratic cash. As long as Republican presidents continued to lose the popular vote, the majoritarian argument was tempting, even if its advocates ignored the likelihood that a new constitution would turn out to be less democratic than the old one.

But every election is a reminder that the country is narrowly divided and has been for decades, with frequent changes of control in the House of Representatives. Now that Trump has won the popular vote and the Electoral College, the majoritarian illusion, like the demographic one, should be seen for what it is: an impediment to Democratic success. It relieved the party of the need to listen and persuade rather than expecting the dei ex machina of population and rule changes to do the work of politics.

When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.

Democrats have become the party of institutionalists. Much of their base is metropolitan, credentialed, economically comfortable, and pro-government. A realignment has been going on since the early ’70s: Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.

I spent the years after the financial crisis reporting in parts of the country that were being ravaged by the Great Recession and the long decline that had preceded it, and were growing hostile toward the country’s first Black president. Three things recurred everywhere I went: a conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class. The morning after Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, a colleague approached me angrily and said, “Those were your people, and you empowered them by making other people feel sorry for them—and it was wrong!”

In some ways, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign tried to reorient the Democratic Party back toward the working class, which was once its backbone. Biden pursued policies and passed legislation to create jobs that don’t require a college degree in communities that have been left behind. Harris studiously avoided campaigning on her identity as a Black and South Asian woman, appealing instead to a vague sense of patriotism and hope. But Biden’s industrial policy didn’t produce results fast enough to offset the damage of inflation—no one I talked with in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Washington County, Pennsylvania, this year seemed to have heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris remained something of a cipher because of Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside until it was too late for her or anyone else to make their case to Democratic voters. The party’s economic policies turned populist, but its structure—unlike the Republican Party’s mass cult of personality—appeared to be a glittering shell of power brokers and celebrities around a hollow core. Rebuilding will be the work of years, and realignment could take decades.

So much of the Trump Reaction’s triumph is unfair. It’s unfair that a degenerate man has twice beaten a decent, capable woman. It’s unfair that Harris graciously conceded defeat, whereas Trump, in her position, would once again have kick-started the machinery of lies that he built on his own behalf, continuing to undermine trust in democracy for years to come. It’s unfair that most of the media immediately moved on from Trump’s hateful rhetoric and threats of violence against migrants and political opponents. His campaign was unforgivable—but in the words of W. H. Auden’s poem “Spain,” “History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”

[From the July/August 2017 issue: What’s wrong with the Democrats?]

The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.

The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions—to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk.

Journalists will have a special challenge in the era of the Trump Reaction. We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds. Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth. “Legacy journalism is dead,” Musk crowed on his own X in the week before the election. Instead of chasing phantoms on social media, journalists would make better use of our dwindling resources, and perhaps regain some of the public’s trust, by doing what we’ve done in every age: expose the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats, and tell the stories of people who can’t speak for themselves.

A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist—critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The End of Democratic Delusions.”