Pay attention to political discourse for a moment and you’ll immediately notice how eager everyone is to point fingers at anyone other than themselves. There’s nothing particularly new or interesting about this—politics has always been about campaigning against an opponent—but the degree to which it is true strikes me as a new development. Just 30 years ago, Bill Clinton famously declared that the era of big government was over, and five years after that Republicans were seriously debating privatizing Social Security. The mood of the country was jubilantly, confidently individualistic. Capitalism had triumphed over communism, we solved politics (liberal democracy) and economics (the Washington Consensus), and the end of history was here. Public life was fading from importance, so now it was up to you to get ahead. There were no more excuses.

Today, every political faction presents the government as the solution to your problems. There is no ideological perspective that does not consider the country systemically compromised in its own way, either because of uncontrolled immigration and DEI, the growth of veto points to construction, or oligopolistic control of politics and the economy. One of the most interesting aspects of progressives’ recent momentum is how unchallenged their economic ideas have been on free-market or individualistic grounds. In 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders still faced routine criticism from the Right and the Center that his policy platform would undermine American entrepreneurship and the work ethic that sustained it. A few years later, that rhetoric is absent from politics.

This development is indicative of a major phenomenon in American politics and culture: the rapid decline of personal responsibility as a civic virtue. At first glance, no serious analyst of American politics—at least on the Left—would bemoan this loss. Personal responsibility has a terrible reputation as the cardinal virtue of a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” attitude that has been thoroughly discredited by the steady erosion of our meritocracy, if it ever existed. The backlash to this is justified, but it is not without consequences. Historically, American society sought to foster personal responsibility to prepare citizens for the duty of self-government. Over time, however, personal responsibility was appropriated by market fundamentalists who used it to justify radical economic reforms that loosened restrictions on capital. When the Great Recession and rising inequality discredited this economic system, personal responsibility did not regain its old status as a necessary component of self-government. Rather, it simply faded away. Consequently, longstanding moral standards are being replaced by personal biases and excuse architectures. For a Left whose political program rests on economic self-government, the decline of personal responsibility could present a unique challenge to successful leftist governance.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of our collective abdication of personal responsibility is that it breaks from the entire American socio-political tradition dating back to the ancients. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics set the historical groundwork for Western civilization’s coupling of ethics and personal responsibility by linking virtue with moral habituation. The text would later become the standard textbook for moral philosophy in Protestant universities, helping to orient the Protestant ethic around hard work, thrift, and self-reliance. By the time of America’s founding, the early settlers had literally thousands of years of ethical and religious teachings preaching the virtue of personal responsibility.

Nor were these teachings limited to the private sphere: John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, widely considered the foundational text of the American Constitution, held that the public has a right and responsibility to resist tyranny if the government violates their rights. The small-r republicanism of the founders—with their concern for liberty, the common good, and civic virtue—also emphasized personal responsibility as a cornerstone of democratic government. Both James Madison and George Washington argued that democratic systems require greater civic virtue than other forms of government, and that America would collapse into mob rule or authoritarian control without a baseline measure of moral responsibility.

Guided by this historical tradition, early American policy emphasized the importance of cultivating responsible citizens capable of self-government. The Jeffersonian ideal of a country of independent Yeomen rested on a belief that small proprietorship produced the private virtues necessary for democracy, including personal responsibility. After the industrial revolution rendered a largely agricultural economy impossible, the Jeffersonian ethic found renewed expression in the 19th-century producerism of Jackson and Lincoln. For nearly a century—until the march of industrialism made the existence of a hereditary wage class undeniable—Americans considered the independence and responsibilities fostered by small proprietorship to be the essence of effective self-government.

Eventually, it became clear that modern capitalism required the government to assume some responsibility for ameliorating poor social conditions. Yet reform movements continued to regard personal responsibility as an important democratic virtue to uphold. The 19th-century populists framed cooperative action, antitrust legislation, and free silver as policies that would strengthen independent farmers and restore the producerist ethic. Early-20th-century liberals agonized over whether it was possible to maintain the “assumption of responsibility” necessary for democratic citizenship under conditions of industrialism. Herbert Croly’s call for “Hamiltonian means” to secure “Jeffersonian ends” shows the importance Progressive Era reformers placed on the old democratic virtues. Even as he called for bold federal interventions into the national economy, Croly insisted that those actions were necessary to preserve citizens’ capacity for self-government in the face of unprecedented corporate power.

The decisive change came when personal responsibility was detached from citizenship and redefined as the willing submission to market forces. Historically, personal responsibility was a civic virtue because it constituted a moral prerequisite to democracy, which is the collective attempt at self-government. During the neoliberal revolution of the 20th-century, however, personal responsibility was emptied of its political character and redefined in strictly economic terms. Market fundamentalists perverted the virtue to justify a radical moral proposition: that we must act in accordance with market forces and accept market outcomes as natural and unquestionable. Through this maneuver, market success became evidence of discipline and good judgment, while failure exposed an inability or reluctance to submit to global capitalism.1 It was your responsibility to be a good steward of your personal human capital, not of the country, or your community, or your ideals. Thus, a virtue once meant to ensure against mob rule or authoritarian consolidation became an argument for the despotism of the market.

This shift carried disastrous consequences. Economically, the neoliberal agenda it supported fostered greater inequality, stagnant wages, and a dramatic increase in capital’s share of the national income at the expense of labor. Trade barriers were reduced or eliminated as a commitment to efficiency and consumption supplanted our responsibility for workers’ economic security. And the public programs and institutions that progressive reformers argued were preconditions to genuine citizenship were condemned for shielding people from the consequences of their choices or distorting efficient capital allocation. Welfare programs, antitrust agencies, and financial regulations were all hollowed out. When those impacted by these decisions looked to the state for support, they found a set of policies narrowly tailored to a personal responsibility approach: small expansions of workforce development and job retraining programs, and slight increases in funding for community colleges.

The cultural impact was equally bad. As the zeitgeist shifted from the civic-mindedness of postwar America to the self-interested rationality of the neoliberal era, we discarded institutions of social solidarity in favor of individualism and a market-minded personal responsibility. American culture fractured into atomized subgroups as community organizations—including local clubs, unions, and churches—saw attendance fall. When social trust decayed without the stabilizing base of community, individualism entered a doom loop. In 1998, The Wall Street Journal asked Americans how important certain values were to them, including patriotism, religion, having children, community involvement, and making money. Of these five values, the fewest respondents described making money as “very important.” When the Journal asked the same question in 2023, the importance of each value had plunged—except for making money. It was now the most important of the five, and the only priority in the entire survey whose importance rose in the last 25 years.

Of course, it’s clearly incorrect to blame this economic and cultural transformation solely on a redefinition of personal responsibility. Economic shocks like the end of the gold standard and cultural shocks like the development of the television and algorithmic media played a much greater role than shifting expectations of what constitutes personal responsibility. But that shift happened in the context of these greater economic and cultural changes, and the tagline that exemplified the redefinition of personal responsibility—pull yourself up by your bootstraps—became one of the most visible cliches of the neoliberal era. As a result, neoliberalism’s distorted personal responsibility was commonly understood as one of its primary moral justifications.

It is no surprise, then, that the backlash to the virtue of personal responsibility has been so severe, particularly on the Left. While most leftists no longer espouse old orthodoxies about the nature of historical development—specifically that history is driven by the dialectical process of class struggle—they continue to maintain a strong emphasis on systemic analysis in their political critique. The analytical framework of historical materialism, in particular, is one of the last remaining vestiges of orthodox Marxism, albeit in a partial and distorted form. It’s difficult to find a leftist who does not believe that individual agency is highly conditioned—especially in the economic sphere—by material conditions.

With this ideological foundation, the Left vociferously argued against neoliberalism’s directive that individuals should take responsibility for their economic circumstances. At first, they were unpersuasive. Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, lawmakers cut welfare programs and instituted strict work requirements for cash payments, food stamps, and public housing vouchers, most notably through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was the 2008 Financial Crisis that represented a dramatic turning point. Bank bailouts revealed that neoliberalism’s valorization of personal responsibility omitted the country’s rich and powerful, who were compensated for a crisis they caused with taxpayers’ money. The working and middle classes, meanwhile, received foreclosure notices and a deeply insufficient stimulus package. After such a visible elite abdication of personal responsibility, the neoliberal insistence that the working-class must take ownership for its economic condition lost most of its credibility. At the very least, the words “personal responsibility” dripped with hypocrisy.

The populist wave that followed 2008 was the nail in the coffin for the neoliberal conception of personal responsibility. With each successive movement throughout the 2010s—the Tea Party, Occupy, the MAGA movement, Bernie Sanders’s campaigns—the populist formation of the exploited “us” vs the exploitative “them” steadily eroded the idea that we were all responsible for our economic circumstances. By the end of Bernie’s 2020 campaign, the neoliberal conception of personal responsibility was thoroughly discredited. How could one possibly argue that individuals are responsible for their economic outcomes when our agency is constrained by employer-sponsored health insurance, the absurd price of higher education, crippling student and medical debt, and a political system captured by the wealthy? Outside of a small subset of “grindset” influencers, you never really hear about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps anymore.

So in the 2020s, what has come of personal responsibility? Unfortunately, the answer is nothing. The decline of neoliberal virtues did not coincide with a revival of republicanism or a renewed patriotism centered on civic virtue. In fact, the three most successful political movements of the decade—right-wing populism, identity-oriented liberalism, and left-wing populism—explicitly argue that individuals are not responsible for their circumstances, and that systemic forces or a societal out-group are to blame for our national problems.

As someone on the Left, I’m quite sympathetic to this instinct, and think it is both a correct analysis of our political economy and a necessary corrective to the neoliberal era. The wealthy have far too much influence over the economy and democracy, and they are wielding this power in a way that undermines individual agency. Clearly, systemic reform is needed.

But the recognition that societal circumstances constrain individual agency is hardening into a belief that acknowledging systemic failures and committing to personal responsibility are incompatible ideas. Across politics and culture, we see this hardening sneak into our understanding of our economy, our relationships, and ourselves.

Of course, the market—which produced many of our most egregious systemic failures—is a primary driver of this dynamic. One of capitalism’s greatest assets is its incredible ability to dampen our imaginations and inculcate a sense of helplessness in its subjects. There is an incredibly narrow range of careers or majors that we consider responsible, and this narrowness is socially enforced by the ritual flagellation one receives upon any deviation from conventional paths: “What are you going to do with that degree?”, “So you’ve decided to go for the big bucks?”, or “When are you going to get a real job?” And so many careers develop an air of inevitability—I guess it’s time to go to law school—that ultimately undermines personal responsibility as a public virtue. You cannot take responsibility for your role in the economic order if you do not have economic agency.

Nowhere is this more true than in corporate America, where a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits precludes any sense of civic responsibility. Every time a corporation increases prices, lays off workers, or invests in artificial intelligence at the expense of employment or product quality, the decision is laundered through the inevitability of market forces. Once the pride of American ingenuity, corporations now infantilize themselves into passive recipients of price signals. It’s easy to forget that this was not always the case—for decades, corporate America flirted with unions, the family wage, and lifetime employment—and that it is not the case in many other parts of the world. But we, as a culture, have come to value the market for its own sake, and nobody questions the pretense of helplessness by the most powerful economic engines to ever exist.

None of this is to say that capitalism does not constrain individual and corporate agency, or force us to behave in accordance with its logic. It certainly does. The fact that the economy is a genuinely constraining force on our agency only deepens the sense that we are not, or cannot, be fully responsible for ourselves in public life.

It’s a mistake, however, to assume that personal responsibility’s collapse as a civic virtue is a purely economic phenomenon. The decline of neoliberalism coincided with the rise of a mental health discourse consisting of destigmatization campaigns, celebrity confessions, trigger warnings, and online support communities—to name a few of its familiar manifestations. These efforts were well-meaning, but as clinical concepts were increasingly applied to everyday life, they created a vast ideology of therapized “self-care,” one that would explode into the societal mainstream in early Covid.

A few years later, the tenets of therapy culture are widely accepted truisms. Americans have rushed to parrot discourses preaching the importance of self-care, showing up for yourself, protecting your peace, setting boundaries, and validating your feelings, as if the problems in this country stem from our being too concerned with the well-being of others. Of course, none of these tenets are inherently bad, and some are important interpersonal skills that all adults should know. But together, they produce an ideology that dismisses social obligations in favor of indulging your immediate desires. This is most apparent in the way therapy culture distinguishes good actions from bad, a designation made solely on whether it makes the actor more or less emotionally comfortable. As the author and Substacker Freddie deBoer noted, this makes therapy culture an essentially amoral—or at least selfish—cultural phenomenon, with “a stance on morality that has completely excised the interests of others, which is to say, an anti-morality.” Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the most destructive cliché to come out of therapy culture, the endlessly self-righteous assertion that “you don’t owe them anything.”

Therapy culture’s rapid proliferation carries significant political implications, particularly around questions of civic virtue and personal responsibility. When social obligations or moral principles are tossed aside when they conflict with our base desires, or force us to do things we don’t want to do, or cause us stress or anxiety, any hope for a revitalized sense of civic virtue is tossed aside with it. The virtue of personal responsibility is particularly affected, rendered entirely unnecessary by the fact that there are no standards by which we must hold ourselves responsible. The fundamental terms of the social contract become entirely self-determined, based solely on our immediate emotional comfort. Morality—public and private—is reduced to what we can or cannot internally rationalize.

Personal responsibility’s recent history as an instrument of a discredited neoliberal doctrine, combined with its inherent incongruity with a hyper-capitalist economy, rightly predisposes us to a healthy measure of skepticism about its value as a civic virtue. But rather than recognize the impossibility of perfect personal responsibility while affirming its importance as an aspirational civic virtue, we are taking this skepticism and allowing it to delegitimize any insistence on personal responsibility at all. What was once a moral space occupied by a republican commitment to civic virtue, the common good, and self-government is left empty. Into the gap rushes elaborate excuse architectures built solely on one’s personal desires and biases.

Therapy culture and the strategic use of “market forces” to explain objectionable behavior are two amazing examples of excuse architectures, especially because they both bear some culpability for our recent abdication of personal responsibility. But we see other examples around us all the time. As personal responsibility faded as a civic virtue, political polarization and partisan tribalism pushed us into a defensive “the other side is worse” posture, a moral permission structure that allows us to excuse our side’s hypocrisy, corruption, or immorality. It’s this excuse architecture that explains why, when a political party faces a scandal, partisans are far more likely to remain silent than demand a policy change. We saw this with Democrats’ refusal to acknowledge the border crisis and Biden’s evident cognitive decline during his presidency—in fact, the Democratic base convinced itself that acknowledging either abetted fascism—and with the GOP’s January 6th reductionism. As I write, the entire Republican establishment is ignoring Max Miller’s child and domestic abuse to protect its fragile House majority. In a vacuum, this is indefensible, but we seem to be able to come up with a reason to excuse anything nowadays.

Reversing this cultural trend should be an urgent priority for any political movement, but it is particularly important to the Left. The Left is riding high on a string of primary victories, the emergence of a once-in-a-generation political talent in Zohran Mamdani, and incredible message discipline on the cost of living. It is the only remaining political faction that can credibly claim to be a change agent. In a 2028 election that is currently shaping up to be the change election to end all change elections, it will be a strong contender. Yet recent history suggests that in our endlessly toxic cultural and economic climate, winning the presidency can discredit your movement if your governance is poor. Biden’s presidency was the death knell for an already floundering Democratic establishment, while Trump seems determined to do everything in his power to anger the MAGA base. It is unlikely that either camp will be popular in 2028. As a result, it will be the greatest opportunity the American Left has ever seen.

Two things are required for the Left to translate this opportunity into a durable political coalition. In the immediate future, the Left must limit inflation, address the housing shortage, and reduce the cost of healthcare. Over time, however, it must make good on its less material promises to the working class: greater dignity in one’s work and more agency over one’s life. From unionization to socialism, the promise of leftist politics has always been economic, not just political, self-government. At some point, the Left will be forced to confront the question of how this expanded self-government is supposed to succeed in a culture that has abandoned one of self-government’s prerequisite virtues.

A few moments a year, something happens in politics that goes beyond the typical partisan bickering or electoral jockeying to offer a peek behind the curtain into the psyche of a political faction or ideology. The recent Hasan Piker controversy was one of those times.

I actually watch Hasan Piker. This does not make me a slobbering radical or terrorist sympathizer, but a 23-year-old who has been interested in politics since I was a teenager. For me, Hasan has always been around, the same way that Sam Seder, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro have always been around. At various points in my life, I watched all their shows, and while my digital media consumption is lower than at its Covid-era peak, I still check in with all of them.

From this vantage point, the debate over whether Democrats should engage with Piker or “push him to the fringe” was nonsensical. To be sure, it had real implications for the ongoing intraparty conflict over how Democrats should approach Israel, but that conversation was predictable and uninteresting, as its resolution was a foregone conclusion: the strengthening of the pro-Palestinian position, and the continuous slide into political and moral irrelevance for the party’s pro-Israel contingent.

What is interesting about Piker-gate is what it revealed about Democratic centrism’s understanding of the media environment and this political moment. Piker-gate was predicated on a fundamentally outdated view of the relationship between the media and democracy, one that the center’s hesitancy to abandon calls into question their commitment to the democratic values they claim to represent.

For those out of the loop, Piker-gate began when the leaders of Third Way, an influential centrist Democratic think tank, published a March 19th op-ed smearing Piker as a “jew-hater” and calling for his cancellation from Democratic circles á la peak-woke. The op-ed was a response to Piker’s growing influence in Democratic Party politics and media, with Third Way citing his relationships with Pod Save America, Abdul El-Sayed, and Ro Khanna as violations of an unspoken cordon sanitaire. In the echoes of 2025’s “Joe Rogan of the Left” discourse, many commentators defended Piker by arguing that Democrats need to be more willing to engage with those they disagree with. But Democratic centrism launched a full-scale assault to shun Piker from public debate, replete with the litmus tests and questionnaires that groups like Third Way are supposedly against. Ultimately, the controversy fizzled out after Ezra Klein, flexing his muscles as chief arbiter of establishment disputes, penned a laudable defense of conversation as a “necessary habit” of democracy. The wind was taken out of Third Way’s sails.

The built-in assumption on all sides of this controversy is that Piker’s fervent anti-Zionism and leftism—the central topics of Piker-gate itself—are the crux of his popularity and influence. While this is undoubtedly true for most of his audience, the assumption obscures the many other reasons why someone would watch Hasan at the expense of an accurate analysis of the media environment.

One reason is that his stream is just a great watch. Piker is quite funny, and he has segments that are more comedy-oriented than typical commentary. Most of these segments—such as Hogwatch, where he watches social media videos of Trump supporters being insane—combine political analysis with a steady stream of jokes, ridicule, and bits.

In contrast, a lot of the commentary on Piker is profoundly serious, even grave, completely missing the reason for his appeal. Piker is not a demagogue, angrily snarling an endless stream of ideological nonsense to frothing fans. There are many liberals, conservatives, and leftists who watch Piker’s stream for the same reason they watch YouTube, or Instagram Reels, or listen to podcasts: for entertainment.

There are many other viewers who watch Piker just to learn the news. It’s hard to overstate the sheer quantity of information he covers streaming eight hours a day, nearly every day. Piker splits his time between covering the news cycle, highlighting stories he chooses before each stream, reacting to breaking news that happens throughout the day, and responding to the endless questions and comments raised by his chat. The result is a show that covers a broader range of topics than broadcast television at—thanks to the back and forth generated by a live chat—a much higher level of complexity and depth.

Viewers also learn from Piker’s sharp and often prescient analysis. Over the years, he’s proven himself capable of remarkable foresight, including anticipating the collapse in U.S. support for Israel soon after October 7th, predicting China’s enduring strength amidst Evergrande’s collapse, and calling out the Harris campaign’s early missteps when everyone else was still basking in brat summer. The establishment seems to regard radical thought as disruptive, even corruptive, to the public sphere, but this belief ignores its great public virtue. It’s often radicals, with the perspective gained from a little ideological distance, that have the most prescient analysis.

The myriad reasons why someone may watch Piker exemplify the relationship new media figures have with their audiences and the new media ecosystem. While Piker, Rogan, or Shapiro all occupy this “new media” space, each commentator is distinct from one another and occupies a unique role in the overall media ecosystem. Even when the medium is the same from a bird’s-eye view, the specifics of each show are often quite different. While both Shapiro’s and Piker’s shows are extremely political, the former features a more traditional format: a daily one-hour podcast with a predetermined set of issues. Piker’s stream, in contrast, has a more amorphous structure, but offers an interactive 8-hour dialogue between him and his viewers, where each one has the theoretical power to determine the stream’s focus. Rogan, unlike both Shapiro and Piker, often eschews politics altogether, with the content depending on whoever Rogan happens to be interviewing. That’s why there’s a unique and different dynamic between new media figures and any given viewer: people tune in for a broader and more individualized set of reasons. I, for example, will always pick up a newspaper to read the news, but whether I consume Shapiro’s podcast, Piker’s stream, or Rogan’s podcast can be for entertainment or education depending on the day.

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The fluidity of the new media landscape is the result of technological and cultural change over the last quarter-century. What changed technologically is well-established: The invention of the internet—combined with the growth of social media platforms—“democratized” political speech, allowing more voices and ideas to reach the public. In the early days of the internet, with the “end of history” veneer still framing political analysis, there was hope that the explosion of available information would eliminate extreme ideas as the public learned what was “rational” and “correct.” In practice, of course, there has been a dramatic increase in both radical and independent thought. Far from a place where citizens learn best practices for economic and social policy, the internet is a colosseum of warring ideas and factions, with new entrants constantly disrupting the fight.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a technological innovation that allowed more people to have a voice resulted in more voices. But there were cultural forces at play as well. The rise of the modern internet coincided with the emergence of what the author Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics,” or the coalescence of the public and private spheres in daily life. Far from the days when you could just ignore the news, everything is political now in a way that was not true at the end of history. We no longer live in a world where the public trusts experts to handle policy, or where ideological conflict is relegated to history books. Instead, politics weighs so heavily on our lives that the boundary between public and private life can seem to buckle under its heft. And yet we never abandoned the individualistic and consumerist culture that the end of history wrought. The result is that politics is an increasingly individual endeavor—membership in political parties, churches, unions, and civic associations continues to fall—but one that subsumes nearly all aspects of our private lives, from our work, to our interests, to our consumption choices. Everything is given a public meaning, to the point where our hobbies, clothing, and diet can immediately be categorized as “coded” in one way or another. So our culture fragments into increasingly niche subgroups to match our aesthetics and political sensibilities. The new media ecosystem reflects this era of hyperpolitics: a landscape of independent shows with an infinite variety of opinions and formats, whose audiences form an identity as viewers that is self-referentially political.

The mainstream media, on the other hand, is the product of an earlier technological and cultural moment dominated by mass politics. The 20th century was the century of political parties, class and ethnic conflicts, and ideological movements. Fascism, Communism, nationalism, even party or union membership all promised a space where the many could be represented by an institution or ideology. Some of this was the result of different cultural practices than we have today. Unlike contemporary hyperpolitics, where one’s political identity and private self are intrinsically connected, affiliation with a mass organization determined an individual’s public identity for most of the 20th century.

But much of mass politics was produced by technological constraints we no longer have. Legacy newspapers and cable news matured at a time when getting your voice heard often required the help of large institutions, which effectively made them gatekeepers of political speech. While smaller outlets and the radio existed, their impact was far smaller than the internet’s is today. Only a select few institutions were technologically capable of reaching mass audiences, which gave them outsized power over the boundaries of public debate. As a result, the media environment—like the political environment—was filtered through elite representatives. In the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the panels of cable news, liberals, moderates, and conservatives each had their representatives who typified the opinions of their respective ideological factions. What these figures said, therefore, was profoundly, sometimes contentiously significant, not only because their ideas were supposed to reflect their ideological base, but also because the masses accepted their ideas and learned their discourses.

So when the center asks whether Democrats should engage with Piker, the question strikes me as of a different era. The center fears that simply engaging with Piker will intrinsically validate his ideas within the Democratic base—or worse, will implicitly instruct the base to adopt his opinions. But the question of who the legacy media platforms is largely irrelevant to modern politics. Audiences have already splintered into political micro-communities that are coded beyond party or ideological affiliation. Individuals rarely accept all the arguments of a commentator in the way they once accepted the positions of their representatives. Now, many people, particularly from my generation, consume a far wider variety of media, adopting positions and participating in audience communities in a way that advances a personal political identity. Politics is inseparable from our larger culture of individualism. There is no mass audience to insulate from radical thought or whose opinions elites have the power to dramatically influence. The technological environment that once fostered mass politics is long gone. Rather than spaces where audiences gather—newspapers-of-record, cable news conglomerates, public radio stations—where elites can supervise the spread of ideas, we have thousands of tiny islands, each with preexisting biases, that politicians must visit to introduce their ideas.

The disconnect speaks to a serious problem for Democratic centrism, which is that they’re just decades behind the political curve. They’ve become so reliant on professional, bureaucratized politics, with its spate of backward-looking election analysis, and its parsing of polls and focus groups to find the quantitatively perfect policy platform, that their ability to think critically about the always-incalculable momentum of politics has atrophied.

But it also speaks to an even larger problem for the Democratic center: that they no longer seem to like or believe in democracy. In recent years, center-left thought has increasingly eschewed the democratic ideals of debate and persuasion in favor of systems-level analysis about the “attentional economy” or “outrage economy.” This paragraph by Noah Smith in his “Hasan Piker is Bad for the Democrats” is indicative of the shift:

The obvious problem with [including extremists in the conversation] is that it creates a competitive market for extremism. If being more extreme and profane and outrageous than the next guy is what gets attention, and if attention is what gets you influence in the Democratic Party or the GOP, then there’s a huge incentive for would-be influencers to be as extreme and outrageous as possible. Everyone will just keep one-upping their competitors until all the right-wing commentators are Hitler fans and all the left-wing commentators are Stalin apologists.

In this analytical model, voter preference for radical thought is a built-in assumption. The notion that such ideas can be defeated through debate—that voters might turn against extremist positions when confronted with genuine alternatives—does not even enter the conversation. What this makes clear is that the center has no confidence in its ability to persuade voters of its ideas. As a consequence, they’re taking their last great political asset, their institutional power, and wielding it to try and win the ideological battle through coercion. Whether it’s painting all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, dismissing progressive ideas as unelectable, maligning legitimate questions as misinformation, or constantly instructing voters to obey the experts, the goal is the same: narrow the range of acceptable ideas until politics is safely within the center’s boundaries.

Fortunately, this strategy is doomed to fail. The new media environment has steadily diluted legacy media’s influence year over year, culminating in a 2024 election where podcasts, Twitch streams, and TikToks were arguably more influential than the Washington Post or NBC. If Democratic centrism wants to reenter the modern world, it will be forced to leave its ivory tower and come roll around in the muck with the rest of us. The future of political campaigning will consist of long-form dialogues with small audiences on unfamiliar terrain—it will, in other words, place a premium on persuasion, authenticity, and argument. But the center’s endless attempts to avoid meaningful debate indicate that its hesitancy to adapt to the new media environment may really be a hesitancy about this style of democratic politics. The key question, it seems to me, is not whether Democrats should engage with Hasan Piker, but whether they are willing to practice the democratic ideals they claim to defend.

I’m currently experiencing a fate worse than death, a torture beyond medieval cruelty, an affliction so harrowing it makes the most neurotic of my Jewish matrilineage shiver. I’ve been thinking a lot about a Pete Hegseth press conference, one he delivered shortly after the start of the Iran war.

At this point, the ever-tormenting press conference is nothing special. Immediately after we started this war, the Trump administration spent a week repeatedly dodging what should have been a softball question: why we struck Iran in the first place. Hegseth’s March 2nd press conference was just one example of this initial deflection. Nevertheless, it’s stuck with me:

Mr. Hegseth spent much of his time chiding reporters for their questions rather than answering them. When a reporter said that “people also want to know what they’re sending their men and women to war for,” and asked whether there was a concern that the conflict could spiral into a longer war, Mr. Hegseth turned confrontational.

“Did you not hear my remarks?” he said. “We’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished, but we are very clear-eyed, as the President has been, unlike other presidents, about the foolish policies in the past that recklessly pulled us into things that were not tethered to actual, clear objectives.”

Asked why we’re going to war, Hegseth replied that we were ensuring the mission gets accomplished. Put another way, the objective was to accomplish our objectives. Truly tortuous logic.

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A lot has happened since that press conference—most notably, a tentative ceasefire that, while not ending the war, ushered in a new, less-lethal phase. And as the conflict transitions to this new stage, so too has the administration’s messaging. Out are the opaque and contradictory justifications for mass slaughter and self-imposed quagmires. In are increasingly breathless assurances that it will all be over soon.

But I’m not ready to move on. Part of the reason is anger. The fact that our government took us to war without bothering to explain why feels personally offensive, an insult to both my own intelligence and the nation’s democratic values. But like when a friend hints at a secret without divulging what it is, the question “Why are we at war with Iran?” has also become the subject of my deepest curiosity.

In their own words, how has the administration answered this question? First, they said that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States, but then quickly abandoned that argument after our intelligence community concluded that Iran was “years away from developing missiles capable of hitting the United States.” Next, they fell back on an old favorite, Iran’s nuclear program, which Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress Iran was trying to recover. This justification quickly evaporated when Gabbard—in a feat I consider genuinely impressive—managed to pre-contradict herself in her testimony’s written statement, which said: “there [have] been no efforts” since July’s strikes “to try to rebuild [Iran’s] enrichment capability.”

Then there’s Israel. We know that Israel helped persuade Trump to bomb Iran, yet the administration insists they are not the reason we’re at war. Weeks before the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu and a team of Mossad officials—possibly coached by Sen. Lindsey Graham—gave Trump a PowerPoint presentation about why the U.S. should go to war with Iran. Trump liked this presentation. But when Marco Rubio tried to pin the conflict on Israel by saying they were going to strike Iran with or without American involvement, therefore forcing America to preempt an Iranian retaliation against U.S. assets, Trump said that the opposite could be true: “I might have forced [Israel’s] hand,” he said, “and it was my opinion that [the Iranians] were going to attack first.”

Is the war meant to spark a revolution? Trump was pretty excited about this possibility early on, but now he thinks the chance of revolution is “maybe not immediately.” Is this a regime change war? Finally, we receive an affirmative “yes,” but then the administration defines regime change as any change to Iran’s government, regardless of what ideology or faction the new government belongs to.

I guess you could say that the clearest reason for the war is to open the Strait of Hormuz; then again, the Strait was open beforehand.

After weeks of conflict, the administration finally settled on four objectives: 1) destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, 2) “annihilating” its navy, 3) ensuring Iran can’t develop a nuclear weapon, and 4) stopping Iran from arming and funding its regional proxies. Why Iranian missiles, ships, or proxies pose any threat to the United States is unclear. Why war was necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, considering they made no effort to do so, is also unclear. Suffice it to say, no explanation is forthcoming.

So now that we’ve started and tried to end the Iran War, it seems that, in a feat of remarkable stupidity and incompetence, the Trump administration remains incapable of explaining why we went in there in the first place.

The stupidity and incompetence are even more remarkable when you consider that the administration is trying to justify the conflict retroactively. They had the opportunity to evaluate the situation ex post facto, assess what the public needed to hear, and then deliver a carefully crafted justification to the American people. Instead, we get only more stupidity and incompetence. The Right has a word they use to describe stupidity and incompetence like this. We don’t use it in polite society.

The stupidity and incompetence are so remarkable that I can’t help but wonder if it’s really stupidity and incompetence at all, or rather the deliberate misleading of the American public.

The distinction between lying and hubris is not always so clear, as Hannah Arendt suggests in Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers. Writing in late 1971 as the Vietnam War was sputtering to an end, Arendt tries to answer the same question we’re asking today: why our government took the country to war.

Arendt begins by reminding us to focus on the practical utility of the political lie rather than our own moral outrage. However angry lying in politics may make us, history shows that “secrecy…and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history.” With its historical permanence in politics, it’s far more productive to analyze what the political lie is trying to achieve than to call out the liar for their iniquity. For while we’ve long considered truthfulness a personal virtue, it “has never been counted among the political virtues.” Lying did not “creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness.”

In fact, Arendt argues, the lie is an essential aspect of what is good about politics, which is its ability to change the circumstances in which we all live through human action (emphasis mine):

In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we are physically located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source, imagination….

We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no…” no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics is made of.

This is not to say that Arendt has no moral qualms with political lying: she writes that “totalitarian rulers’ frightening confidence in the power of lying” is a key aspect of authoritarianism, and her disgust with Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is the clearest indication of her awareness of the destructive, even violent nature of the political lie. But whether a lie is deployed for good ends or for bad is irrelevant to its ability to spark action. When connected to a tangible goal, to a vision for how our collective life could be different, the lie’s utility is undeniable. The reason truthfulness has never been considered a political virtue is because the lie is often better at getting things done.

Except it’s tough to get things done when, as in the case of the Iran War, the goal is unclear. For obvious reasons, critics have repeatedly compared the conflict to our past forays in the Middle East, but the comparison obscures key differences between the wars. In Iraq, it’s true that the Bush administration lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, but they did it to serve the clearly defined goal of regime change. If the Trump administration is lying about Iran, what goal is that serving?

In this sense, the Iran War has a lot more in common with Vietnam than Iraq or Afghanistan. In Lying in Politics, Arendt also struggled to figure out what goal Vietnam’s constant stream of deception served, because all the common explanations for the war—the Domino Theory, the specter of a Sino-Soviet communist bloc, the United States’ credibility as protector of its allies and the free world, the United States as an imperialist empire—were internally contradicted by the Pentagon Papers’ reports, testimonies, and documents. None of Vietnam’s official justifications could explain the U.S. government’s baffling decisions from 1955 onward.

And here is where the distinction between lying and hubris becomes increasingly blurred. With no tangible goals capable of explaining the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, Arendt writes that “The first explanation that comes to mind…is likely to point to the interconnectedness of deception and self-deception.” The government and its national security apparatus lied so much in public that they began to believe their lies in private—or, at the very least, those lies began to unconsciously shape their decision-making. The Pentagon Papers proved that the government considered Vietnam “devoid of decisive military objectives,” but that did not stop them from prosecuting the war as if such objectives existed.

The result, Arendt argues, is that the real goal of the Vietnam War was to foster a specific state of mind. Rather than admit that we had gotten ourselves into a quagmire with no strategic importance, the U.S. tried to lie the existence of military objectives into reality, so they could then accomplish those objectives and declare victory. We fought a war so we could declare a psychological victory.

Over a half-century later, we’ve found ourselves in the same situation. I won’t pretend to know whether Trump himself believes Iran actually poses a threat to U.S. national security. Same goes for Hegseth: “and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” But when you examine how key administration officials described Israel’s presentation and the consequences of a U.S.-Iran war prior to the initial strikes, it’s obvious that none of them believe a word coming out of their own mouth. C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe called Israel’s pretensions of regime change “farcical.” Unnamed insiders said that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, thought war with Iran was a “terrible idea.” Marco Rubio was “ambivalent” about the whole thing. Vance accurately gauged Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and directly cautioned the President against the war. Susie Wiles was trying to get all these men to share their concerns but wouldn’t say anything herself.

Yet all these figures now parrot the same incoherent justifications for the war as Hegseth and Trump. What this suggests is that, like the generals in Vietnam, the Trump administration is trying to lie nonessential military objectives into a factual basis for war, so Trump can claim a psychological victory in a war we’ve already lost. Even if the war ends with Iran’s military decimated, its proxies destroyed, and its nuclear program in ruins, the tangible impact on America’s citizenry will be zero, because these military objectives are fundamentally, well, trumped up. But Trump would relish in the image created: the omnipotent America, home of the greatest military on Earth, accomplishing the mission.

Suddenly, Hegseth’s enigmatic press conference makes perfect sense. Answering a reporter’s query that “people also want to know what they’re sending their men and women to war for” with “we’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished” is not a deflection or non-answer, but an admission of the war’s true purpose. It does not matter whether our stated goal is regime change, nuclear arms control, promoting democracy, destroying Iran’s missile capacity, destroying Iran’s navy, wiping out Iran’s network of proxies, preempting an imminent strike on U.S. military assets, securing the Strait of Hormuz, seizing Iranian oil, responding to “47 years of aggression,” or defending Israel. What matters is that we have a mission, and we accomplish that mission. The objective is the objective.

While Arendt understood the utility of any given lie, she also knew that “the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute.” Trump has a set of lies about threats to our national security that he hopes to make true through the Iran War. If he succeeds, he hopes to use the psychological victory to serve a set of greater lies at the heart of his political project: lies about the values and tradition America is meant to inherit, and about what it means to be an American. His movement has always been about myth-making, demagoguery, and a romantic, “Golden-Age” populism rather than the political program of a philosophical system, or a technocratic response to a set of well-defined issues. It’s lies all the way down.

But there are some for whom the Iran War is undeniably real. First and foremost is Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader of Iran. He lost his father, his wife, his teenage son, his sister, his brother-in-law, and his 14-month-old niece in a strike that burned his entire body and left him disfigured. Even if we destroy every missile Iran has—missiles, we must remember, that can’t even reach us—are we really supposed to believe that his grief leaves us safer? Or what about the families of the 120 children killed in an indiscriminate attack on the first day of the war, when the U.S. struck a school at an IRGC compound based on an AI analysis of outdated data. In the face of their reality, should our military superiority make us feel strong?

Back in high school, my DSA comrades and I constantly debated questions of ethical consumerism under capitalism. At the near-peak of Democratic purity politics, relatively meaningless consumer choices gave us the terrain to burnish our leftist bona fides without requiring a serious grasp of policy. On Twitter and in school, we debated the morality of shopping on Amazon given their anti-worker and monopolistic practices, and the ethical implications of using plastic straws or eating meat given the climate crisis.

Some on the Left made compelling arguments about not allowing systemic critique to excuse individual apathy, particularly in the fight against climate change. But I found those systemic critiques more persuasive because they understood the practical realities of 21st-century capitalism. According to their logic, the system had become too oppressive, too all-consuming, so that it forced you by means of cost and convenience to fully participate in it. Ethical consumerism was a luxury reserved for the affluent. Were these arguments a way for us to enjoy the fruits of our materialist society without feeling responsible for perpetuating it? Probably. But they also alluded to a particularly pernicious effect of capitalism on our minds, one that is only intensifying as economic precarity deepens. For as much as capitalism shrouds itself in the rhetoric of freedom and choice, it is remarkably good at foreclosing the opportunities we believe available to us until we begin to behave on its terms.

I thought of these high school debates while watching Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, a movie that takes the question of moral agency under capitalism and raises it to the level of systemic critique. No Other Choice opens with a cartoonishly picturesque scene of a happy family sitting down for dinner. They are a paragon of the institutional nuclear family: Man-su, the family breadwinner and a veteran mid-level executive of a successful paper company; Miri, a beautiful and responsible homemaker; the two children, Ri-one and Si-one; and two buoyant golden retrievers. They are also firmly middle-class, with a base level of economic security that affords them the opportunity for a fulfilling family life. In this opening scene, the trappings of a middle-class life are a character in and of themselves. Framing the family’s dinner is the beautiful home they live in, the eel meat cooking on the grill, and a pair of dancing shoes that Man-su buys his wife. Drawing his family in for a hug, Man-su reflects on his good fortune. “Know what I’m thinking now?” he asks Miri. “I’ve got it all.” Of course, he’s talking about his family, but the scene makes it clear how a stable, well-paying career can underwrite such a rich inner life.

That security soon falls apart. The paper company is bought out by an American private equity firm that lays off 20% of the production line, including the 25-year veteran Man-su. He assures himself that he will find another job in 3 months, but an increasingly automated paper industry has few available opportunities. After 13 months, Man-su has still not found a paper job, and the family’s finances are in trouble. The dogs are sent away to live with Miri’s parents, family dinners go from decadent barbeques to sad soups, and the family home is put on the market.

The financial insecurity erodes Man-su’s inner life as well. After a particularly humiliating incident finds him pleading on his knees in a bathroom for a job, the previously virtuous Man-su decides to kill the paper executive who chided him in the bathroom, apply for his job, and then eliminate the strongest competitors for the position. The decision is motivated by a recognizably conservative impulse to preserve the family life seen in the beginning of the film, but as he executes the murders his entire moral foundation begins to collapse. He accuses his wife of infidelity. He breaks his sobriety. We see this previously empathetic man willfully ignore the humanity of his victims to further his own economic interests.

Yet despite the apparent ridiculousness of killing for a middle-bureaucracy job, an ethos of rationality informs the choices Man-su and others make throughout the film. Early on, when Man-su tries to convince the Americans not to lay off a number of factory workers, the new owners cast the decision as a business necessity: “I’m sorry. There’s no other choice.” This abdication of responsibility sparks a series of other choices framed as not being choices at all. Man-su repeatedly justifies his killing spree by telling himself that he has “no other choice” but murder. And at the end of the film, as he’s being interviewed for the job he has literally killed for, one of the interviewers explains that if he’s hired, he will oversee a fully automated AI factory. The workers will have to be reduced. After all, “that’s the whole point of the system. No other choice.” Is Man-su okay with that? He laughs off the question. “How can you go against the times?”

Are these businessmen wrong to think this way? Is Man-su wrong to use the same logic to justify murder? No Other Choice never quite challenges the sense of fated inevitability each party has about their decisions. It’s no coincidence that the initial choice-without-choice was made by an American private equity firm, the modern apotheosis of capitalism. The job of a corporation is to maximize profits; what else were they supposed to do? And if corporations are forced to obey this capitalist logic, does it not follow that their employees must as well? Even the movie’s title implies an understanding that capitalism forces us to abide by a certain twisted rationality. But what if what is rational under capitalism betrays our traditional norms of morality?

The relationship between capitalism and morality has always been tenuous at best. Historically, capitalism rested on the idea that “private vices” could become “public benefits” when filtered through market mechanisms. In fact, early political economists were remarkably candid about the ethical implications of the capitalist system. David Hume argued that as individuals became accustomed to the “pleasures of luxury and the profit of commerce,” their envy and greed would fuel an ambition to obtain ever-greater material comforts. This ambition, however, was a good thing, as it “roused men from their indolence” and sustained rising levels of employment and productivity. And while Adam Smith freely acknowledged the ultimate insignificance of material goods in sickness or old age, he believed it was fortunate that people rarely consider their possessions in such an “abstract and philosophical light.” It is this “deception” of vanity and want, he thought, that “keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

But even these early proponents of capitalism qualified the social benefits of self-interested materialism. Hume observed that humans “are always much inclin’d to prefer present interest to distant and remote,” and that they struggle to defer gratification when it is immediately available to them. In Hume’s time, this wasn’t a problem, for as long as “the pleasures of life are few,” the temptation of immediate consumption posed no threat to a social order whose stability relied on long-term commitments to God, family, and local community. But commercial societies, with their expanded range of consumable luxuries and tendency to stimulate the desire for such comforts, had the potential to corrode our shared moral foundation. The “avidity…of acquiring goods and possessions,” Hume warned, “is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.”

Have we reached this point? Commercial societies have long been unimaginably prosperous by Hume’s standards, but technological development and political economy combined in a way that promoted social conservatism, the political vehicle of traditional moral ideals. In the United States, for example, the early 20th century saw the emergence of mass unionization and the “family wage,” which inculcated a set of conservative values in wage labor—stewardship and self-reliance; responsibility to the nuclear family; connection to local community, and self-subordination to long-term commitments—that had previously been associated with small proprietorship. While these “good jobs” were initially scarce, the postwar expansion of manufacturing and professional employment led Americans to believe that unionized or family-wage work would soon be broadly available. For a time, it seemed as though capitalism and a conservative moral framework were not so incompatible after all, so long as new institutions and practices arose to regulate capitalism’s tendency to elevate “private vices.”

These regulations, however, were ultimately discarded when the profit motive demanded they be: The “family wage” became economically unviable amid the stagflation of the 1970s, and an increasingly globalized economy allowed corporations to outsource production to lower-wage countries. While we can certainly point to specific policies that hastened this outcome, the mid-century settlement was always more of a contingent truce than a stable synthesis. Writing just after its demise in 1990, the social critic Christopher Lasch argued in Conservatism Against Itself that there was a fundamental contradiction between social conservatism and capitalism that explained the failure of this resolution. According to Lasch, the “essence of cultural conservatism” is a “certain respect for limits:” an understanding that human freedom is constrained by nature, history, our own fallibility, and the “perversity of the human will,” and that real freedom stems from an “acknowledgment of the constraints” within which we must operate. In practice, these constraints take the form of a moral framework that prioritizes durable obligations—to the family, or local community, or God—over the “ideology of progress” and unfettered choice. Capitalism, on the other hand, is defined by precisely its rejection of any limitations to economic growth, including the social limitations imposed by moral standards and tradition. As a result of this contradiction, Lasch argued, social conservatism is “clearly incompatible” with modern capitalism and its obsession with unlimited economic growth.

Through this lens, the family wage and mass unionization appear less as replicable policy interventions and more as the result of a specific stage of capitalist development that we are currently exiting. For most of modern history, capitalism’s rejection of limits ran into one stubborn constraint: it still needed people. Firms had to attract, train, and retain workers; and to do so, they had to compromise—often grudgingly—with unions, local communities, and social expectations in a way that stabilized family and community life. Capitalism’s dependence on labor didn’t make it moral, but it forced it to coexist with the very “durable obligations” and local forms of accountability that social conservatism relied upon for its existence.

Now we’ve reached the final frontier of capitalism’s rejection of limits: a stage of development in which capital can plausibly imagine shedding that dependence and replacing a significant portion of labor with artificial intelligence. When the market no longer needs workers in large numbers, it loses even the instrumental reason to sustain the institutions that restrain its tendency toward moral corrosion. Without these moral limitations, we’re left with a culture whose driving force is capitalism’s insistence on ambition, greed, and self-interested rationality. What happens when such a culture combines with a potentially permanent reduction in the demand for labor is the dystopian future we see in No Other Choice.

In these circumstances—a capitalism entirely unrestrained by its greatest limitation, a workforce left deeply insecure by its sudden uselessness—what choices do the rest of us have? No Other Choice seems to envision two options, neither of which bodes well for the sustainability of traditional moral values.

The first is the path chosen by Man-su: increasingly fierce competition for a shrinking number of good jobs. That’s not to say that we’re about to see strings of job-related killing sprees, but we may see Man-su’s underlying logic normalized as a broader “whatever it takes” ethos. Working for Palantir or McKinsey or ICE, taking unprescribed Adderall as you fight for a promotion, networking or fundraising with plainly evil but well-connected individuals; these choices would become increasingly acceptable not only at the individual level but at the societal level too. For in order for society to sustain a “whatever it takes” posture, economic success would need to be conflated with moral goodness to justify behavior we would otherwise consider odious. As a result, culturally-imposed limitations on career choice or business practices would quickly fall by the wayside, as these types of social norms only exist if we collectively choose to enforce them. Not wanting to feel disadvantaged in the shrinking labor market, who would make that choice? The result is a society in which anything could be justified by invoking economic insecurity, and behavior in the economic realm becomes insulated from criticism. Of course, there would be kernels of truth here. Without a baseline of stability, immoral behavior can sincerely present itself as the only rational way to survive.

The second path looks respectable, but is potentially more insidious. Throughout the movie, No Other Choice offers a clear alternative to increased competition: the endlessly flexible workforce. This path is embodied through the character Ara, the wife of Man-su’s first victim, Bummo. Like Man-su, Bummo is a long-time paper man who, before a merger eliminated his entire division, was successful and respected, even winning “Pulp Man of the Year” in 2018. Since he lost his job, however, Bummo has faced the recurring question of whether to continue his search for a paper job or, as suggested by Ara, open a music cafe. The cafe is presented as the clearly rational choice. As Ara says to Bummo in a fit of exasperation over his fixation with paper:

Paper, paper! Damned paper! My dad kept offering to set you up with a café, but no, it had to be paper! Even if they hire you, you’ll retire in 6-7 years. What then? In an age of living to 100? You with your nice audio system, you could earn even more with a music café!

You could earn even more with a music cafe. The decision to abandon his career and start a business is the correct one from the perspective of the market, whose theories consider us to be perfectly rational, infinitely selfish beings. But there is often a tension between what the market incentivizes and what our souls insist we do. As Bummo says in response to his wife, “Paper has fed me for 25 years. Honey. It’s how I’m meant to be, I’ve no other choice.” Bummo’s insistence that paper is his only choice shows how our careers are often intertwined with our identities and personal sources of meaning. When Man-su repeats Ara’s refrain before shooting him—“you did not even listen to your wife’s sensible suggestions. What’s wrong with a music cafe?”—Bummo screams back, “I’m an engineer! An expert!” But in a tight labor market, such a self-conception is a luxury Bummo cannot afford. Ultimately, he is killed not by Man-su but by his own wife. “How many times must I say it?” she screams at him. “Losing your job isn’t the problem! The problem is how you deal with it!”

The ideal of an endlessly flexible workforce has long been a dream of capital. In the models of economists, labor has been reclassified as “human capital”: a pseudo-quantitative rendering of the skills, education, and experience of an individual worker divorced from the actual humanity of the person who possesses them. In a capitalism without limits, No Other Choice suggests that our only refuge from fierce competition may be to learn to see ourselves that way too.

This suggestion terrified me precisely because it seemed so reasonable. Flexibility feels more civilized than competition, and we all recognize that some degree of flexibility is necessary in economic life. But taken to their extremes, these options are two sides of the same coin in the way they transform us into agents of the marketplace. While competition requires that we see other people in purely economic terms, flexibility insists we turn that lens inward. To operate as human capital—investing our skills wherever secures us the highest return—we have to treat our own skills, experience, and education as detachable assets, separable from the parts of ourselves that make us unique and from which we derive meaning. Paradoxically, then, the endlessly flexible workforce constrains the most important choice we have as individuals: the ability to decide for ourselves what makes our lives meaningful.

By depriving us of that choice, flexibility may undermine social conservatism even more than competition. If, as Lasch argued, capitalism’s unlimited appetite for growth undermines social conservatism’s insistence that we abide by certain limitations, then a human capital conception of the self doesn’t reconcile this tension but resolves it in capitalism’s favor. It implies the embrace of the very “ideologies of progress” that Lasch contends have little patience for the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities or thick social bonds. When capitalism forces workers into states of heightened competition or perpetual flexibility, the traditional moral values social conservatism claims to defend—stable families, rooted communities, commitments that transcend economic calculation—become impossible to live by.

Despite continuously protesting that their choices are out of their control, nobody in No Other Choice ever seeks political solutions to their personal crises. Yet it’s the political implications of the film’s premise that are its most relevant takeaway.

Admittedly, I don’t care about saving social conservatism, whose political project has abandoned any pretense of fostering durable social obligations in favor of mobilizing the forces of reaction and bigotry. But I am motivated by my fear of this incipient capitalist epoch that promises not only to exacerbate inequality and precarity but destroy our ability to choose how—and with what values—we want to live our lives. And it is here that the contradiction between capitalism and social conservatism becomes relevant to non- social conservatives. Because while the Left has certainly become more influential in recent years, a genuine challenge to untrammeled capitalism may ultimately depend on the Right abandoning the free-market orthodoxy that is corroding the social values it claims to uphold.

Lasch seemed to regard some kind of falling out between social conservatism and market fundamentalism as inevitable. Writing 25 years before Trump rode down his golden escalator, he concluded Conservatism Against Itself by anticipating the Right’s populist turn:

In the twentieth century, conservatism has incongruously allied itself with the free market, including the free market in labor. What passes for conservatism, in other words, has allied itself with the very forces that have brought about the ‘progressive shattering to atoms of our social system.’ The defense of conservative values, it appears, cannot be entrusted to conservatives. If conservatism implies a respect for limits, localism, a work ethic as opposed to a consumerist ethic, a rejection of unlimited economic growth, and a certain skepticism about the ideology of progress, it is more likely to find a home in the populist tradition than in the free-market tradition of mainstream conservatism.

Time has proven him right, but only to an extent. A new generation of post-liberals, national conservatives, and populists now criticize market fundamentalism in explicitly socially conservative terms, arguing for protectionist trade policy, industrial policy, and limits on corporate consolidation with an eye on promoting family, community, and national stability. But as a political movement, right-wing populism remains what Lasch described as “a populism largely divested of its economic and political content.” The movement’s vitality lives in the culture war, not in grappling with how to preserve the moral advantages of durable social and economic commitments amid unprecedented corporate power, increasing social and economic atomization, and eventually the dominance of artificial intelligence.

Still, the evolution from the culture-war populism Lasch observed in 1990 to today’s right-wing market critics suggests continued movement away from free-market orthodoxy. Whether that intellectual turn trickles down into mass politics remains uncertain. But if it does, could we be witnessing the dawn of a new economic order, an inverse of the neoliberal era’s consensus around free markets?

Such an order will not be born from shared values but from shared constraints. Neoliberalism delivered widening wealth and income inequality, an isolated and atomized populace, and—after 2008—the unmistakable proof that the state prioritizes capital over its citizens. The backlash has been swift and severe, but it’s also creating an opportunity. The Left’s longstanding critique of unfettered capitalism may find unexpected allies as an emerging faction on the Right questions whether social conservatism can survive the corrosive fusion of corporate power and AI. Both the Left and a not-insignificant chunk of the Right now agree that capitalism, at least this version of it, can no longer be trusted to advance the common good. But they diverge on why capitalism should be constrained. The Right wants to protect certain traditional values from the moral solvent that is market fundamentalism. The Left wants to restore dignity and agency through shared prosperity. Those are not the same project, and any coalition between them would necessarily be partial and provisional. But they may nevertheless share a basic premise that capitalism denies: that the freedom to choose depends on boundaries. That a society without limits is not liberated, but debased, and eventually leaves us with no choices at all.

As we enter a new year, a consensus has emerged in the far-too-early 2028 Democratic presidential primary: California Governor Gavin Newsom is clearly the frontrunner.

​How did this happen? While today it might be tempting to dismiss his frontrunner status as the logical result of his position—after all, he’s the high-profile governor of a big, blue state during Trump 2.0—it wasn’t that long ago when Newsom was a deeply unpopular figure: an ineffective governor with little political future. Newsom was disingenuous, a slimeball, a coastal elite, too much of a politician. He was too handsome, his hair too gelled, his persona too slick. His presumed insincerity allowed everyone to project their worst interpretations onto him, even when they contradicted each other. Moderates and conservatives thought he was an ideological progressive, unwilling to take on the non-profits and special interests that were crippling the state’s business environment. Progressives thought he was captured by corporate donors, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, determined to moderate the program of an overwhelmingly blue legislature. Newsom was caught in the middle of a Democratic civil war, but instead of being a mediator or neutral party, he was a kind of anti- double agent: no matter what he appeared to do for your side, he was secretly working for the opposition.

To a certain extent, this is still the case. Newsom has not shaken the impression of sliminess, and many still regard him as unelectable for that very reason. Business interests still criticize California’s regulatory state, and he receives near-constant bashing in publications like the Wall Street Journal for his climate and economic policies. And progressives are furious about his homelessness policies and perceived softness towards the oil industry, which they point to as evidence of his moderate (or even conservative) bona fides.

Yet Newsom is ascendant. He’s leading in the polls for the 2028 Democratic nomination, albeit by only 2.2 points, and he’s up by a much larger 23 points in the prediction markets. At a time when Democrats are rudderless, unfocused, and still wildly unpopular, Newsom is the closest thing they have to a leader.

​What explains this frankly unexpected rise? The standard explanation from the punditry points to Newsom’s expert deployment of #Resistance politics, including his parodic social media strategy, combative approach to the redistricting arms race, and fierce opposition to large-scale ICE raids in L.A. in June. To a certain extent, this is absolutely correct. In the past year, Newsom’s approval rating jumped three times: once in early June following his response to large-scale ICE raids in California; once in August after he started shitposting daily; and once in November after Proposition 50 passed overwhelmingly. The Democratic base wants a fighter, and Newsom has demonstrated more fight more times than any other member of his party.

​But at the same time, this explanation misses something. Every 2028 hopeful is itching for a “fight,” but only Newsom has proven himself capable of seizing the many opportunities Trump’s mania provides. What is it about Newsom’s character or politics that allows him to consistently generate #Resistance moments for the base?

​The answer is that Newsom is willing to experiment more than any other Democratic politician with dreams of 2028. In the past year, he has repeatedly taken meaningful political risks, and he has done so decisively and confidently. At the near-peak of anti-immigration sentiment, he opposed ICE’s and the National Guard’s invasion of L.A., sparking a steady decline in support for the president on the issue of immigration (this was always going to be popular in California, but Newsom turned it into a national victory). Newsom then embraced a long-shot redistricting proposal whose initial polling was, in the words of one Democratic consultant, “as palatable as warm spit,” but which ultimately won by nearly 30 points. He launched a podcast seemingly designed to antagonize his own base through its emphasis on civil discourse with far-right guests, and then he launched a social media campaign tailored to the carnal desires of Democrats through its ruthless parody of Trump and the Right. His experimental approach has inoculated him against the deadly cautiousness of the consultant class that has doomed so many promising Democratic campaigns over the last decade.

​And the energy and vitality such experimentation fosters has left him deeply unconcerned by charges of hypocrisy or contradiction. Newsom has embraced conservative policies on California’s homelessness crisis and the state’s budget deficit. He has similarly embraced progressive policies, including trailblazing labor legislation creating a “fast-food council” with the power to regulate working conditions and minimum pay. And he has gone all-in on the growth-oriented Abundance agenda, passing a slate of pro-housing reforms that eliminate regulatory and environmental barriers to housing construction and facilitate transit-oriented development in California’s biggest cities. The result has been a genuinely ambitious effort to address Newsom’s biggest weaknesses—homelessness, housing, and affordability—through a variety of policy programs that don’t fit neatly into any ideological box. Is this the cold calculation of a slimy politician, or the nuance and flexibility of a genuinely creative thinker?

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​This question frames Newsom’s recent appearance on The Ezra Klein Show, where he articulated and defended his willingness to experiment with policy and strategy. Discussing his podcast episodes with Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage, Newsom embraced the contradictory nature of his Resistance persona and the friendly interviews on his podcast, pointing out “the great irony” in his political messaging, being that “I’m fighting fire with fire and I’m pushing back” while also believing that “divorce is not an option, and we have to live together and advance together across our differences.” On policy, too, Newsom displayed an unusual willingness to experiment and a receptivity to ideas from beyond the Democratic bubble. During a segment on tax policy, Newsom pointed to Steve Bannon as someone with a finger on the pulse of public opinion. “Bannon,” Newsom said, “is the thought leader” for Trumpism’s policy and ideological framework. “And I know that offends a lot of liberal minds that are offended by Bannon, and don’t want to attach any thoughtfulness to what he promotes, but I think we would be wise to listen.” When was the last time you saw a Democratic politician looking outside the liberal institutional blob for inspiration? “Learn from people,” Newsom emphasized. “Success leaves clues; there’s power of emulation.”

​Contrast this approach with that of the DNC. In mid-December, DNC Chair Ken Martin announced that he would not release the Democratic Party’s 2024 autopsy report despite previously pledging to do so. In announcing the reversal, Martin claimed that he did not want to relitigate the 2024 election, and instead wanted the party to focus on its recent successes in off-year elections heading into the midterms. Experts had “completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024,” Martin said, and he assured voters that the party was “putting our learnings into motion.”

​This censoring of accountability and reflection is emblematic of a Democratic establishment desperate to police the boundaries of acceptable policy and discourse—and therefore terrified of experimentation. Rather than subject the party’s historic failure to the unpredictable whims of the public, the DNC prefers to keep the democratic process in-house. There’s no need, Martin says, for voters to give any input on the Democratic Party’s future, because the experts and consultants are reforming it on their behalf. The benefits of this approach to the establishment are obvious. If the public is excluded from the process of reflection, accountability, and reform, then the party’s elites can ensure that any reform occurs within the confines of elite opinion. There is no experimentation; there are no surprises. There is none of that horrible “listening” and “learning” that Newsom claims to do.

​From this perspective, it’s no surprise that Newsom is rising as voters’ favorite establishment Democrat. For all the talk of “saving democracy” in the Democratic Party, Newsom seems to be the only mainstream figure that actually embodies its principles. While all politicians claim to listen and learn, few exhibit the consequence that, for regular voters, results from such behavior: a changed mind. In the past few years, Newsom shifted his position on criminal justice reform amid the retail theft crisis; reversed his support for independent redistricting following Texas’s electioneering (somewhat—he claims to still support it in principle, if not in practice); and split with his party on trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports. At the same time, he has demonstrated real principles through his advocacy of policies he believes the public needs persuading. When Klein challenged Newsom on his support for government-sponsored healthcare for undocumented immigrants and phasing out of gasoline-powered cars—two issues the Right has hammered Democrats on—Newsom earnestly defended the policies without any of the cowardly hedging or equivocating that defines Democrats’ political messaging. Citing the economic imperative of competing with China in the global EV market and a genuine belief in universal healthcare, Newsom said, “I can’t [run away from those issues.] I’m sure the polls will say I should, but that’s not who I am.” This is the push and pull of democracy in action: the public persuading the politicians, and the politicians persuading the public. How far a cry from Martin’s censorious elitism.

​Newsom’s great weakness is that this experimentation has not led to a broader political vision. Newsom has expertly deployed experimentation to position himself as an energetic counterweight to Trump, but he is clearly still searching for what he really believes in this moment—not a great look for someone derided as slimy. “I have been as progressive and adventurous in terms of progressive policies as most, if not all, Democratic governors in this country,” Newsom told Klein. “Same time, I was also advancing Care Not Cash programs that take welfare away from [the] homeless and guarantee housing in lieu of cash, because I didn’t believe in the handout framework.” Summarizing his political philosophy, Newsom simply said, “Both / and,” a framework that by definition includes literally everything. Combined with a willingness to experiment, this approach has paid dividends to Newsom while he is in the opposition. But when it comes time to run on a positive platform in 2028, it is more likely to read as empty and disingenuous.

​And despite his position as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, Newsom is not proposing a vision for where the party should go. Rather, he wants the Democrats defined by “an open hand, not a closed fist,” a Newsomism for a big tent. “We got crushed in the last election,” Newsom says. “We need to find common ground, not just stand our ground.” For Newsom, that means a Democratic Party that spans from “Manchin to Mamdani.” When Klein pressed him on what this big tent would believe in, Newsom said, “Give me a break…it’s about addition, not subtraction. Our party needs to be ‘many parts, one body.’”

​There’s no problem with a big-tent political party in practice, but there is in principle. I wrote about this last year, and I think it stands up fairly well:

​I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea of candidates running against their party’s positions in less favorable political environments. But if a moderate big tent was the party brand, as the centrists envision, what would the Democratic Party be? What would it represent? Well, if any candidate could take any position as long as it was politically expedient for them to do so, it would not represent any particular ideology. It would not even represent centrism, because there would be at least as many progressives as centrists within the big tent. In this Democratic Party, the only thing its members would represent would be not being Donald Trump and the Republicans.

And in 2025, what “not being Trump” really means is believing in American political institutions and defending the rule of law. If Democrats can be pro-immigration or immigration hawks, social progressives or social traditionalists, welfare-state liberals or fiscal conservatives, free trade proponents or protectionists, or oil-and-gas champions or green-new-deal enthusiasts, the party’s message to three-time Trump voters will be this: We do not believe in anything, but we will be responsible stewards of the political system you hate.

​Things are not hopeless, however, for Newsom. His willingness to experiment, which makes him ideologically flexible and nuanced, ensures that he could develop a genuine political vision by 2028. If so, I think he would be quite a formidable candidate.

Am I thrilled by Newsom’s rise? It’s hard to say. But when I started this Substack, I did so with a specific thesis and goal:

This Substack starts from the premise that the American Left is suffering from a crisis of ideological exhaustion. What was once a dynamic political coalition lively with ideas—the source of the 1910s’ progressive reformers, the 1930s’ New Dealers, and the 1960s’ New Left—has lost the creative energy, experimental spirit, and countercultural edge that once defined it. Its competing factions, different in nearly every imaginable way, are beset by one common trait: an unwillingness to think.

What this Substack hopes to do, therefore, is contribute in its own (very) small way to the revitalization of the Left—not defined by the victory of any particular ideology (although I will offer my opinion unapologetically), or the passage of a specific policy proposal (although I will be honest about what I would like to see passed), but by the reemergence of debate, independent thought, and ideological exploration.

With the exceptions of Zohran Mamdani (constitutionally barred from running for president) and Ro Khanna (unknown to all but the most chronically online), it is—to my veritably endless surprise—Gavin Newsom who best embodies this goal. For those on the Left who would prefer to see a different standard-bearer in 2028, perhaps they should take a page out of Newsom’s playbook: “Success leaves clues; there’s power of emulation.”

With the start of a new school year, the academic-media complex has been working itself half to death debating the role of artificial intelligence in higher education. Should it be embraced as a personal tutor, a sort of educational miracle drug that can democratize access to education and facilitate learning? Should it be shunned as a means of rampant cheating, an innovation so destructive that it necessitates the transformation of the entire academic project? Or should it be cautiously accepted as simply another tool in the student’s toolbox, one that can be deployed for good or bad ends?

Missing from these conversations is an acknowledgement of their obsolescence. Amidst the dour warnings, the shameless optimism, and the uneasy fence-sitting, universities and students alike have forged onward and answered the question for themselves.

Let’s take a look at some recent survey data and university press releases. While research on students’ AI adoption is still relatively limited, the data available indicates widespread use. One study of Harvard undergraduates found that 90% of respondents had used AI to help with schoolwork, with two-thirds using it at least once a week. Another study of students across the U.S. also found that 90% of respondents reported using AI for academic purposes, with 73% of them saying they use AI more this year than last. This final point bears repeating: since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, the data unambiguously shows that AI adoption is rapidly rising among college students.

Moreover, universities themselves have enthusiastically embraced AI. In 2023, the University of Michigan announced the launch of its own generative AI tool, becoming the first university in the world to do so. Following the release of Claude for Education in April 2025, “a specialized AI model that ‘guides’ students to answers rather than giving them directly,” Northeastern University, The London School of Economics, and Champlain College announced full campus access to the model, with Syracuse University following their lead soon after. And right before the start of the fall semester, Google announced a $1 billion commitment to “provide artificial intelligence training and tools to U.S. higher education institutions and nonprofits.” Already, more than 100 institutions have signed on, granting them access to an advanced Google Gemini.

What do these surveys and announcements tell us about the role students and universities envision for AI in higher education? The role will be—and to a large extent, already is—total. AI will build syllabi, plan lessons, and teach. AI will research, conduct literature reviews, and produce scholarly work. AI will take notes, create study guides, and generate ideas. AI will write for you. AI will read for you. AI will think for you.

This development begs the question: Why? Why do students want to use AI to write their papers, create their study guides, take their notes, and summarize their readings? Why are universities pushing their students and faculty to use AI?

Because from my perspective, AI is an existential threat to the entire point of higher education. Consider, what is a good education supposed to do? First and foremost, a good education makes minds by teaching you how to think. By reading closely, participating in small seminars, and engaging deeply with a text through essay writing, a good education will instill certain qualities in a student: the ability to critically reason, the courage to think independently, and the propensity to reflect on embedded assumptions and sacred cows. And by developing these skills, a good education will certainly help you get a job, but it will also do something more. It will foster in its students the capacity to answer the questions that are necessarily asked by life itself, questions to which the answer is always changing. Who am I? What do I believe? What do I want?

If you’ve ever encountered a novel, a political essay, a philosophical treatise, or a physical theory that you just couldn’t get out of your head, that forced you to grapple with its ideas, its themes, or its critiques, then you have experienced firsthand the impact of a good education. In the process of interrogating the questions posed by others, your beliefs and values mature, yes, but you also learn how to approach the questions asked by yourself, the questions that life—often unwillingly—forces you to agonize over. So a good education, it seems to me, teaches you how to think, and in doing so, prepares you for life itself.

But if students use generative AI to do their readings, brainstorm their essay topics, and outline their arguments, then that thinking never happens. The process of reflection and concentration that creates free and independent minds—in other words, the entire point of a college education—completely falls apart when students use AI to take shortcuts and avoid thinking. With the technology so diametrically opposed to the foundational aspect of a good education, shouldn’t students and universities be avoiding it at all costs?

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If the point of a college education is to make minds, then yes, they should be avoiding it. Except that is not the point of higher education, at least for most students and nearly all universities. Instead of college being a place where you receive an education, it is now understood as a place you go to get a job. For students, you can see this in their choice of majors, which are overwhelmingly in the vocational fields. According to the college admissions website Niche, six of the eight most popular majors are in vocational fields, with the two exceptions—biology and psychology—overwhelmingly understood as “practical” degrees. In 2023, universities awarded 289,000 Business degrees, 218,000 degrees in health-related fields, 118,000 Engineering degrees, and 99,000 Communications degrees. Meanwhile, they awarded 44,000 English degrees, 39,000 Political Science degrees, 38,000 History degrees, and 23,000 Foreign Language degrees. And it’s not just the humanities or soft social sciences that students are rejecting. Universities awarded only 29,000 Math degrees, 16,000 Chemistry degrees, and 8,500 Physics degrees. Niche didn’t even bother including geology and the earth sciences on their list. So much ink has been spilled on the growing disparity in enrollment between STEM and humanities majors. But that distinction is the wrong one. The proper comparison is between the pre-professional and knowledge majors.

Universities are similarly pivoting away from a focus on learning and thinking and toward a focus on vocational education. At the same time as universities continue to hire adjunct professors and defund the liberal arts, they are opening “innovation hubs,” startup centers, and hiring middle administrators with titles like “associate vice president for transformational technology and innovation.” Even more striking, the entire mission of most universities has been transformed to align with students’ vocational priorities. While a university’s utmost priority was once the quality of its academics and teaching, it is now students’ return on investment. All other concerns, from the quality of teaching, to the fostering of independent minds, to the excellence of faculty research, pale in comparison to the cold, hard data of ROI.

But if the goal of an education is to get a job, what do students do while at college? Between the selection of one’s major—often before college even begins—to walking across the stage at graduation, there are years to be filled all in pursuit of a mystical job. How does the typical student fill those years to set them on a path to lucrative employment? Universities, too, are faced with the same problem of how to fill the four years a student spends at their school. Their overall goal may be to maximize their students’ ROI, but that is necessarily a backward-looking statistic, as it measures the lifelong financial return of a college degree relative to the cost of attendance over 4 years. How does the university structure itself so that a student’s four years as an undergraduate can maximize their ROI years down the road?

When you consider these questions, the point of college looks a bit different. While the broader goal of an education may be to get a job, the goal at the front of students’ minds, the more tangible north star of day-to-day life, is to get things done. In class, do just enough of your reading (or have your handy AI assistant take notes for you) to secure a solid participation grade. For your papers, produce quality A- work as fast as possible so that you can move on to the next task. In between, make sure you apply to a bunch of summer internships to strengthen your resumè, and don’t forget about the extracurricular meeting you have at 5pm. Oh, and of course, network with everybody you meet. This is higher education represented not by the library, or the classroom, or even the laboratory, but by the planner.

Universities, too, structure themselves to maximize the number of things students can get done as an undergraduate. Their pivot away from teaching and towards vocational training reflects the logic of an education designed for the completion of tasks. It surely hurts the quality of a student’s education when universities reduce the number of tenure-track professors and increase the proportion of courses taught by part-time adjuncts; tenured professors simply have years, or even decades, more experience than their adjunct peers. But if the goal of higher education is to get things done, who cares? A better use of funding is to pack universities with non-faculty professionals and administrative staff, who can service all the centers, offices, initiatives, hubs, programs, and facilities where students can do things to fill their resumés and help them get internships.

From this perspective, students’ and universities’ eagerness to integrate AI into the educational system makes perfect sense. AI may actively prevent deep thinking and reflection, but it is undoubtedly convenient. And this convenience, in the service of productivity and task completion, is what we value most nowadays. Ask most people what they think about AI, and they will offer a pretty negative opinion about its impact on employment, culture, and our ability to think critically. But that doesn’t stop us from using it. The idea that the goal of every task or assignment is to complete it has become so ingrained in our psyche that we don’t even question it. It’s sad to see the university—supposedly the epicenter of critical reason—succumb to this dogma of productivity.

As AI’s exceptional capacity for problem-solving and time-saving exacerbates the productivity culture that has engulfed the university, it’s easy to see what’s lost: the liberal arts conception of higher education. That’s not to say that the liberal arts ethos and “getting things done” are incompatible goals. Quite the contrary: the process of “making minds” is inherently hard work. Reading books, writing papers, and participating in seminars requires sustained concentration and effort, and doing this work for multiple classes at a time demands some degree of productivity. But when productivity itself is prioritized over other educational goals, the mere existence of AI ensures that students will take shortcuts that undermine the liberal arts process in the service of task completion. As long as getting things done remains the point of day-to-day life at the university, students will naturally gravitate towards an AI summary over close-reading a text. The liberal arts will live on, but only as a philosophical or aesthetic choice for individual students. As a form of mass education, it’s hard to imagine how the liberal arts will survive the AI revolution.

Why should we care? Or more precisely, why is this a public concern? When normal people hear about the “death of the liberal arts,” for years a favorite topic of conversation among the most pretentious people you know (myself included), their response is one of overwhelming apathy. After all, don’t we have bigger fish to fry? Climate change, social alienation, democratic backsliding, economic precarity, genocide—why should we devote any attention to how students are working or what majors they are choosing?

The answer lies in what the death of the liberal arts means for our political leadership. It’s no coincidence that the humanities’ 21st-century collapse in prestige has been accompanied by a general decrease in the quality of our political leadership, from presidential candidates to the bureaucrats who staff our government and political parties. In a complex, democratic society such as our own, the liberal arts and political leadership are fundamentally intertwined. There is no way to insulate the latter from the implosion of the former.

Much of this relationship has to do with the nature of leadership itself, political or otherwise. The skills one develops through a liberal arts education are the same qualities associated with good leaders: the courage to reject conventional wisdom and ask difficult questions; the intelligence to solve problems using reason; the confidence to defend unpopular ideas when they’re true and virtuous; and most of all, the vision to forge a new path, achievable only by thinking for yourself. Any brute with enough charisma and vitality can be an effective leader—but being a good leader means being a thinker.

The liberal arts and political leadership are intertwined in another, potentially more important way. In the hard sciences and technological fields, there are clear distinctions between right and wrong answers: either the math adds up, the code works, the equation balances, or it doesn’t. In politics, however, the distinction between right and wrong isn’t so clear. It’s not that there are no wrong answers; there are certainly theories, policies, and practices that have been discredited (or repudiated) by history, economics, or developments in our moral philosophies. But at any given moment, there are always a myriad of potentially right answers—a number of ideas whose eventual impact, truthfulness, and righteousness can never be foreknown, but whose reasonableness can be defended in debate.

This is not the fault of politics, but of human nature. Humans are imperfect and irrational, complex and indecipherable, full of contradictory opinions and emotions. They make decisions based on necessarily incomplete information and deep-rooted biases. They create social structures all are meant to abide by, and they all fail to do so. Yet humans simultaneously have an inalienable right to self-determination. As a result of this incongruous combination—the right to make political decisions, but the inability to make perfect ones—politics is constantly reappraising itself. It’s deeply unsatisfying, but politics can never be perfected, resolved, or answered. It can only continue.

In this way, the liberal arts—and especially the humanities—is the educational equivalent of politics. In his 2017 essay Culture Against Culture, the essayist William Deresiewicz, defending the humanities from charges that it is an inferior form of knowledge to science, asks:

What else does humanistic inquiry resemble? In plainer terms, what else is the experience of reading and trying to say something sensible about a novel or a drama, for example, like? Where else do we encounter a welter of miscellaneous circumstances, a jumble of characters, scenes, ideas, and feelings, organized within a loose, complex, and hidden structure, through which we must navigate some kind of cognitive path, out of which we must make some kind of sense, one that we know will only be a partial and indeed a temporary sense, one possible sense out of an endless array of others, a sense that we ourselves will probably repudiate tomorrow or a year from now in favor of a different one?

The answer is: everywhere. Every time we get up in the morning. What I just described, in that convoluted sentence whose structure was meant to mimic the convolutions of the thing it describes, is the experience of being in the world—that is, the human world, the world of human relationships. Such is the function of art, especially of literary art.

Politics, in the ongoing effort to navigate a complex world and arrive at the most-right answer amidst a multitude of right answers, resembles humanistic inquiry, the foundation of the liberal arts. Humanistic inquiry, in its reproduction of the experience of the human world, resembles everyday life. And from the collective experience of everyday life, we get politics. The liberal arts and politics reflect one another and influence one another at the same time. Classical antiquity, the Enlightenment, the first half of the 20th century: all periods of creative upheaval in the arts and in politics, where cultural and political movements pushed one another to continuously break down the walls of normalcy and convention.

This is why the liberal arts, and the humanities specifically, prepares students for political life. Through the interrogation of one tiny sliver of subjective experience, the liberal arts forces you to reckon with the experiences of others and reevaluate your own life through new eyes. It encourages humility and understanding by exposing how each of our subjective experiences represents very, very little of the overall human condition. It teaches you to listen to the perspective of the author. It opens your mind to previously unimaginable ways of thinking. In other words, the liberal arts cultivate the qualities we need to live with each other and answer the questions posed by politics, questions that inherently affect untold lives other than our own.

So when our political leaders receive a liberal arts education, they not only develop the mental faculties necessary for good leadership, but their relationship to politics itself is fundamentally different. They have a deeper appreciation of the viewpoints and experiences of others, and they are better able to navigate the nuances and complexities of collective life. They are more capable of producing striking insights—of seeing the most-right answer in a haze of partial truths. They can see opportunities for political change, which always originate from everyday life.

But if the proliferation of AI in higher education entails the death of the liberal arts, what political leaders are we left with? Admittedly, it’s impossible to know for sure—a wonderfully convenient example of a political question with multiple potentially right answers. Maybe Claude for Education can guide students to nuance, humility, and critical thinking in the same way it guides them through a math problem. AI itself seems to think so.

But when we consider what AI is good at (technical problem solving, automating repetitive tasks, and summarizing large bodies of text), and when we consider the goal of higher education (getting things done), another answer seems more likely.

If we continue on our current educational trajectory, we risk our political leaders becoming glorified consultants. They will be exceptional at resolving technical problems, finding bureaucratic efficiencies, and optimizing service delivery. All good things. But they will struggle to think critically about the government they’re managing in the first place. They will fail to ask whether what they are doing is right, instead asking whether they are doing it in the right way. They will not be able to chart a new course: to think creatively and independently about the problems this country faces, and then devise a new way of doing things.

They will be extremely effective middle managers in a dying company: fantastic at keeping the ship afloat, but powerless to steer it away from the iceberg.

And at a time of near-unprecedented concern over the future of American democracy, these political leaders will be remarkably detached from “the real world,” from culture. Not in the way in which all political figures live abnormal lives, but in their lack of ability to navigate collective life. Educated through the black-and-white lens of tasks and completed tasks, problems and solutions, they will never have the ability to think with nuance that students naturally develop over the course of a liberal arts education. Their relationship to politics will stem from the managerial ethos of projects and deliverables, rather than the experience and interrogation of everyday life.

Is this the fate of politics in the course of unstoppable technological change? It’s easy to blame AI for this state of affairs—and to a large extent, I do. More difficult is to acknowledge our own culpability in producing a culture that accepts AI in higher education. The incorporation of AI into every aspect of the educational project is not inevitable. And yet, a sense of total helplessness has emerged around AI. Universities claim that it’s impossible to police cheating, that they can’t let their students fall behind the technological curve, and that they need to be “leaders in the space” to compete with other institutions. Students claim that they need to “develop the skill” to not be left behind in the workplace, that they are too busy to do all their work (“I only use AI when I don’t have time to do the reading”), and that they use AI strictly as a tutor. All of this serves as a mass-evasion tactic to avoid a difficult confrontation with the productivity culture that is the fundamental source of higher education’s embrace of AI. It’s easier for everyone to feed the delusion. Students get to pick a nice, cushy job from the outset of college, and then complete a predictable checklist to get it. Universities get to invest in highly profitable, ROI-generating vocational majors and non-academic programs, and ignore any civic responsibilities they are supposed to have. As long as we remain unwilling to sacrifice profit and convenience for literally anything, AI will continue its destructive takeover of higher education. If we wait too long to change course, who will be left to lead the change?

Update 07/06/2026: In the months following publication of this article, a steady drip of scandals revealed Graham Platner’s decades-long pattern of deeply immoral behavior, culminating in a sexual assault allegation made public today. Clearly, he should not be a moral model for anyone. While this article’s argument focused exclusively on moral frameworks in politics, not personal character or actions, Platner’s moral failings are so serious that I think it detracts from the substance of the article. In the interest of transparency, I’m leaving this piece up with an addendum that in no way does it constitute an endorsement of Platner’s personal behavior or the excusing of sexual assault.

In my ongoing discussion of electability, I’ve tried to highlight one essential component to the left’s political future that remains essentially undiscussed in mainstream political discourse: the centrality of moral frameworks to winning elections.

I know that discussing morality as a key aspect of our domestic politics can feel quaint, even unsuited to our modern, technocratic era. Yet it remains the case that every society is produced, constrained, and sustained by a moral framework—a web of values, principles, and ideas that normatively determines right from wrong—underlying its dominant ideology. In feudal society, a moral framework of religious considerations, mutual obligation, and paternalism produced the feudal ties that shaped the economic order and kept society together. In the age of liberal democracy, a moral framework of civil rights, democratic control of government, and meritocratic values produces a capitalist society that aims to equalize opportunity and guarantee equality under the law. And in the last few decades, the moral framework of neoliberalism has ascended to a dominant place in America. This is an ideology that values capital accumulation, governance by experts and elites, individualism, and the sanctity of institutions and processes to protect all three.

For a while, this framework worked. The end of the Cold War seemingly proved the supremacy of the capitalist system. With capitalism venerated, confidence in economists and experts to be responsible stewards of markets was at an all-time high. And demands for social justice and small government dovetailed nicely with an emphasis on individual rights in the social and economic sphere.

But today, there is mass disillusionment with the neoliberal moral framework. As I argued in my last piece, Americans are now seeking a more communal politics, one that reasserts the old-world, small-c conservative morality that bound society through mutual obligations, cooperation, and a sense of shared identity—in other words, the products of community and solidarity. Faced with the forces of globalization, corporate power, and cultural fragmentation, Americans feel atomized and powerless, unable to resist the hollowing-out of their communities and the loss of agency that results from the vicious triumvirate of bad jobs, a threadbare safety net, and an affordability crisis. The result, on both sides of the political divide, is a potent nostalgia for community, “third spaces,” and social solidarity, all of which are imagined as plentiful in the days of yesterday.

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Right now, only one of our two major political parties is meeting this demand for a more communitarian politics: the GOP. Examining the populist right’s political platform, it’s clear that a moral vision rooted in a nationalist social conservatism is the throughline that ties it all together. Trade protectionism is not just about jobs; it’s a promise to protect local communities and foster self-reliance. Immigration enforcement and mass deportations are not just about public safety, but about the preservation of cultural identity in the face of an external “invasion.” Attacks on LGBTQ rights and free speech, especially when combined with state support for Christianity, create the appearance of cultural homogeneity to supplant neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualism. Ending foreign wars—while obviously empty rhetoric—nevertheless signals a foreign policy that prioritizes the domestic over an ephemeral commitment to a “world order.” Taken together, this program aims to artificially construct a community and rebuild social solidarity through a moral framework that elevates the values of “legacy Americans”—who are assumed to share an ideology and identity—while insulating them from the external forces of globalized leftism, immigrants, and worldwide economic competition.

The Democratic establishment, on the other hand, has only drawn closer to the neoliberal orthodoxy that the country is rejecting. As Trump and the populist right took the reins of the GOP, its establishment flocked to the Democratic side, a trend that culminated in a Harris 2024 campaign that represented nothing but the establishment’s final effort to maintain control over America’s institutions. Yet even that brutal loss couldn’t breach the echochamber. In fact, the DNC has become somewhat like the mythical city of Ba Sing Se from Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the midst of a political war it’s undeniably losing, the party establishment is opting to enclose itself behind massive walls to preserve the illusion of stability. Rather than confront the fact that the neoliberal consensus has collapsed, a culture of denial is enforced from the top down. Democrats may have lost in 2024, but there’s no reason to panic. Everybody gets to keep their job, electoral autopsies will ensure that nobody is held accountable, and dissent is quickly squashed. “There is no war in Ba Sing Se.”

To be clear, the left should not emulate the Republican “community.” But at the same time, it must recognize the need to offer an alternative vision of American life that speaks to the desire for community that Trumpism capitalizes on. The promise of sound technocratic management is no longer enough to win elections in a moment dominated by economic and cultural insecurity. The first step, therefore, is to articulate a moral framework from which a vision can flow.

Luckily, a number of new Democrats are currently giving us a model for how this can be done. They hail from all across the country and are running for positions up and down the ballot. They are surprisingly ideologically diverse. And they all share the same thing in common: a commitment to a vision of American life that marks a clear break from the neoliberal orthodoxy of the Democratic establishment.

Who are these new figures, and what do they represent?

First, there is Graham Platner. A harbormaster and oyster farmer from Maine, Platner launched a campaign for Senate just six weeks ago, the first major political campaign of his life. But in the campaign launch video that catapulted him from total obscurity to national recognition, Platner instantly displayed a natural mastery of economic populism. In the first minute, he gushes over the “hardscrabble” people of Maine, angrily describes the challenges of modern American life, and attacks the “oligarchy” for “crushing the middle class.” He then contrasts himself with that oligarchy by listing his policy priorities, which include universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage, ending foreign wars, taking care of our veterans, and strengthening unions. The video is so effective, and Platner so clearly genuine, that when he states why he is running for Senate at the end of the video—“Because I truly do believe that we can build a system that is going to represent working people”—you’re inclined to actually believe him.

With his fiery, unapologetic attacks on the political establishment and billionaire class, it’s easy to write Platner off as just another economic populist. But there is another element to Platner and his campaign that gets lost in that simplifying description. While one of the clear ends of Platner’s economic populism is a stronger middle- and working-class, another goal is more philosophical and neighborly. “I want the community that I am from to succeed,” Platner said in a profile for The New Yorker. “I want the state that allowed me to come home, to give me this frankly spectacular life that I get to live, I want that to work, because there is no point in living a good life if all of your neighbors are getting fucked.”

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Next, there is Zohran Mamdani. Running for mayor of New York City, Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability has come to define his campaign, specifically the four policy proposals that he’s often identified with: freezing the rent, no-cost childcare, fast and free buses, and city-owned grocery stores. For Mamdani, however, these policies do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are presented as a part of a greater political goal—a New York City where working-class people have more dignity and agency in their lives. In his campaign videos and media appearances, Mamdani tells voters that “the slowest buses in the nation are robbing us of our time and our sanity.” He highlights that “the number one reason working families are leaving our city is the housing crisis.” And discussing his proposal for a pilot program of public grocery stores, he argues that “when something is critically important to that dignity, I believe that there should be a public option for it.” This is a politics with a specified goal: that “a life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few.”

Finally, there is Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who in her third term in Congress has become a rising star among the moderate faction of the Democratic Party. Immediately following her 2022 upset victory in a Trump +4 district, the establishment was quick to claim Gluesenkamp Perez as one of their own, hailing her as an example of what was possible electorally if progressives got out of the way. At first glance, this diagnosis seems correct: Gluesenkamp Perez ran against “extremism” in Congress, is co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, and has supported some high-profile Republican measures, including the SAVE Act, the Laken Riley Act, and the recent stopgap budget bill to prevent a government shutdown.

But on closer inspection, it’s clear that her brand of “centrism” has little in common with the neoliberal ideology of the establishment. Gluesenkamp Perez has nothing but disdain for the centrists’ fidelity to technocracy and expert governance—instead, she is motivated by a vision of politics that centers localism, communal agency, and stewardship. This vision shines through when she criticizes the “ingrained disregard for working people by policymakers in D.C.,” and earnestly argues that “we can only make policy that really helps people when we listen to folks working here in our communities.” It shines through in her policy priorities, including investments in trade education, strong antitrust enforcement, and her magnum opus, the right to repair, which would break manufacturers’ monopoly on diagnostic data by requiring them to provide consumers with the information necessary to fix their own stuff. It even shines through when she fondly discusses her hometown dump, which she describes as “kind of our community meeting site.”

What Platner, Mamdani, and Glueskenkamp Perez all have in common is that the values which underpin their politics are dramatically different from the values of the establishment’s neoliberalism. Platner’s emphasis on neighborliness—“because there is no point in living a good life if all of your neighbors are getting fucked”—through economic populism contrasts sharply with the neoliberal celebration of economic self-interest. Mamdani’s emphasis on dignity through affordability sets a new goal for economic policy beyond capital accumulation. Gluesenkamp Perez’s focus on localism and stewardship marks a clear departure from the top-down, technocratic governance of the establishment. And for each of these figures, their commitment to their values translates into the key prerequisite for the Democrats’ electability: a vision of American life that provides an alternative to the Republican “community.”

Analyzing the commonalities between Platner, Mamdani, and Gluesenkamp Perez’s politics, you can start to see the makings of a common moral framework for the Democratic Party, one built on valuing community, agency, and dignity.

Such a moral framework would understand community not in terms of in-groups and out-groups, but as a mode of relationship to one another—a relationship founded on mutual obligation, cooperation, and shared prosperity.

This idea of community is evident in the rhetoric and policy of all three figures. You can see it in Platner’s economic populism, which calls out the oligarchy for abandoning its obligations to the country and working people. You can see it in Mamdani’s pluralism, which insists that “we can build a new kind of politics” through coalition building and cooperation. You can see it in Gluesenkamp Perez’s localism, which intuitively creates a congresswoman that doesn’t “want to be a mouthpiece for any agenda besides my community.” And perhaps most of all, each figure’s economic policies—geared towards making life more affordable and secure for the working- and middle-classes—show this relationship in action. If we are a community, then we are going to support one another.

Such a moral framework would also recognize agency as a key goal of public policy. Between Platner’s support for pro-worker policies like raising the minimum wage and strengthening unions, to Mamdani’s call that “in our New York, the power belongs to the people,” to Gluesenkamp Perez’s belief that regular people deserve control over their communities, their work, and their time, the value of agency is a common element between all three figures.

What would a moral framework that values agency look like in practice? It looks like an economic policy that aims to maximize economic agency and self-determination for workers, rather than the stock prices of corporations. It looks like ensuring that we all get to experience the freedom of economic security, rather than the paralysis of working paycheck-to-paycheck. It looks like understanding that the freedom to endlessly consume goods produced by others is no freedom at all, and that genuine control over our material conditions comes from the competence developed through production and stewardship. And it looks like supporting local communities in the face of monopolies and foreign competition, so we can find a better balance between the advantages of economies of scale and the necessity of thriving main streets.

Finally, this moral framework would center dignity in American life. The core premise of Platner and Mamdani’s politics, despite the dichotomy between their populism and pluralism, is that the cost-of-living crisis is destroying the American dream. The promise of this dream is really straightforward: work hard, and you’ll have a good life. But when one can’t afford housing, healthcare, or an education on the inadequate wages of a bad job, then the good life never comes, and the dignity that accompanies that life is never felt. This problem---of our economy not rewarding hard work with lives of dignity---is the problem that Platner and Mamdani’s progressive economic policies aim to address. As Mamdani said in his victory speech following the New York City mayoral primary:

We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford. A city where they can do more than just struggle. One where those who toil in the night can enjoy the fruits of their labor in the day. Where hard work is repaid with a stable life.

But the output of the American dream, the “good life,” is only one half of the equation. The other half is the input, the work. Gluesenkamp Perez, through her emphasis on production, competence, and stewardship---on individual and communal self-sufficiency---shows how this moral framework could extend our understanding of a dignified life to the conditions of the workplace and the nature of our work. If dignity is what we value, Gluesenkamp Perez argues, it may not be enough to reward toil with riches. The toil itself must be overcome. As Gluesenkamp Perez says herself:

“People have misunderstood work as a bad thing. Toil is the bad thing, right? Toil is the curse. But work is a joy. It’s exploitation that is the problem.”

There is real potential here for a different political future than the right-wing hellscape of the GOP or the zombified corpse of the establishment’s neoliberalism. If other Democratic candidates were to follow the model provided by Platner, Mamdani, and Gluesenkamp Perez, we could see a totally new kind of politics in the Democratic party—one grounded in a moral framework that marks a clear break from the values of neoliberalism. This politics, and the moral foundation that supports it, would speak to the desire for community among the American public. It would represent the kind of creative destruction, the kind of politics that doesn’t fit neatly into our ideological boxes, that could generate a movement and build a coalition. My analysis of this potential moral framework is far from definitive. But I hope it shows that we’re ready to make a start.

Perhaps this all sounds like a pipe dream, and maybe it is. But at the same time, it’s nothing more than the answer to a few questions: What is the experience of American life today? What do we want American life to look like? How can we get there?

What are those questions other than the essence of politics? In times of incredible uncertainty, it’s often best to get back to basics.

You’ll have to forgive me for writing a Luigi Mangione article in July of 2025. I know that I’m quite late to the party, and that most of the ink that will ever be spilled about Mangione already has been. But following my last article on the centrist conception of electability, multiple readers reached out to me with rebuttals that highlighted the left’s electoral problems and proposed ways that the left could become more electable before 2028. During those conversations, I found myself continuously returning to the UnitedHealthcare shooting and the outpouring of support that followed the crime.

How are these seemingly dissimilar topics related? First, we must revisit both the murder and the feverish discourse it generated in the following weeks.

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On November 24th, 2024, Luigi Mangione arrived at a hostel in Upper Manhattan, using a fake ID to book a room. For the next ten days, he constantly wore a mask to hide his face and avoided both public places and conversations with others. Then, on December 4th, he used a 3D printed gun equipped with a silencer to kill UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson before fleeing the City by foot, bike, car, and train. He was eventually caught in Central Pennsylvania, over 200 miles from the original site of the shooting.

What this timeline reveals is the premeditated nature of Thompson’s murder. This was not an accident, or a killing in the heat of the moment, or the product of organized crime. Radicalized by his experience navigating the U.S. health care system to manage chronic back pain, Mangione meticulously planned each step in the murder and left a manifesto articulating his motive and the ideological basis for his actions. This is the type of crime that we are supposed to abhor in a democratic society, where the rule of law reigns supreme and we answer political questions with politics, not violence.

But the overwhelming response was not one of abhorrence. When UnitedHealthcare posted a statement to their Facebook page about the death of Thompson, users responded with over 71,000 laughing emojis. On SNL, the crowd went ballistic when Mangione’s name was mentioned during the Weekend Update. And when asked about her reaction to the murder on live television, one journalist said she felt “joy…well maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy.” These were not isolated incidents: research from the Network Contagion Research Institute, an organization that tracks online extremism, found that six of the top 10 posts about the murder “either expressed explicit or implicit support for the killing.”

Nor was the controversy limited to the left. In a painfully obvious example of horseshoe theory, conservatives echoed many of the same sentiments as the Twitter leftists attempting to use Mangione to foster class consciousness. This was most visible in the comments section of Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh’s videos denouncing Thompson’s murder and the public’s reaction to the killing. “Ben isn’t one of us, people,” one commenter wrote. “He’s just another richie who makes his career off of dividing people.”

Of course, not everyone was so supportive. Polling after the murder showed that most of the country disapproved of Mangione and his actions. But that only added to the sense of consensus that rapidly emerged around Thompson’s murder. It appeared that—for the first time in years—Americans were speaking with the same voice, saying, “I don’t condone murder, but I understand why he did it.”

In response, a shocked establishment rushed to make sense of Mangione’s valorization. Some determined that a broken U.S. healthcare system was responsible. Others blamed moral rot, concluding that “the healthcare system is [not] broken but that many of us are.” And still others saw Thompson’s murder as just another salvo of “populist rage.”

But most of the establishment eschewed analysis in favor of moralizing to the public. Pundits warned against the allure of political violence, reminded Americans that “a broken system is no excuse,” called for moral clarity that murder is wrong, and denounced the “yes…but” attitude of the country. On all these points, the pundits should have been right.

So why did the public think they were so wrong? In the comments sections of their op-eds and the replies to their tweets, the establishment found that America’s reaction to their moralizing was angry, defensive, and entirely unreceptive. Americans didn’t just consider the anti-Mangione rhetoric unpersuasive—they found it insulting. If you read the top three comments of the New York Times article “A Broken System is No Excuse,” you won’t find civil discourse; you’ll find indignation:

I am tired of all the articles decrying the public’s response to the shooting….

When people believe there is no path to justice, they will take matters into their own hands….

Where are all the essays about the people who were denied coverage? Did any of them die? Did any of them go bankrupt first, and then die?

It’s too easy to write an essay pointing out that shooting people is bad….

Somehow, amidst the discourse over a cold-blooded murderer, those condemning violence were the ones who appeared callous, insensitive, and even immoral. It is in this paradox that a source of our current political crisis is revealed: a profound disillusionment with the moral soundness of the values that underpin our political system.

This disillusionment is the result of a deep divide between the moral framework the public wants to see in our politics and the actual values of our presently existing system. The divide is akin to the German sociological concept of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft—roughly translated to English as “community” and “society.” On one end of the paradigm is the “community” characteristic of old-world cultures: a social order based on interpersonal interactions and formed by kinship, neighborhood, and friendship. Here, social ties are organized around emotion (including the emotion of religious feeling) and moral obligation, making deference and honor important values. Cooperation, not competition, is the norm.

On the other end of the paradigm is the “society” of the modern state. Here, social ties are impersonal and indirect, and based on rationality, calculation, and self-interest. This society is structured around the legalistic and bureaucratic organization of the state and corporation, and therefore rational behavior—defined in self-interested, economic terms—supplants moral obligation as the organizational force of society. Competition, not cooperation, is the norm.

What the Luigi Mangione saga reveals is the American public’s desire for a more community-oriented politics and culture and a less extreme form of the modern “society” described above. While both ends of the community-society paradigm represent the Platonic ideals of their respective forms of social organization, the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant American ideology has brought us closer to the ideal of “society” than ever before. This process began with the rapid transformation of our economic policies in the 1980s. While the New Deal and Great Society embodied the values of shared prosperity, supporting local communities, and helping the downtrodden, neoliberalism’s reforms were designed to force Americans to act in accordance with the market’s self-interested rationality. The rhetoric deployed to support various neoliberal reforms makes this abundantly clear: unions were dismantled to foster “labor market flexibility” and create a “friendly business climate;” tax policy was reformed to “sharpen incentives;” trade deals were negotiated to promote the “efficient allocation of capital;” and welfare was transformed into “workfare.” Behind all these policies lay the same insidious logic: if you remove safety-net protections while rewarding large fortunes, Americans will be compelled to prioritize their economic self-interest.

While the wealth generated by these policies may not have trickled down to the public, the moral framework they embodied certainly did. Nowhere is this more evident than in mass culture, which is now dominated by the consumerist and economically rational values of neoliberalism. On social media, vapid celebrity culture has reached its apex, while the rise of influencers has created an “influencer lifestyle” attainable only through total financial security. Television is filled with reality TV shows—Love Island USA comes to mind—whose contestants are obviously more motivated by the chance to become an influencer or Amazon brand ambassador than the search for true love. In everyday fashion, we dress to look wealthy (old-money, clean girl) or for “ourselves” (athleisure, loungewear). In general, our relationship with culture has never been so driven by the cultivation of an “aesthetic,” or the conscious consumption of material and cultural products to signal a certain vibe, lifestyle, and belief system.

Surveys of American values have confirmed the proliferation of a neoliberal rationality throughout the citizenry. In the last few decades, the American moral compass has turned away from traditionally important non-economic values and toward money and economic security. While 31% of Americans reported that money was “very important to them” in 1998, 43% of Americans said the same thing in 2023. Meanwhile, the share of Americans reporting that patriotism was very important to them plummeted from 70% to 38%, with religion (62% to 39%), having children (59% to 30%), and community involvement (47% to 27%) facing similar fates.

Is the growing emphasis on money partly a reflection of rising economic precarity and an ongoing affordability crisis? Certainly. But the simultaneous erosion of our longstanding, nation-defining values suggests something deeper: the emergence of new national principles in response to a transformed political economy.

And it was these principles that informed the establishment’s denunciations of Mangione and his sympathizers. To the establishment, what was so immoral about the public’s sympathy for Mangione was not how it glorified violence, but how it undermined the “society’s” fundamental values, such as the rule of law; the need for rational behavior; the containment of politics to its institutional structure; and the respect, even deference for the market and its outcomes, even when the outcome is your insurance claim being rejected.

The public, on the other hand, was operating on an entirely different moral register, one that had more in common with the ideal of the “community” than the “society.” From this perspective, Mangione’s actions were wrong, because murder’s inherent immorality and anti-social nature violates the ethos of the community. But it was simultaneously understandable, because UnitedHealthcare—representing the U.S. healthcare system as a whole—also violated the communal ethos by foregoing its moral obligations to the community. The public understands that the U.S. healthcare system withholds essential medical care behind the bureaucracy of the corporation and the rationality of the market. They understand that the state sanctions this system and chooses to apportion healthcare by this logic. And they understand that there is no sense of shared citizenship, or kinship, or cooperation in this system, only the cold, calculated logic of profit maximization. So while the establishment saw Mangione as an assault on our society’s fundamental values, the public saw him as an assertion—if an imperfect one—of an older form of morality we abandoned somewhere along the way.

Unless the left is able to address the moral disconnect between the public’s desire for a more communal politics and the currently institutionalized principles of neoliberalism, they will not win elections. The Luigi Mangione saga is a particularly conspicuous example of Americans’ hunger for the “community” of days past—and while it does not mean that the left needs to embrace Mangione or adopt the social conservatism of the old-world, it does mean that they must articulate the moral obligations of our country to its citizens and what economic and social policies can fulfill those obligations. The left’s next political program, therefore, must communicate a post-neoliberal vision of American life and the moral framework present in that vision.

Right now, the populist right is winning because they are offering a vision of “community” while the left offers nothing. If we do not respond, that vision will win, because despite the populist right’s narrow and oppressive version of community, something will always beat nothing.

The summer of 2025 is marking the triumphant reinvigoration of an ongoing argument in the Democratic Party following their devastating loss last November: how can the Democrats become more electable?

June saw the debate return in earnest following WelcomeFest, Democratic centrism’s marquee annual conference, and the L.A. protests against ICE immigration raids. The vibes of the two events could not have been more different—the former was profoundly technocratic, a little awkward, and yet quite smug; the latter was simultaneously angry, fearful, joyous, and sporadically violent. Yet both struck a nerve with the Twitterati on questions of strategy and messaging in a post-2024 political environment.

The fault lines will feel familiar to Democrats everywhere. While the left argued for a positive alternative to Trumpism and against a redux of 1990s Republicanism-lite, the moderates stressed the practical importance of message discipline and meeting the country where they are.

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With WelcomeFest, the centrists continued the full-fledged attack on “wokeness” and progressivism that they launched the moment Trump regained the presidency. From the moderate perspective, the progressives and their network of powerful advocacy groups pushed the party too far on cultural issues in the 2010s and early 2020s, and this overextension of cultural capital generated a backlash that culminated in a GOP trifecta in November. If the left had made way for a bigger tent, they argue, maybe the Democrats could have won the House, where they would be able to block the Big Beautiful Bill or investigate Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

The left, on the other hand, counter that the technocratic nebbishness of Democratic elites has surrendered populism to the GOP at a uniquely populist moment. In their view, the root cause of the Republicans’ working-class appeal is economic, even if their right-wing populism manifests as social or cultural grievance. The way to win back political power is with a message of economic populism that pits the 99% against the 1%, and this requires a decidedly anti-big-business posture. The left criticizes the centrist attempts to signal populism through cultural moderation and vaguely pro-worker rhetoric as grossly insufficient, and they argue that the Democratic brand can only be recovered by economic policy that genuinely confronts corporate power and makes big-business the populist “other.”

The controversy over the L.A. protests and the subsequent success of No Kings Day—where protestors conspicuously deployed American iconography and emphasized Constitutional values—seemed like a victory for Democratic centrism. The center-left pundit Noah Smith, who attended the San Francisco No Kings protest, wrote that “it was the single most patriotic protest I’ve ever been to,” with “none of the angry energy and racial grievance of the BLM protests of summer 2020, nor the anti-Americanism of the Palestine protests.” He concluded that “it was a stunning victory for message discipline among the anti-Trump opposition,” and that the protests resulted in “something of a public relations coup.”

With this momentum, prominent center-left pundit Matt Yglesias published a theory of electability titled “Why I’m obsessed with winning the Senate.” In it, he rightly criticizes the pro-democracy center’s “save democracy” rhetoric that prioritizes “sounding the alarm” over figuring out how to actually win elections. He also advances strong arguments about the importance of the Senate specifically and the potentially counterproductive consequences of high levels of Trump-alarm for the pro-democracy center. And I agree with him that “to defend democracy, we need to pander more to the actually existing views of people who voted for Donald Trump three times.” But Yglesias’s ideas on how to do that—in other words, of what constitutes electability—reveal the fatal flaws of the centrist conception of electability and the inevitable transience of the No King’s Day victory.

As the title of Yglesias’s piece indicates, the Senate is crucial to the center’s conception of electability. For Yglesias and the centrists at WelcomeFest, Democrats cannot regain power or “save democracy” without meaningfully contesting a wider range of Senate seats. In practice, this means tailoring the Democrats’ messaging to succeed in places like Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and North Carolina. From this starting point, Yglesias writes that (emphasis mine):

Under the circumstances, it should be a no-brainer for the party to write a more moderate platform and deliberately engage in a loud and proud big tent recruiting strategy. In states where Democrats are struggling to win, there’s nothing to lose by recruiting and standing behind pro-gun candidates, candidates who are friendly to oil and gas, candidates who are okay with late-term abortion restrictions, candidates who have traditional views on gender identity, candidates who are immigration restrictionists, candidates who are old-fashioned deficit hawks, candidates who are vocally skeptical of affirmative action.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea of candidates running against their party’s positions in less favorable political environments. But if a moderate big tent was the party brand, as the centrists envision, what would the Democratic Party be? What would it represent? Well, if any candidate could take any position as long as it was politically expedient for them to do so, it would not represent any particular ideology. It would not even represent centrism, because there would be at least as many progressives as centrists within the big tent. In this Democratic Party, the only thing its members would represent would be not being Donald Trump and the Republicans.

And in 2025, what “not being Trump” really means is believing in American political institutions and defending the rule of law. If Democrats can be pro-immigration or immigration hawks, social progressives or social traditionalists, welfare-state liberals or fiscal conservatives, free trade proponents or protectionists, or oil-and-gas champions or green-new-deal enthusiasts, the party’s message to three-time Trump voters will be this: We do not believe in anything, but we will be responsible stewards of the political system you hate.

This is a catastrophic misread of the political moment, and it is the same misread made by the Harris campaign in 2024. Consider how the writer Christian Lorentzen described the Democratic Party he saw at their national convention last summer:

Trump’s ideological destruction of the bond between the conservative movement and the Republican Party…[has] allowed the Democrats to open their tent to all-comers, from neocons to the self-proclaimed socialist left. It is now the party of labour and of capital; the party of debtors and of bankers; the party that mocks the Ivy League but is largely run by Ivy Leaguers; the party of anti-monopolists and of Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of insiders and of the marginalised; the party of the football team and of the sorority; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and of the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide.

I would like the centrists to tell me: does this not sound like the big tent that they are asking for? Kamala Harris created an ideological coalition spanning Dick Cheney to Bernie Sanders—and she lost the election. In fact, it was the bigness of the tent itself that was ultimately her downfall. Despite total consensus among both the Democratic intelligentsia and the public that Harris should focus on the cost of living, her closing argument at the Ellipse told Americans that we—the responsible establishment of the center-left and right—will set aside our ideological differences to protect democracy. This was not a problem of a campaign prioritizing the wrong message. Harris could not talk about the cost of living because doing so meant alienating one part or another of her tent. The only message everyone could agree on was the need to “save democracy.”

What the center and the Democratic establishment do not understand is that their conception of American politics is deeply outdated. In their world, our political institutions still have public legitimacy; our economic system is flawed but not unsalvageable; and our cultural values are more or less centered around foundational American ideals. In their world, market liberalism is still the rational “end-of-history,” even if its edges need to be softened, and public policy is still best when placed in the hands of experts and their perfectly calibrated cost-benefit analyses. In their world, the foundations of our political and economic systems are still correct, and the reasonable middle of America knows it. Trump’s comeback challenges this assertion, for sure, but he still represents a minority view—it’s just not as unpopular as the platform of the far-left.

In their world, if you listen carefully, you can hear a quiet consensus being drowned out by the loudest voices on the left and right.

In such a world, “messaging” takes on a unique importance in political campaigns. When everyone agrees on the same foundation, most voters do not consider the other party an intolerable option; after all, they agree on the core principles. The parties understand this, so they design their platforms to simultaneously protect their own coalition while poaching as many voters as possible from the other party. This is a very delicate act, and it demands a carefully calibrated message to build the biggest tent possible. Winning elections, therefore, requires running a risk-averse campaign, carefully poll-testing your message, and attracting moderates in the political center.

But this approach only works when those political foundations are legitimate in the eyes of the public. When political legitimacy is strong, voters can be successfully messaged to by party elites, because there is a certain amount of faith, however small, that those elites represent the interests of their voters. But when political legitimacy is weak, this faith no longer exists, and the mistrust and skepticism of elites that inevitably accompanies a crisis of legitimacy ensures that voters will not believe the message their elites are selling them. In that context, being electable requires building power with voters rather than trying to sell them a message. Party leaders win elections by creating a movement that brings voters along for the ride, that tells voters, “This system may be corrupted, but together we will make something better.”

The big tent approach articulated by Yglesias is thoroughly incompatible with the movement politics demanded for by our current legitimacy crisis. Movement politics requires, above all, enthusiasm generated by bold policy ideas. But to a big tent, enthusiasm is a threat. If an idea is too exciting, the power balance within the tent shifts towards that idea, threatening the other factions in the coalition. This was ultimately the downfall of Harris’s cost-of-living messaging. After unveiling her anti-price-gouging proposal, voters loved the idea so much that it began to threaten the establishment wing of her tent. After a handful of meetings with big donors, the policy fell by the wayside, and so did Harris’s momentum.

Until the center and the Democratic establishment stop pretending like our system has public legitimacy, they will be unable to win elections and thwart the current ascension of the populist right. Unfortunately, they will never come to this realization, because they have thoroughly convinced themselves of their system’s supremacy. This self-delusion makes perfect sense. For years, the political consultancies, hedge funds, start-ups, non-profits, academic disciplines, think tanks, and media outlets that constituted the establishments of both parties reaped economic, sociological, and psychic rewards from their system. Now, sensing the threat of the populist right, they have coalesced in one party, creating a Democratic establishment so close to the political order that they are blind to its flaws. The result is that what appears as centrism or rational moderation is really a fervent commitment to ideology, only that ideology is the market liberalism that has dominated American politics for decades. And like all the true-believing establishments of history, their inability to accept other ideas and perspectives leaves them stuck in the past while the rest of the country moves on. So while the center continues to insist that Trump is a disease to an otherwise healthy system, a majority of the country considers him an antibody to a disease they have been suffering from for decades.

The reaction of the Democratic establishment to Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary perfectly illustrates their inability to adapt their conception of electability to the post-legitimate moment. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the City’s wealthy elite issued panicked statements about Mamdani’s win and got to work scheming ways to defeat him in November. But their conclusions show how profoundly out of touch they are with their own city and the political moment. To be sure, donors piled on to Cuomo, describing him as “entitled,” “arrogant,” and “aloof” while criticizing his campaign’s Rose Garden strategy. Yet they pledged to back a candidate with the same policies, assuming that if they run a better campaign, they will win. In this analysis, the idea that the electable candidate is the one who rejects the primacy of capital in political life, refuses to offer unconditional support for Israel’s genocide, and rebuffs the establishment’s constant need for flattery is literally unimaginable. So, as with Trump in 2024, Mamdani’s success is explained away by better “messaging” while the center avoids any self-reflection about why New Yorkers rejected their vision.

But for those of us on the left, Mamdani offers a glimpse of the path forward. The center is overplaying its hand in this Democratic civil war they insist on fighting. They are discredited, paralyzed by ideology, and stuck in yesterday’s political climate. They do not understand how to be electable in this post-legitimate moment. And they cannot rebuild political legitimacy because they are unwilling to lose the economic, sociological, and psychic benefits they reap from market liberalism. Mamdani is proof that we can be ideologically confident.

But rashness must not be mistaken for confidence. The left faces many of the same problems as the center. The language policing and emphasis on identity at the expense of class has discredited progressivism for most of the country, making it seem like a coercive force interested in its own power rather than the broad-based working- and middle-class movement it aims to be. The anathema to debate and insistence on ideological purity that plagued the left for the last decade has left us dangerously paralyzed by ideology as well. And the left faces its own challenges toward restoring political legitimacy, which requires not only economic reform but the establishment of a cultural compact that can restore a shared sense of citizenship. The door to power may be open now, but the failure to overcome any of these weaknesses could slam it shut. So before the left can take full advantage of the center’s electoral weakness, it must foreground an economic vision and articulate its definition of American values. Speak freely and think deeply—now is the time for soul searching.

Nobody has taken Donald Trump’s return to power worse than the Democrats. Since his electoral victory in November, they have wandered in the political wilderness, unable to settle on a reason for their electoral loss or construct a coherent strategy to counter Trumpism for the next four years. Facing historically low approval ratings and a trust deficit relative to Republicans on nearly all significant issues, the party has dug itself into quite a political hole.

This future did not always look so bleak. Even after Trump’s initial victory in 2016, Democrats maintained that “demographics are destiny,” assuming that a steadily diversifying electorate and historically progressive Gen Z would eventually deliver consistent Democratic victories and render the MAGA movement unelectable. In liberal circles, “demographics are destiny” was not considered cope or wishful thinking. Rather, it was a truism—an inevitable wave of blue votes liberals could count on saving them in the not-so-distant future.

The 2024 election obliterated this fantasy. Not only did Trump sweep the swing states and win the popular vote, but he did so on the backs of the very voters Democrats assumed would save them. Trump made remarkable gains among Hispanic and Asian voters, the fastest-growing demographics in the United States. He won naturalized immigrants by 1 point—a 28-point swing from 2020 to 2024. And shockingly, Trump won 18-29 year-olds, flipping Gen Z from the most progressive generation in 50 years to one of the more conservative.

This data comes from Blue Rose Research’s 2024 Election Retrospective, a research report that combines survey, voter file, and precinct-level data to create a more accurate picture of the 2024 election than exit polls can provide. Blue Rose Research is run by David Shor, a data analyst and self-described socialist known for his tough-love approach to Democrats. In this report, however, no tough love is necessary—the data speaks for itself.

The extent of young people’s conservative shift is staggering. In 2020, Biden won 18-29 year-olds by 24 points, the largest margin of victory among all age cohorts that year. But in 2024, Trump shifted these voters 25 points to the right, becoming the first Republican to win young voters since Ronald Reagan. Moreover, it appears that youth was a more potent determinant of Republican support than historically meaningful demographic characteristics, such as race. As Shor explained in an interview with Eric Levitz of Vox (emphasis added):

…if you look at people under the age of 25, every single group — white, nonwhite, male or female — is considerably more conservative than their millennial counterparts. And it even seems that Donald Trump narrowly won nonwhite 18-year-old men, which is not something that has ever happened in Democratic politics before.

How did this happen? Why did Trump do so well among Gen Z voters, a historically progressive generation just a few years earlier? And what happened between 2020 and 2024 to drive this rapid change in political ideology?

In some ways, young voters shifted towards Trump for the same reasons as the rest of the country. Young people cared deeply about inflation and the economy, with 40% of 18-29 year-olds listing inflation as the most important factor behind their vote. These voters saw the cost of living rise under Biden and wanted change instead of four more years of Democratic leadership. While Trump was an imperfect candidate, he promised this change, and voters trusted him to deliver.

The economy, however, does not explain the whole story. One of the more shocking data points in Shor’s report is the gender gap between young men and women, with men supporting Trump and the Republicans at far higher rates. Among voters under 25, there was a 20+ point difference between men’s and women’s support for Democrats—double the national average. Concerningly, the gender gap grew as voters got younger, culminating in a 23-point gap in Democratic support for 18-year-old men and women.

Men and women both experience inflation. They both have to pay rent. They both buy food at the grocery store. Yet 18-29 year-old men moved so far right that they effectively won Trump the entire age demographic. Therefore, the question of why Trump did so well among young voters requires answering another question: why did Trump do so well with young men?

Let’s begin with the underlying social context: all the data indicates that men are not doing well. In education, they are rapidly falling behind women: men make up only 42% of college students nationwide, and after controlling for all other variables, the single most significant risk factor for dropping out of college is being a man. In the economy, men’s average inflation-adjusted earnings are $3,000 less than in 1979, and their workforce participation rates have stagnated. And in their personal lives, men are disproportionately socially isolated, with young men’s alone time increasing faster than any other demographic group. This social isolation may explain why men are three times as likely as women to die from suicide or drug overdose and have far higher rates of addiction.

The extent to which young men are literally alone is startling. Despite having more free time than any other group, single men without kids—a category that describes most young men—spend the vast majority of their leisure time alone. Two-thirds of men aged 18-23 say that “nobody really knows me.” 30% of young men report not spending time with a single person outside their household in the past week. And 15% of men report having no close friends at all. Perhaps this explains why only 18% of young men feel deeply connected to a community while 21% say they do not feel a strong sense of belonging anywhere.

The evidence strongly suggests that this amount of alone time is mentally harmful. Not only did we run a giant natural experiment on the effects of social isolation during Covid—an experiment with definitively negative results—but the scientific consensus clearly indicates that loneliness increases stress and antisocial behavior while also being one of the highest risk factors for depression and anxiety.

All of this has a potent political effect. Politics, as a product and producer of social life, is intrinsically connected to an individual’s social condition and experience. If young men are disproportionately isolated from American society and culture, this experience will inevitably shape their political preferences.

This leads us to our next question: why does young men’s social isolation push them toward conservative politics?

Let’s start by acknowledging what the data clearly shows: social isolation feels really bad. Humans are naturally social creatures and tend to seek out and embrace community, especially when they feel like they do not already belong to one. When young men seek community, however, they often find themselves face to face with a right-wing pipeline.

Here’s the reality of today’s internet: if you’re a man and you have a hobby, the online community for that hobby is most likely right-wing.

The examples abound. If you’re into video games, that online space—dominated by Discord and Steam—is right-wing. If you’re into comedy, that online space is right-wing. The online spaces for the gym, computer science, personal finance, tabletop gaming, and history all lean to the right. Some sports are right-coded, with UFC being the quintessential example. Politics is often a right-wing hobby on the online platforms young men frequent, from YouTube to Twitch to the podcast network. While less of a hobby, men’s self-help content is either right-coded or explicitly right-wing, with the manosphere serving as the only accessible source of advice (more on this later).

A lot of this content is not explicitly political but instead emphasizes right-wing values or themes, which makes it easy for men who are less politically attuned to fall quickly and deeply into a right-wing rabbit hole. Oftentimes, this apolitical conservatism manifests as simple misogyny, but it can also appear as the glorification of traditionally masculine traits, ironic allusions to an imagined social hierarchy, a fixation on personal responsibility and self-improvement, terrible dating advice that reflects backward assumptions about women, or the valorization of entrepreneurship and hustle culture.

To be clear, there are exceptions to this claim. In every community, you can find left-wing content creators, and some hobbies are nearly homogenous in their leftism. Music is a left-leaning online space, as are the communities for most artistic and creative hobbies. Some sports, such as basketball, also lean left. And there are plenty of Democratic or leftist content creators to watch on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok.

The point I’m trying to make is that if you’re a young man looking for an online community that shares your interests, you are more likely to stumble into a space that intersects with the right than the left. Not only are you now in a right-coded space, but the social media algorithms are ready to push you down a right-wing rabbit hole. For example, consuming gym content, comedy content, UFC content, personal finance content, history content, self-help content, or political content can all lead the YouTube algorithm to recommend Joe Rogan’s podcast. If you watch that, it will also recommend Theo Von’s podcast. Once you make the rounds in this ideologically heterodox (but still right-leaning) circuit, the algorithm will soon recommend the more far-right Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, you’ve been “red pilled.”

There is some quantitative evidence to support this argument. One 2021 study analyzing online political polarization using 5.1B Reddit comments across 10,000 Reddit communities (subreddits) found a statistically significant relationship between masculine subreddits and right-wing politics. While 23.3% of the most right-wing communities were at least one standard deviation more masculine than the mean, only 2.9% leaned feminine. And among left-wing communities, 44% were at least one standard deviation more feminine than the mean, while only 1.4% leaned masculine. Additionally, this same study found a similar relationship between younger subreddits and right-wing ideology, with 26.1% of right-wing communities leaning younger and only 2.9% leaning older. This data unambiguously suggests that young men’s online communities are disproportionately right-wing—at least on Reddit.

Other studies have confirmed the phenomenon of algorithmic radicalization, determined that YouTube’s algorithm has a right-wing bias, linked the video game platform Steam to right-wing extremist content, and established that the manosphere is a gateway for young men and the far-right.

But beyond the quantitative evidence, I’m most confident in the intuitive truth of this argument to young men. I’m willing to bet that most men will read this article and remember the right-wing spiral they fell into after stumbling across a Ben Shapiro video in 8th grade. Or remember the insane misogyny they saw in Discord communities for their favorite video games. Or how the history videos they tried to watch about WW2 were always weirdly apologetic towards the Germans. Or when they fell into the manosphere after trying to improve their personal hygiene, or learn about the gym, or get help about any number of personal issues.

This is one piece of the puzzle. But the other piece is even more impactful. When young men are socially isolated, they are far more willing to engage with a community that speaks to how they’re feeling and validates those feelings. And the reality of today’s cultural milieu is that the only place where men can find that validation is in the manosphere.

To put it simply, the manosphere—rightfully derided as a hotbed of misogyny—derives its appeal from a surprising place: basic empathy. At the same time as they spew hateful bullshit about women, manosphere influencers candidly discuss the problems young men face in a socially isolated environment, including anxiety, economic precarity, cultural alienation, porn addiction, romantic rejection, loneliness, and pessimism. By acknowledging these legitimate issues, manosphere content creators build trust between themselves and their audience, who feel heard, understood, and supported. Young men clearly see a lot to like in the manosphere, since nearly half of them say they trust one or more of its voices.

On its face, this is a good thing. It’s good for young men to have a space where they feel seen and supported, and where they can openly discuss their problems in a community. We want more communities like this for everyone.

The problem arises in the manosphere’s solutions to young men’s anxieties. Manosphere influencers frequently imply—or explicitly claim—that the growing success of women has come at the expense of men, and that men’s challenges can be attributed to feminism and other “woke ideologies.” To be a happy and successful man, they argue, you must counter a woke culture with strong masculinity—defined by the manosphere as a masculinity that places men above women in a social hierarchy. This solution, unsurprisingly, fosters reactionary, socially conservative opinions that push young men towards Trump, the political representative of the manosphere’s masculinity and reactionary conservatism.

While much of Trump’s support among young voters was undeniably driven by economic concerns, the critical component behind his success was the right’s ability to convert young men’s isolation-driven anxieties into political conservatism. This success, however, could never have happened without the Democrats’ failure to counter the manosphere’s messaging.

The key behind the manosphere’s success is not that its solutions are uniquely persuasive or compelling; it’s that they’re the only ones available. For the last 10 years, the left has failed to adequately confront men’s challenges or even talk about them in any meaningful capacity, leaving a vacuum the manosphere has eagerly filled. When young men seek advice or guidance online, they find the manosphere, happily alone with no left-leaning alternative.

If the Democrats want to regain young voters’ support, they must pivot away from the rhetoric of the last decade and actively include men in their political coalition. Two notable mistakes in the last 10 years were ceding masculinity as a value to the GOP and rejecting men as valuable members of their political movement. The manosphere makes it terrifyingly clear that when the left fails to promote a constructive vision of masculinity and actively confront men’s issues, the right capitalizes with harmful consequences to everyone. And when Democrats criticize politicians like Bernie Sanders for having a robust base of male supporters, they send a message to men that they are not valued or included in their political movement.

Importantly, these mistakes compound on each other to further erode trust between young men and the left. When the right is the only political movement confronting men’s challenges, and when the left uses male support as an argument not to support a politician, each side becomes associated with a particular gender—the left representing women, the right representing men. In this environment, social phenomena like Gen Z’s gender war—the endless cycle of instigation and outrage between men and women on social media—is coded as political rhetoric, where young men see women’s provocations as personal critiques from the left. As a result, young men trust the left even less and are further susceptible to the manosphere’s content. This is how we end up in a situation where, prior to the 2024 election, more young men trusted Andrew Tate (20%) than the President of the United States, Joe Biden (15%).

I don’t pretend to know exactly how the left can stop the radicalization of a generation of young men and win back young voters. But I do know that any solution has to check two boxes: it has to directly address young men’s challenges, and it has to be actionable.

Addressing young men’s problems begins with acknowledging that those problems exist. Honestly, I’m sympathetic to those who are skeptical that the left should devote any political capital to men’s issues. The fact of the matter is that we still live in a deeply patriarchal society. Men continue to dominate the C-Suite and all levels of politics, and women are still paid 21.8% less than men, on average. Sexual violence remains a pervasive societal issue, with many men continuing to act in harmful ways without facing adequate accountability. The left should not abandon its commitment to equality and should continue to prioritize these issues.

Additionally, the claim that young men are struggling is likely incongruent with many on the left’s lived experience. The Democratic party is the party of the college-educated, and the data indicates that college educated men are doing pretty well. Like everything in America, men’s social and emotional well-being is polarized on educational lines, with non- college-educated men facing immense social and economic challenges while college-educated men continue to succeed. It’s hard to accept that men need attention when the men in your social class are just fine.

But it would be pretty ironic if the party of intersectionality could not accept that some social forces—like class and educational attainment—are creating unique socioemotional challenges for young men that the patriarchy is unable to compensate for. All the data indicates that precarious young men are facing a social isolation crisis that is fostering a profound sense of alienation. The right recognizes this and offers a solution in the form of traditional masculinity and male-supremacy. Can we on the left not come up with anything better?

Even if you’re uncomfortable with the idea that young men deserve special political attention, the cold realities of politics necessitate a leftist response to the manosphere. If you cede an entire generation of young men to the right, it will be very difficult to win elections. And when the right wins those elections, their base will be filled with radicalized men preaching a return to traditional gender roles. There is nothing progressive about idly standing by while we watch this hypothetical become a reality.

After acknowledging young men’s challenges and empathizing with those challenges, the left must present an actionable vision for manhood that offers an alternative to the manosphere’s solutions. For the last decade, the left’s vision of masculinity has promoted the idea of taking a back seat and giving other voices an opportunity to set the agenda and lead. The problem with this approach is that it does not offer men any direction or purpose. As Equimundo’s State of American Men survey found:

Men who adhere to the Man Box – a set of widely held ideas that men should dominate female partners, not show vulnerability, and use violence to resolve conflicts – show the highest purpose in life, while men with the most progressive views about manhood feel the least purpose in life.

The failure of the left to present an actionable vision of masculinity creates an opportunity for the right to radicalize directionless and alienated young men. If the left wants to win back the support of young men—while also fostering a healthier masculinity—it must propose a vision of manhood that gives men direction and a future to work towards.

A left that directly confronts young men’s challenges and offers solutions to solve those challenges is a left that regains territory in the online male spaces that are currently dominated by conservatism. In doing so, it would both cultivate a positive masculinity and make the necessary political gains with young voters to win elections. The good news is that, as we learned so painfully in 2024, demographics are not destiny. There is nothing inherent in Gen Z’s and young men’s conservatism; in fact, both demographics were overwhelmingly liberal just four years ago. And the catastrophic start to the second Trump administration gives the left an opportunity it can capitalize on. To successfully do so, however, the left must alter its approach and propose its own vision of masculinity. Failing to do so will only lead to further right-wing radicalization and future electoral losses.

On an unseasonably warm January night, armed with a bottle of root beer and some supermarket hamantaschen, I walked into a smoke shop motivated by the thought of a nice night in with Michael Mann’s 1995 classic Heat. After briefly perusing the selection and making small talk with the man behind the counter, I walked out with a pre-rolled joint.

Normally, this story would be entirely unremarkable in every way—aside, perhaps, from the fact that my local supermarket has hamantaschen. But what’s interesting is that this did not take place in New York, or California, or Massachusetts.

Rather, I was in Texas.

How is this possible? Texas is one of 26 states where recreational marijuana remains illegal, meaning that—according to state law—no one should be able to buy weed for recreational use from any smoke shop within Texas’s borders. But federal law supersedes state law; and in 2018, Congress inadvertently legalized marijuana nationwide.

As part of the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018—popularly known as the 2018 Farm Bill—Congress legalized the production of hemp, a cousin of weed with no psychoactive properties. Congress expected Americans to use hemp mainly for textile manufacturing and as a nutritional supplement, and they (ironically) included provisions to limit the amount of THC allowed in hemp products to 0.3% of the product’s weight. But what they did not know is that with a little chemistry and botany, hemp can get you just as high as traditional weed.

When you smoke weed or take edibles, the chemical compound that delivers its psychoactive effect is delta-9 THC. Delta-9 is one of over 100 cannabinoids naturally occurring in Cannabis Sativa, the plant species that includes both marijuana and hemp. Before the 2018 farm bill, delta-9 was the only psychoactive cannabinoid in the public consciousness, and nearly all weed nationwide got its special kick from delta-9. This led lawmakers to believe that if they legalized hemp while restricting the amount of delta-9 permitted in hemp products, they could have their cake and eat it too: weed would remain illegal at the federal level, but American farmers could develop a prosperous hemp industry.

Congress can be forgiven for this line of thinking. Hemp, as it occurs in nature, contains little delta-9 but large quantities of the cannabinoid CBD. CBD is non-psychoactive, and while many Americans report health benefits from CBD use, it will not get you high. But what Congress did not know is that CBD can be synthesized into other cannabinoids that produce a psychoactive effect nearly indistinguishable from marijuana. Unsurprisingly, innovative entrepreneurs saw this loophole and absolutely abused it, selling hemp products across the country that were both psychoactive and contained less than 0.3% delta-9.

Today, hemp-derived marijuana has ballooned into a multi-billion dollar industry, and Americans across the country have easy access to potent marijuana regardless of what state they live in. For legalization advocates, this may seem like Christmas in July—by blind luck, Congress accidentally made weed de facto legal nationwide. But in reality, the hemp loophole has obliterated marijuana regulatory policy, creating a Wild West of weed that undermines the regulated market and contains little-to-no guardrails for consumer safety.

U.S. regulatory policy towards marijuana is now dominated by a great paradox: the states where recreational weed is illegal have the least regulated markets. In other words, the states that aim to entirely restrict marijuana consumption are the same states where dispensaries can sell nearly any marijuana product they want without government oversight or interference.

With no regulatory oversight, the market is filled with harmful and potentially dangerous weed. The hemp-derived cannabinoid industry can treat its weed with pesticides, label its products in misleading or manipulative ways, and bring products to market with no safety testing. All of this presents a massive consumer protection failure. But far worse is the lack of restrictions on dosing or product design. Vendors can sell edibles with 12,000mg of THC; joints with THC percentages far higher than what is naturally possible; and carts with an unlabeled combination of hyper-potent cannabinoids.

Manufacturers can also use any synthetic cannabinoid they want to create customers’ desired psychoactive effect—and in the last few years, chemists have pumped out new synthetic cannabinoids at a seemingly impossible rate. The first was delta-8, a nearly identical but slightly weaker cousin to traditional delta-9. While chemists have known about delta-8 since at least 2002, most subsequent innovations are completely unknown to everyone but the manufacturer, meaning that vendors have no idea what they are selling and consumers have no idea what they are putting in their bodies. Take these two posts on the subreddit r/altcannabinoids, an online forum for synthetic cannabinoid enthusiasts:

CB9 and CBG9 and THXE is claimed to be a psychoactive CBD analog, it is claimed to be developed by 2 manufacturers. However, they are refusing to say what CB9 actually is, and are refusing to show what the structure of CB9 may look like because they “don't want it to get banned…” and they “don't want competitors to copy them….”

PHC sometimes referred to as “Pentahydrocannabinol” or “Proprietary hydrogenated cannabinoid” has been claimed to be several different things based on which vendors marketing you listen to….

To make matters scarier, many of these unknown cannabinoids are designed to be as potent as possible, because high potency aligns with manufacturers’ and vendors’ economic incentives. Data from legal weed markets indicates that the 40% of weed users who consume cannabis daily or near-daily account for 80% of all sales, which creates an incentive structure where the industry designs their products around the users with the highest tolerances. This has led to the creation of cannabinoids like THC-P, which bind to the brain’s cannabinoid receptors at 33 times the rate of delta-9 THC. Like most of the novel synthetic cannabinoids, not much is known about THC-P—but anecdotally, user reports on drug forums frequently report multi-day highs, vomiting, paranoia, and the occasional bout of psychosis. In illegal states, THC-P products are available for purchase right next to their weaker delta-8 counterparts, with no labeling requirements to indicate any difference in potency at all.

This lack of regulation in “illegal” states undermines the regulated markets in legal states. The hemp-derived cannabinoid industry does not need to pay excise taxes or comply with regulatory requirements, and it has access to the banking system that legal marijuana companies do not. This allows them to out-compete legal weed on price and (sometimes) potency, therefore threatening the viability of legal markets entirely. This is what has happened in NYC, where after three years of legalized recreational marijuana, there are 140 legal dispensaries compared to 2,000-8,000 illegal smoke shops, and the City’s legalization rollout has been widely panned as a disaster.

This is not to say that the legal weed experiment would be doing just fine without the hemp loophole. Legal states are also failing to implement effective regulatory regimes, which has led to more addiction, new health problems, and a sharp uptick in consumption. That being said, the emergence of hemp-derived cannabis has exacerbated all of these problems in both legal and illegal states, all while creating new consumer safety concerns and threatening the momentum of the still-necessary push for weed legalization.

In both legal and illegal states, the regulatory regime for weed needs dramatic reform, because the current fragmented, state-level regulatory approach is not working for anybody. Legalization advocates are reeling after their efforts stalled in the 2024 elections, and as Americans’ views on marijuana begin to sour. The marijuana industry is in crisis as revenue growth plummets and hemp-derived competitors gain market share. Lawmakers are upset as tax receipts come in lower than promised and policy rollouts continuously fail. And prohibitionists got the worst deal of the bunch, waking up one day to realize that weed was accidentally made federally legal.

What can we do? At a minimum, Congress must expand the regulatory umbrella to include hemp-derived cannabis, and legal states must increase enforcement to ensure that the only dispensaries open for business are licensed and legal. Many lawmakers see the ongoing farm bill negotiations as the perfect place to start, and there is bipartisan support in Congress for closing the hemp loophole lawmakers accidentally opened in 2018. But this could create more problems than it solves. Shutting down a $28 billion dollar industry is easier said than done, and the likely impact of such a move would be to force the industry underground. This would complicate efforts to make hemp-derived cannabis safer, since producers would have an even greater incentive to hide what’s in their products.

The best approach is the creation of a national regulatory regime for marijuana and hemp-derived intoxicants. This is less a revolutionary reform and more a rightsizing of regulatory policy. Weed is already legal nationwide, but its regulation is still constrained to a state-by-state basis. This imbalance leaves states unequipped to adequately enforce the law in the face of a massive resource deficit vis-á-vis the marijuana and hemp industries. Across the country, unlicensed dispensaries open daily, the underground market remains strong, and illegal farms (which have somehow been taken over by the Chinese mafia) continue to thrive. The federal government has far greater law enforcement capacities than state agencies—and the prerequisite to any effective regulatory regime is ensuring that the law has teeth. Before we write off marijuana legalization as a widespread policy failure, we should try bringing all weed products under the regulatory regime while actually enforcing the law.

A new national regulatory regime also gives us the chance to learn from our mistakes. In the last two decades, weed’s average THC content has ballooned, transforming the drug into something barely recognizable to the hippies of yesterday. While most weed in the 20th century hovered around 5% THC, today’s dispensary weed routinely contains 25% THC or more, and legal concentrates typically reside in the 70-90% range. There is even more variation among hemp-derived products, which advertise absurd and completely unverifiable THC percentages. As weed has grown stronger, addiction has increased, an uncontrollable vomiting condition has perplexed hospitals, and psychiatrists have seen an increasing number of patients with temporary psychosis or even schizophrenia associated with their cannabis use. Banning or limiting high-potency products could go a long way towards alleviating these emerging harms.

Whatever your personal policy preferences, one thing is clear: today’s Wild West of marijuana needs reform. The hemp-derived cannabis industry is like a brazen outlaw, hashing wild schemes and doing whatever it wants to make a buck. It actually has even more freedom, because, unlike the outlaw, the sheriff is not on its tail.

But perhaps Alice in Wonderland is the more apt metaphor. Does a world where illegal states have unrestricted cannabis markets, and legal states have unenforced regulatory regimes sound like the real world? Or does it sound like the down is up and up is down world of Wonderland?

Most likely, this order will not deliver more affordable homes or rents for the American people. While there are some actions the executive branch can take to lower the cost of housing, the most impactful moves occur at the state and local levels. Nevertheless, this directive is notable for what it says about the second Trump administration’s approach to housing policy. Trump has clearly bought into YIMBYism, a movement that argues we can solve the nation’s housing crisis through supply-side policies that eliminate barriers to multi-family homebuilding and stimulate development.

To be clear, Trump is correct to embrace this approach. Cities that have embraced YIMBY policies have managed to keep housing affordable, even while prices skyrocket across the country. In Minneapolis, YIMBY advocates successfully passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive housing plan that eliminated single-family zoning laws, ended parking requirements, and encouraged developers to build multifamily housing. The result was that Minneapolis remained largely immune to the dramatic spike in housing costs that afflicted the rest of the country. From 2019 to 2024, rents surged 22% nationwide; in Minneapolis, they actually fell 4% during the same period, driven by a meaningful increase in the city’s housing stock.

But for all of YIMBYism’s success, focusing exclusively on homebuilding misses one of the biggest contributors to housing inflation in the last few years. In cities across the United States, landlords have used a sophisticated algorithm from a company called RealPage to collude with one another and raise rents above what the market would otherwise tolerate.

RealPage is not a landlord or developer, but a tech company that sells pricing and inventory management software to large landlords. Using proprietary, nonpublic information it gathers from landlords—including data concerning occupancy rates, rents, lease terms, amenities, and move-in and move-out dates—RealPage’s algorithm calculates the highest rents the market can bear before issuing “pricing recommendations” to its clients.

These recommendations are designed to maximize profits, but from the perspective of the entire industry rather than for an individual landlord. In practice, this means raising rents across the entire market. In a competitive market, this is impossible, because if a landlord raises rents they will lose business to a competitor who keeps their prices low. But RealPage insulates its clients from the forces of competition by coordinating rent increases between landlords via its algorithmically derived pricing recommendations, which allow landlords to raise prices together and guarantee higher profits than if they acted alone. In the words of one RealPage executive, the company’s philosophy can be encapsulated in an old JFK adage: “a rising tide raises all ships.”

Landlords are well aware that they are illegally colluding with their competitors by using RealPage’s pricing software. Landlords submit competitive information to RealPage with the understanding that their competitors will do the same, and while knowing that doing so facilitates higher prices. RealPage itself makes this quite explicit, telling clients that their data would never be used “to undercut RealPage’s higher prices.” Competing landlords also encourage each other to submit information to RealPage, so that—in their own words—they can “eliminate the guessing game” around pricing.

Landlords also know that by using RealPage, they are tacitly agreeing to raise prices. In public, landlords are trying to hide behind the deceptive framing of RealPage’s services as pricing “recommendations,” arguing that RealPage’s software informs but does not determine their business decisions. But in private, they told RealPage:

I always liked this product because your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and term. That’s classic price fixing….

RealPage itself is also acutely aware that its software is mediating illegal price-fixing—in fact, that is its primary selling point to prospective clients. In pitch meetings to sell their software, RealPage advertises its access to competitors’ nonpublic data as a “meaningful tool” that allows clients to outperform the market by 2-7%. And during training sessions on the use of RealPage’s pricing software, landlords are trained on the “role of competitors’ transactional data in the price recommendation process.”

In the last few years, RealPage has dramatically expanded its reach into the U.S. housing market. In 2017, it monopolized commercial revenue management software by acquiring Lease Rent Options, its primary competitor. And since 2020, 70% of all units constructed nationwide are managed by RealPage’s clients. As of 2024, RealPage’s clients owned 36% of all rental units in America.

This combination of market power and outright collusion has sent rents soaring across the United States. According to calculations by antitrust expert Matt Stoller, up to 24% of all rental inflation since Covid is the result of RealPage’s algorithmic price-fixing—although estimates vary widely. Regardless of RealPage’s precise contribution to rental inflation in recent years, one thing is clear: in nearly every market in which RealPage has a foothold, rents have soared.

Government enforcers have taken notice. Washington D.C. sued RealPage for “rental price-fixing” in November 2023, and Arizona followed with its own suit in February 2024. Finally, the Justice Department—which had taken a keen interest in these cases—sued RealPage in August 2024, naming six corporate landlords as co-conspirators at the beginning of 2025.

If Trump is serious about reducing the cost of housing, his Justice Department must continue to prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law. In addition to expanding housing supply, ending RealPage’s illegal practices is crucial to making housing affordable again. While supply-side deficiencies account for most of the housing sector’s recent cost increases, increasing the nation’s housing stock is not a panacea. According to an analysis by Morgan Stanley Research, rental price increases in the U.S. are far higher than they should be given the underlying supply and demand conditions. Could a nationwide price-fixing conspiracy that potentially accounts for a quarter of post-Covid rental price inflation explain this imbalance?

Following the D.C. lawsuit, RealPage lobbied up, hiring three high-powered veterans of Capital Hill to lobby on “algorithmic pricing issues.” These lobbyists will try to convince the Trump administration to drop the Justice Department’s case or settle on favorable terms for RealPage. They will use every trick in the book to try and convince Trump that they are not colluding with landlords and that their software does not foster collusion. But Trump must see the case through, because this is collusion—landlords are sharing competitive information with each other and using that information to raise prices, just with RealPage’s pricing algorithm as the intermediary that facilitates it all.

What’s the saying? If it looks like a duck…?

When the economy reopened following the end of Covid-19 shutdowns, a combination of strained global supply chains, large-scale fiscal stimulus, and corporate concentration ignited a spike in inflation, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates and reduce inflationary pressures. As the federal funds rate increased, the interest rate on all new debt issued by the government naturally followed, raising the average interest rate on the national debt from 2.4% in January 2020 to 3.3% at the end of 2024. On their own, higher interest rates would make the national debt more burdensome—but the issue was compounded by the additional $11.1 trillion in debt the Treasury accumulated during this period. The result was that the cost of servicing the national debt spiked at the same pace as during the Volcker Shock, when the Fed raised interest rates to nearly 20% in the early 1980s. Today, interest payments constitute the second most expensive program in the federal government, ahead of even the military; and as we enter a higher interest rate environment and continue to run massive deficits, they will only get more expensive. Currently, CBO projections state that in just 20 years the U.S. will spend more money servicing its national debt than on all discretionary spending combined.

The economic danger posed by rising interest payments marks a divergence from recent history. From the Great Recession through the Covid-19 pandemic, the debt posed little financial risk in the short- to medium-run, and the cost of servicing the debt was manageable. Because interest rates were near zero, the U.S. could deficit spend without overwhelming public finances. While debt held by the public nearly tripled from $8.3 trillion to $23.2 trillion during this period—a 182.9% increase—the cost of servicing this debt rose from 1.3% of GDP to 1.8%, a disproportionately slight 38.5% increase.

Despite its relatively low fiscal burden, the national debt was nevertheless one of the most important issues facing Congress. Tea-party Republicans made apocalyptic claims that rising deficits would lead to economic collapse, and the issue spawned numerous government shutdowns, a “supercommittee” on deficit reduction, and a few (unnecessary) brushes with default. At the time, the political salience of the debt contrasted with the risks it posed; there were few times in American history when it was less costly for the government to run large budget deficits, yet the issue dominated post-2008 politics.

But at the beginning of 2025—proving that irony is not dead—the situation reversed: despite the national debt emerging as an economic issue, the Trump administration is sending mixed signals about whether it will seriously pursue deficit reduction.

On the one hand, you have Trump himself, who is far more concerned with political popularity than being a responsible steward of the economy. One of his primary strategies in the 2024 presidential campaign was to promise expensive tax cuts to as many key constituencies as possible, and his mass deportation operation could cost as much as $967.9 billion fully implemented. Despite styling himself as a conservative, Trump’s approach to the economy is anything but: the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates that his policy platform will increase the debt by $7.75 trillion over 10 years.

On the other hand, Trump’s choice of Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, indicates that the administration will not entirely ignore the debt. In his confirmation hearing, Bessent warned that America’s debt burden makes it “hard-pressed” to borrow its way out of a crisis, and he told senators in his opening remarks that the U.S. “must work to get its fiscal house in order.” Wall Street has responded positively to Trump’s selection of Bessent—despite the threat his neoliberal agenda poses for Main Street—mainly because investors are excited about his focus on deficits. Whether Bessent’s priorities will translate into a fiscally responsible Trump administration remains to be seen.

The Department of Government Efficiency combines the Trump and Bessent signals by rhetorically posturing as fiscally responsible while simultaneously being sure to fail. There are two reasons why this is the case. First, Elon Musk is a walking conflict of interest without any ability to navigate Washington or policy expertise. He has not released a plan stating how DOGE will execute its goal, and reports from inside the department merely state that Musk hopes to cut spending through “the power of technology and data mining.” Second, DOGE’s exclusive focus on spending cuts shows it is unserious about deficit reduction. Cutting discretionary expenditures cannot meaningfully reduce the debt, for the simple reason that there is not enough discretionary spending to cut. In FY 2024, discretionary spending and the deficit totaled 6.3% and 6.6% of GDP, respectively. If Trump and Musk wanted to cut spending enough to reduce the deficit below real GDP growth, they would need to cut around 2/3rds of all discretionary outlays. This will not happen.

What does this all mean for the nation’s fiscal health and the Congressional Budget Office’s warning? For the next four years, three simultaneous processes will characterize the Trump administration's approach to the debt. Trump will pursue a myriad of expensive and inadequately funded policies, while Bessent desperately tries to contain their costs and ease investors’ concerns. Meanwhile, DOGE will accomplish very little, aside from possibly cutting government programs that benefit Musk’s corporate competitors. America’s debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to climb, and interest payments will constitute an ever-greater proportion of our budget. We will not have a debt crisis in the next four years—but the longer we wait to address the U.S.’ debt problem, the more painful those inevitably necessary adjustments will be.