Congress adjourned in August without making any further progress on President Donald Trump’s signature second-term legislative crusade: the grossly restrictive SAVE Act, a thoroughly MAGA-besotted effort to suppress ballot access in the name of subduing a wholly fabricated epidemic of voter fraud. (House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to revive a watered-down version of the legislation this fall, but the prospects that it will make any more headway on Capitol Hill on the eve of the midterms are remote.)

The Oval Office bluster around the SAVE Act indicates that the legislation is yet another example of Trump’s ever-fickle authoritarian hubris; in time, he’ll no doubt revert to his other pet obsessions, like remaking the Washington, DC, cityscape, imposing more capricious tariffs, and pursuing old vendettas under flimsy new legal rationales. Yet as farcical as the SAVE Act drama may be, the underlying logic of the bill—that the success of the right-wing political project in America rests on minimizing mass participation in elections at all costs—remains foundational to conservative governance. It’s also, far from incidentally, why no facet of the MAGA agenda deserves to be called populist.

As a Beltway-bred political descriptor, populism is close to meaningless: It’s pundit shorthand for strongman-style evasions of constitutional restraint that are usually steeped in bigotry and xenophobia. This crude misreading of America’s capital-P Populist movement stems largely from the misleading and tendentious work of the historian Richard Hofstadter; it’s become infinitely dumber and more useless in the hands of a legion of cable hosts, clueless academics, and elite journalists.

The actual Populist movement, which was rooted in the economic plight of farmers and workers during the Gilded Age, was a campaign to expand American democracy into the marrow of our productive lives. This ambitious undertaking entailed everything from the formation of agricultural cooperatives to initiatives devoted to mass literacy and political education, to the establishment of a new currency system designed to reward workers directly for their labor and penalize unproductive financiers who exploited their monopoly hold on the means of production to confine most Americans to a glorified state of debt peonage.

At the core of the Populist reform agenda was the move to put more governing power into the hands of the people, once it was wrested from the moneyed interests. The term populist is indeed derived from the movement’s political vehicle: the People’s Party. The people’s power was to be redeemed and secured by the expansion of their voting rights—the most effective means of curbing the power of money in a formal democracy. That meant the Populists were early supporters of women’s suffrage (even though party leaders kept it out of national party platforms for tactical reasons) as well as Black voting rights after Reconstruction (with the same glum proviso holding for some key state Populist groups in the South). It also meant that Populists were among the first national figures to call for the direct election of US senators, rather than their selection by state legislatures, and to propose ballot initiatives that would prevent state legislatures from being captured by the era’s ascendant plutocracy.

Nothing in the present-day MAGA movement meets the basic definition of populism—and the vote-suppressing provisions of the SAVE Act aren’t even the half of it. Consider MAGA’s war on the ballot initiative. Since the Supreme Court’s overthrow of abortion rights in the profoundly antidemocratic 2022 Dobbs ruling, many states—including several deep-red redoubts in the South and the Midwest—have passed ballot initiatives that protect reproductive rights. The response of GOP governors and legislators in these states has been to hamstring the initiative process itself, either by passing legislation to supersede it or by imposing new requirements for supermajorities of 55 or 60 percent, in order to keep such popular positions as Medicaid expansion, minimum-wage increases, and guaranteed employee sick leave out of the ballot box. Florida was an early adopter of this counter-majoritarian strategy when it mandated 60 percent approval margins for initiatives in 2006—even though the referendum approving the change was passed by a majority smaller than that. When Florida’s 2024 abortion-rights measure won by a 57 percent majority vote, it therefore couldn’t become law, but it came close enough to spook Governor Ron DeSantis and his prostrate state Legislature, which then enacted a bevy of referendum and voting restrictions, imposing new ID requirements on petition gatherers and prohibiting out-of-state residents, felons, and other powerless political out-groups from collecting petitions for ballot initiatives.

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Then there’s the gerrymandering. Trump’s scorched-earth mid-census-cycle campaign in 2025 to coax as many gerrymanders as possible out of GOP state legislatures was an extension of the strategy the right adopted after the 2010 census in its infamous Operation REDMAP drive, which vastly expanded the number of impermeable safe red seats in the country and led to the Tea Party’s takeover of Congress. But unlike in 2010, Democrats have responded in kind to this latest push, securing blue-friendly counter-gerrymanders and more or less leveling the playing field for the midterms. Yet here, too, the right’s minoritarian political imperative carried the day in key instances: After Virginia voters endorsed a redistricting map that favored Democrats, the state Supreme Court’s right-wing majority simply threw out the referendum result, on dubious legal grounds.

Meanwhile, the Republican governor and Legislature in Utah became determined to invalidate an impartial commission’s redistricting plan that was poised to flip one seat into the Democratic column. And when a growing number of citizens joined a popular movement to rescind their signatures on a GOP-led ballot initiative that would have reinstated the earlier Republican-dominated map, the state passed a law to stop them. In other words, the initiative-petitioning process that has been held to be so irredeemably corrupt in red-state jurisdictions suddenly became sacrosanct with the panicked stroke of Governor Spencer Cox’s pen.

Rarely has the machinery of formal democracy operated so completely, or so baroquely, in reverse. Yet this is what our brain-dead political press sees fit to grace with the name of populism.

Most New Yorkers, if they remember the name at all, curse the distant memory of Roy Cohn. He died a miserable death from AIDS just 40 years ago, but his ghost has been haunting Americans over the past decade. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, Cohn mentored our current president and taught him his tricks. He molded Donald Trump into both the worst and the most consequential politician of our time. He took us back to the dark side of American political discourse. Only now can we see the direct line between Senator Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. Roy served as Rasputin for both demagogues.

Some New Yorkers forget about their own complicity in Cohn’s sketchy political project. We forget how much a creature of the Bronx and Manhattan’s Park Avenue he was, and how willingly the city’s elite embraced him. They knew the despicable things he had done during McCarthy’s 1953–54 scourge, but they embraced him anyway. In July 1954, after the 27-year-old chief counsel to McCarthy was forced to resign in disgrace, some 2,000 New Yorkers turned up at a dinner at the Astor Hotel near Times Square—sponsored by the Jewish-American Anti-Communist League—and gave Cohn and McCarthy a standing ovation. This was just the beginning of Cohn’s political rehabilitation.

In the early 1950s, he destroyed the lives of thousands of civil servants: He targeted closeted homosexuals and was the boyish prosecutor who gleefully sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. In Washington, he was McCarthy’s attack hound and book burner, known for forcing US Information Service libraries in Europe to purge 30,000 books from their shelves, including titles by Howard Fast and Dashiell Hammett.

Back in New York, Cohn created a career for himself as a ubiquitous, self-promoting hustler, a scheming con man, and a street fighter who somehow always escaped the courts. He could be charming, but he ran what we’d now call a Trumpian “favor bank,” using his photographic memory to keep tabs on who needed what from whom. He was eventually indicted three times for fraud and bribery. (He once brazenly handed an envelope stuffed with cash to a city employee, standing outside the very courtroom in which he was then being tried for said bribery.) And yet, ignoring the evidence stacked against him, New York juries acquitted him in all his trials.

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Everyone knew Cohn was a lawyer for the Mafia, representing thugs like Moe Dalitz, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti. Many knew he was a closeted gay man and a sex addict who paid high sums to teenage boys for sex. And yet as a powerful lawyer, he hypocritically railed against civil rights for the people whom he called “fags.”

Everyone also knew that Cohn was a racist, who routinely used a Yiddish slur to describe Black people. He left a trail of debts all over Manhattan, stiffing tailors, dry cleaners, and small shopkeepers. He even managed to evade paying the IRS any taxes for the last 20 years of his life and wrote a book calling average citizens “suckers” if they paid the taxman.

But at the time, this didn’t matter. His friends came from New York’s inner circle of influential judges, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians. As the New York Daily News observed in 1979, Cohn “has emerged as the city’s preeminent manipulator. A one-man network of contacts that has reached into City Hall, the mob, the press, the Archdiocese, the disco-jet-set, the courts and the backrooms of the Bronx and Brooklyn, where judges are made and political contributions arranged.”

His network included city politicians like Mayor Abe Beame, Democratic Party boss Meade Esposito, Stanley Friedman, and Andrew Stein. In the 1970s, he called Trump his “best friend” and got the young real-estate developer the tax breaks he needed to build Trump Tower. The judges who routinely socialized with Cohn included Judge Irving Kaufman, Judge Marie M. Lambert, Justice David Peck, Justice Vito J. Titone, and Judge David N. Edelstein. Other friends included media stars Barbara Walters, Cindy Adams, and Walter Winchell, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, CIA director William Casey, Firing Line’s William F. Buckley Jr., political operator Roger Stone, New York Times executive editor A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, media baron Rupert Murdoch, Revlon executive Ronald Perelman, lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, novelist Norman Mailer, and dozens of the city’s other luminaries. Every year, Cohn invited 200 of these celebrities to his birthday party, often held at the club Studio 54. They all came, and they all celebrated him—because they all owed him something. They may have privately feared Cohn, but in public, they called him “a lovable rogue.”

Another noted lifelong friend was Si Newhouse, the Condé Nast media magnate and owner of magazines like Vanity Fair, GQ, and The New Yorker. Roy and Si had been classmates at New York’s elite Horace Mann School. They talked on the phone every day. Newhouse’s father had once given Cohn a half-million-dollar “loan” never to be repaid. Cohn fed the notoriously reticent Newhouse the city’s gossip and often managed his social life.

In the spring of 1984, Newhouse read a GQ profile of Donald Trump written by Graydon Carter. Noting that this issue of the magazine had sold phenomenally well, Newhouse quietly suggested to Jason Epstein, his editor at Random House—another institution he owned—that perhaps Trump should “write” a memoir. Newhouse knew, of course, that Trump was a protégé of Cohn’s. “There’s no question the Trump thing was Roy’s idea to Si,” recalled Peter Osnos, then a recent hire at Random House. So Epstein took a meeting with Trump and signed him up to write what became The Art of the Deal in 1987. It quickly became a national bestseller and turned the once-parochial New York developer into a national figure.

“My father got the idea that Trump would be a person of interest to book buyers,” recalled Newhouse’s daughter Pamela Newhouse Mensch. “He was right. Can you imagine? Between Roy and my father, they put Trump on the map. That’s a heavy burden to walk around with these days.”

Cohn deeply resented New York’s intellectuals, its universities, and particularly its white-shoe, elite law firms. “I’ll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York.” That was Trump in 1990—echoing his mentor’s hatred of the establishment.

America once had a bipartisan establishment that managed to instill a certain civility in our rough-and-tumble democracy. It’s gone. Today, Cohn’s values—or lack thereof—and his right-wing political resentments have replaced the values of that establishment. It is as if Joe McCarthy had become president: The drunkard senator from Wisconsin later inspired Cohn, and Trump, to tap into the raw populist emotions that have long festered in American society. All three were serial fabulists, shamelessly making up stories to stoke tabloid headlines. They uncorked political resentments against immigrants, intellectuals, scientific expertise, feminists, and most particularly, Blacks and any other non-white minority.

They have taken us to America’s irrepressible dark side. And ironically, New Yorkers always let them get away with it. After dining with Cohn once in 1984, Osnos exclaimed: “Rarely have I met a man whose face was not clearer about what he was…. But what is it about us, that allows a Roy Cohn to navigate in a world, the world of New York, the world of the Hamptons? What is it? I consider it corrupting. They don’t. It’s about money. It’s about access. It’s about a certain glamour. You want to always be identified with the red-hot center.”

In a San Antonio hotel ballroom in June, about 2,000 conservative women rose to their feet, cheering, as Erika Kirk strode onto the stage in a silvery pantsuit. It was the opening day of the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, the premier annual conservative gathering for women. “The world has a tendency to overcomplicate the most beautiful and simple things in this world, but to the women in this room who are Christian, it’s actually quite simple,” Kirk declared. “The world will say your life belongs to you. It does not. Your life belongs to Christ.”

The message was straightforward, but Kirk’s task was not: She was there to persuade women to remain in a movement that had splintered since the death last year of her husband, Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA, the campus organization for conservatives, in 2012. At the 2025 conference, Erika had sat onstage with Charlie as he admonished the female audience to focus on landing a husband before 30. “I think there’s an argument to bring back the MRS degree,” he told a 14-year-old girl who asked for career advice during the Q&A. That moment had offended some of the women in attendance, I heard this year. Sitting beside her husband, Erika had done her best to soften his message, telling the single ladies pushing 30 they still had a shot at a husband, because “God is good.”

This year, Erika Kirk stood at the podium alone. In the nine months since her husband’s assassination, she had been lambasted by fellow conservatives for failing to act like a grieving widow—for even appearing energized by her new job as Turning Point CEO. The right-wing podcaster Candace Owens had been spinning elaborate conspiracy theories about her, some of which had seeped into the ballroom. “You want the truth?” one young woman told me darkly after Kirk’s speech. “I don’t trust Erika.” At one point, a protester interrupted the speech to shout “Erika Kirk protects pedophiles!”—an apparent reference to an Owens conspiracy theory. Kirk reacted quickly. “You can be a woman of the world, as we just saw,” she shot back, “or you can be a woman of the Word.”

These days, women of the world and women of the Word both seem to be increasingly skeptical of Kirk and her movement. I saw that up close, watching the country’s leading conservative organization for youth flail about for ways to keep women in the fold, and to paper over any evidence of its own widely reported divisions on issues ranging from Israel to abortion. The theme of the summit was “Curated for H.E.R.”—Holistic, Empowered, Redeemed—and most explicit mentions of politics had been curated right out of the Instagram-worthy frame. In the hallway, a Turning Point staffer displayed a map that scored states on a “tyranny” scale; another handed me a “No Voter ID, No Vote” sticker. But those political displays were swamped by ones advertising MAHA-friendly “health” products like toxin-free toothpaste, organic makeup, blue-light-blocking glasses, and seasoning made from cow brains. I didn’t hear a single mention of the four states where abortion will be on the ballot this November. The speakers fearmongered about trans women without mentioning any of the political races in which Republican candidates are counting on the issue to help them win. Yet the political stakes hung over the gathering. Over 30 million women in the US today identify as Christian and conservative, enough to sway an election, as Katie Gaddini notes in Esther’s Army, her new book on these women, and certainly enough to pack the ballroom of a Marriott for a weekend. But there were cracks in the hot-pink façade. This year’s conference was smaller than last year’s 3,000-strong gathering by about a third, according to most accounts. For the first time since the Young Women’s Leadership Summit started in 2015, the word young had been dropped from the title.

The changes at the conference reflected what we’re seeing throughout the country. Though Donald Trump improved his share of the young women’s vote by six percentage points in 2024 versus 2020, an overwhelming 61 percent of young women backed Kamala Harris in that election. And long-term tracking of their political bent shows a clear leftward shift: A 2024 Gallup analysis found that about 40 percent of young women identified as liberal, up from 28 percent two decades ago. The partisan gender gap between young women and men has nearly doubled over the past 25 years. Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, reports that Gen Z women have become the most liberal cohort in US history. Deckman also found that, as The Guardian put it, they are “expected to outpace their male peers” in voting and political organizing. These women came to political consciousness in 2016, Deckman explained, when a man who boasted about sexual assault defeated a woman to win the presidency. “I think that, combined with the policies, really turned off a generation of young women” from conservative politics, she told me.

Still, the women who remain in the conservative movement are critical to its future. The movement has long relied on women to spearhead the causes in which they have a special layer of credibility, from abortion to the accelerating attacks on trans women, the latter conducted under the guise of protecting women’s sports. In this election cycle, women are leading campaigns that conservatives are banking on to notch wins in the culture wars and tip the balance toward Republican candidates. In Missouri, for example, the governor’s wife, Claudia Kehoe, is the only listed officer on the ballot campaign to repeal a pro-abortion-rights amendment passed by voters in 2024. The initiative would also institute a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The figurehead for that fast-moving front in the culture wars is the former swimmer Riley Gaines, a star at the conference, whose experience sharing a pool and locker room with a trans woman has spurred anti-trans legislation named for Gaines in Georgia and West Virginia.

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The young women I met who look up to speakers like Gaines were running Turning Point USA chapters on their campuses, volunteering at crisis-pregnancy centers, and making content for right-wing news sites. To keep these women engaged, Turning Point was serving up a glitzy vibe that was part megachurch worship, part dance party. The official lookbook was heavy on frilly white dresses and florals. Everywhere I looked, there were pins that read “Pretty girls don’t vote for socialists” and hair bows—so many hair bows. I ran into a friend who was also covering the event. She told me about how she had grown up Christian and conservative in the South but defected in college, where her world opened up. She and I stood watching as a dozen young women near the stage danced to Justin Bieber blasting through the speakers. One had an American flag wrapped around her shoulders. These women seemed to be having a ball, and given the leftward bent of their generation, their wholesome fun had a countercultural edge. “If there had been something like this when I was young,” my friend said, “I don’t think I ever would have left the conservative movement.”

If there was one issue that the women at this conference were counting on to keep their sisters in the conservative fold, it was abortion. Even as 13 states have banned abortion outright in the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the number of abortions in the US has risen, thanks to the increased use of abortion medication mailed across state lines. The dawning realization that abortion bans aren’t preventing abortions has helped a once-fringe faction of the movement known as abortion “abolitionists” gain traction with a call to punish women taking these pills. The Texas Republican Party’s platform this year endorses penalties for abortion seekers, as do at least 14 state bills so far this year. At the conference, the increasing popularity of this position was chillingly obvious. The conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey confided from the main stage that she had once written a “completely weak and hypocritical” post on Facebook arguing that rape and incest exceptions for abortion were acceptable. But in the comments, a fellow abortion opponent had disagreed, prompting Stuckey to reevaluate her stance. “I realized that I wasn’t thinking about this issue from the baby’s perspective, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about the issue from a biblical perspective,” she said. “I was thinking about the issue from a perspective of ‘What can win the most people?’ or ‘What’s the most popular?’”

Now Stuckey was done with privileging what was popular. In fact, barely two weeks after the conference, she, Gaines, and the influencer Alex Clark, who hosts Turning Point’s wellness podcast Culture Apothecary, signed a petition calling to remove “legal immunities” that prevent people who have abortions from being punished under anti-abortion laws.

I heard this sentiment from women in the audience, too. “I’m very pro-life; I want abortion to be abolished,” said one 42-year-old woman who wore earrings shaped like her home state of Texas. “I think if you put in regulations and laws, you’re not going to have people readily stepping up to kill their child for convenience.”

The woman from Texas was disappointed in leaders like Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins, a speaker at the conference, who say they oppose criminalizing people who have abortions for now. Hawkins, during her speech, skirted these political differences; instead, she too called on the audience to be brave when people hate your ideas. “‘That which God has commanded me to do, I will not fail to do for any man alive,’” she declared, quoting Joan of Arc. “In modern language, it means this: ‘What God has called me to do, I will not abandon for the approval, pressure, or fear of any person.’ Not for any person. Not for the online mob or algorithm. Not for your peers who will roll their eyes at you in your dormitory hallways.”

Hawkins sounded almost feminist as she channeled the 15th-century martyr, mocked the “tradwife” influencers for promoting an unattainable lifestyle, and talked about her own 15-hour workdays. She and Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who told attendees, “When I started at the White House, my kids were 5, 3, and 1. Let that sink in for just a second”—represented a “You go, girl” careerism that evidently still fits into what Turning Point’s vision of femininity allows. But that wasn’t all that was on offer. The conference also featured the Christian influencers Millicent Sedra, who told women to “start serving” their husbands “with gratitude,” and Savanna Faith Stone, who thinks women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

The political and philosophical differences between these women were being papered over by a sense of tribal affiliation that hinged on the attendees’ belief that white Christian femininity was under siege. Indeed, whiteness was the undeniable unifier. Turning Point USA commentator Savanah Hernandez appeared to be the sole non-white speaker among 25 headliners. But she certainly wasn’t going to talk about that. Instead, she called on the rank-and-file to brave the backlash.

“We have to deal with it on the scale of millions of people yelling at us,” Hernandez scolded. “You’ve got a couple women at your church, or a couple other parents at your kids’ school, or a couple girls in your class. Like, you can do it.”

For Ann Dailey Moreno, a 29-year-old music teacher who has written for right-wing media outlets, a highlight was Hawkins’s bit about Joan of Arc. In 2020, Moreno was an aspiring actress living in New York City. She felt alienated by the Covid lockdown and the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. That sense of alienation drove her interest in conservative media and politics, which isolated her even further. “I was dehumanized and lost all of my friends when I became conservative in 2020 and came out about it,” she told me.

Indeed, 2020 marked the year conservative women became “activated,” Gaddini writes in Esther’s Army. Trump’s election loss, Covid mandates, and Black Lives Matter protests radicalized many right-leaning women who hadn’t been politically active. They began to homeschool their kids, defy mask mandates, and run for school-board seats. This galvanization spanned local and national politics, as a record 37 Republican women were elected to or already serving in Congress that year. The quickly spreading group Moms for Liberty grew out of this moment, founded by three conservative mothers to take over school boards. The effort has since fizzled out amid infighting, but I heard echoes of the sense of embattlement that had animated it among the young conference-goers. Turning Point leaders were making increasingly unpopular MAGA politics feel rebellious, a modern rebrand with upgraded aesthetics for a younger generation.

The main reason the women seemed to love this message is that it came from fellow women. Because even some of the attendees here had trouble hearing it from men like Charlie Kirk. Moreno had been brought to tears at last year’s summit by his blunt words about her marriage prospects. But she had stayed in the conservative fold and was back at the conference, still single at 29—but with a new role model, courtesy of Hawkins.

“Joan of Arc was never married,” Moreno told me with a smile, “and she kicked ass.”

While several of the women I met at the summit seemed ready to get more hard-line on abortion, outside of the Marriott, I’ve met women who have seen the consequences of abortion bans and fled conservatism altogether. This phenomenon is visible on the ground in Idaho, where a citizen-initiated measure to repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban will be on the ballot in November. Melanie Folwell, a lifelong Idahoan who is leading the campaign for the ballot measure, told me she knew someone I should speak with—a former homeschooling Catholic mom of seven who had gathered hundreds of signatures for the effort to repeal the abortion ban.

Even over the phone, I could sense Suzanne Gallus’s infectious energy. Gallus lives in a small city in deep-red northern Idaho. She grew up Catholic, drifted away from the church, and found her way back to the faith as a new mom. With young kids, her house was hectic, so she started going to the traditional Latin Mass. “I was really drawn to that because it was just very quiet,” Gallus told me. “It became my getaway.” There she met women with large families who homeschooled, and she began to homeschool her kids too. But rifts started to form between her and her community a decade ago as her daughters grew into adolescence; girls at the church started to ridicule them for wearing pants. Then Gallus, who had been an avid mountain biker in her 20s, took an old bike out for a test ride one day. One of her daughters was astounded: “She goes, ‘Oh my gosh, Mom, I didn’t know you knew how to ride a bike!’” Gallus said. She realized she had been so busy raising her kids that she hadn’t found time to show them who she was.

“I need new friends,” Gallus remembered thinking, “and I need to get my girls out of this.”

She joined a triathlon team, switched to a new Catholic church, and enrolled her kids in public school. The school became her new community and supported her through a personal tragedy in 2020, when her 16-year-old daughter, Dorothy, died by suicide after struggling with anorexia. The following year, Gallus got involved in supporting school-board candidates to run against a crop of Moms for Liberty–style conservatives. A year later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Idaho banned abortion outright, and Gallus had an activation of her own: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what just happened?’”

The loss of abortion rights was a seismic moment for women across the political spectrum, and a surging number of abortion-rights ballot initiatives passed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, in states ranging from Vermont and California to Michigan and Missouri, while Democrats had an unexpectedly positive showing in the 2022 midterms. But over time, results for Democrats have proved mixed. In Michigan in 2022, the abortion-rights ballot initiative helped Democrats win a blue trifecta in the state. But in Missouri two years later, voters endorsed abortion rights on the ballot while reelecting Senator Josh Hawley and other conservative Republicans. Kamala Harris made abortion rights a major part of her campaign for president and lost anyway.

After 2024, some Democratic consultants declared the issue over with. But Gallus’s story and those of other women in Idaho show that couldn’t be further from the truth. Idaho has lost more than a third of its obstetricians in recent years, which has made many women of childbearing age afraid to live there. The Idaho grandmas missing their grandbabies are being radicalized as a result. “We have a lot of mothers to adult children who talk about the heartbreak of not having their kids and grandkids near them, because it’s just too risky an environment,” Folwell told me. (Women 65 and over are shifting leftward just like young women are: In 2023, 25 percent of women 65 and older identified as liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2013 and 14 percent in 1999, according to Gallup.) “If you have any kind of high-risk pregnancy, the supply of doctors who can help you here is so narrow at this point.”

In addition to Idaho, three other states—Nevada, Virginia, and Missouri—will have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot this fall. But Idaho is the only state with a ban where voters will have a chance to repeal it, the only state where we’ll see the impact of four years’ worth of news stories about what this ban has meant—including miscarrying women being airlifted out of the state by helicopter because they couldn’t get the care they needed there.

The young women helping to rally support on their campuses for Folwell’s campaign are far more typical of their generation’s views on the issue than the ones I met at the Turning Point conference. A staggering 76 percent of Gen Z women in 2025 said they wanted abortion to be legal, and data suggest the issue may be one of the major factors driving the progressive shift of these women. Gen Z women like Natasha Kokkodil, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, ranked abortion as their most important political issue in 2024. “It is truly the cornerstone issue, the essential ingredient in protecting our other rights,” Kokkodil told me. When I spoke with her in July, she’d just completed a political training run by URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, a reproductive-justice group driven by young people. There’s no single progressive organization for young people comparable in size and scope to Turning Point USA, but smaller organizations like this one are training a new generation galvanized by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

In July, the Idaho campaign submitted 110,000 signatures to put the initiative on the ballot, far surpassing the 70,000 required. Gallus gathered 714 of those signatures herself. In one of the deepest-red corners of America, Gallus knocked on the doors of Trump-supporting strangers and listened to their struggles. The woman who told her about traveling to Mexico for abortions before Roe. The couples struggling with infertility. The woman who confided that her sister’s child, born out of wedlock, had been raised by the child’s grandmother. And while many of the women she spoke with weren’t defecting from conservative politics entirely—if 2024 is any indication, plenty of them might vote for abortion rights and Republicans—it seemed to her that cracks were starting to form in some of their belief structures, just as had happened in hers. She had realized something the women of Turning Point knew: that women’s transformation often comes through conversations with other women. One by one, the women in one of the reddest counties in the country told Gallus their stories. And then they reached for her clipboard to sign their names.

Editor’s Note: A photo caption in this article originally identified a speaker at the Turning Points Women’s Leadership Summit as Alex Clark. In fact, the speaker in the photo is Savanna Faith Stone. We have corrected the error.

In late January 2025, President Donald Trump took his first trip outside of Washington, DC, after returning to office for his second term. His destination: North Carolina, which four months earlier had been devastated by Hurricane Helene—the deadliest storm to hit the United States since Hurricane Maria in 2017. Helene battered communities in six states, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands, but western North Carolina was hit the hardest, and in a series of stops in the region, Trump pledged to rebuild after the storm. “I promised that I’d come back to western North Carolina to help the people of the state, and today, here I am to deliver on that promise,” Trump declared in Swannanoa, 10 miles east of Asheville. “Under the Trump administration, the days of betrayal and neglect are over.”

But Trump delivered two other messages during his visit that seized headlines and may have surprised those assembled for the photo ops. Trump had proposed “getting rid of” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) altogether, saying during his stop in the town of Fletcher, “It’s very bureaucratic, very slow.” He doubled down in Swannanoa: “If it was up to me right now, I’d end it right now.”

He also announced that Michael Whatley, a GOP operative and Trump ally, would lead the administration’s recovery effort. “I’d like to put Michael in charge of making sure everything goes well,” Trump said in Fletcher. In Swannanoa, he added, “Michael Whatley is going to be very much in charge.”

But two years after Helene, North Carolina’s recovery remains painfully slow and uneven, hampered by a federal response that has been starved of money and hobbled by turmoil inside Trump’s FEMA. Western North Carolina has become a testing ground for what happens when increasingly destructive disasters collide with a weakened response system—and whether the US government can still deliver when catastrophe strikes.

The troubled recovery after Helene could also become a political reckoning. Whatley, Trump’s handpicked “recovery czar,” is now in a close race for a critical US Senate seat in North Carolina, which has put his record on Helene—and the administration’s handling of disasters more broadly—under new scrutiny.

Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26, 2024, and careened through Georgia and into southern Appalachia, unleashing a record rainfall and historic levels of flooding. North Carolina’s western counties took the brunt of the disaster, with 100 deaths occurring there out of Helene’s more than 250.

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The storm damaged or destroyed more than 70,000 homes in the state. Water systems in two dozen cities and towns broke down because of flooding and fast-moving debris; Asheville, the biggest city in western North Carolina, didn’t have potable water for almost two months after Helene.

The region’s steep mountain terrain made Helene especially destructive, and recovery especially difficult. More than 2,000 landslides damaged homes and roads; in Fairview, southeast of Asheville, 10 landslides converged, killing 13 people. Entire communities were cut off as 5,000 miles of state-maintained roads and some 8,000 private roads, culverts, and bridges were damaged. The disaster zone also included 138,000 mobile homes, leaving poor and working-class residents especially vulnerable to wind, flooding, and falling rocks.

North Carolina has made remarkable progress in Helene’s aftermath. As of July 2026, the state’s public-recovery dashboard reported that all but one of the 1,588 storm-ravaged public roads have been reopened, and 625 of the 880 damaged public bridges have been fixed. Officials say that 99 percent of public drinking-water and 93 percent of wastewater systems are back online.

Other issues are taking more time. Of more than 3,000 sites targeted by the state’s Private Road and Bridge Program, which was set up to reimburse owners of property damaged by Helene, only 145 had been completed by late July. In a letter to Congress that month, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Josh Stein said that 1,000 homes have been repaired or rebuilt and another 2,800 are in progress, but some 56,000 homes remain damaged or destroyed.

Part of the slow recovery is simply the challenge of rebuilding after a major disaster. “You’re not going to get back to where you were in three or four years,” Stein said in July. “You have to be committed to this work for the long haul.”

But western North Carolina’s recovery has also been hindered by a federal response that many local leaders describe as inadequate, delayed, and chaotic.

The main problem is that Trump and Congress haven’t provided enough resources. Stein said the total amount of federal funding that had been allocated to the state as of July was about $9.3 billion, less than 16 percent of the estimated damages of $60 billion.

That’s glaringly out of step with the federal government’s response to past disasters. After Hurricane Sandy stormed up the Atlantic coast in 2012, federal aid covered 78 percent of the estimated $88 billion in damages. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Maria, federal dollars accounted for 73 percent of costs.

To plug the shortfall, North Carolina has put up more than $4 billion of its own money. That includes $175 million to repair private roads and bridges, utility assistance for more than 10,000 households, and more than $100 million for small businesses affected by the storm. Trump hasn’t asked for, and Congress hasn’t appropriated, any new funding since Helene hit.

“Too many projects in western North Carolina have stalled due to insufficient funding,” North Carolina Republican Senator Ted Budd testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee in July, urging Congress to add Helene aid to Trump’s $87.6 billion supplemental request, largely for the Pentagon and the war in Iran. “When I visit western North Carolina, I see the impacts the delays in recovery have caused. Debris still clogs the waterways. Facilities that provide drinking water and manage wastewater have yet to be rebuilt. Most concerning, some homeowners are paying mortgages on properties that are still unlivable or yet to be rebuilt.”

Jon Council, an organizer for the grassroots group Down Home North Carolina, said the state’s progress was remarkable given the paltry level of federal support. “I’m really happy with what the state has done, particularly the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina,” Council told The Nation and Facing South.

The meager federal spending on Helene may signal something bigger than a momentary bout of stinginess. In June 2025, Trump renewed his call to end FEMA and said he plans to push the responsibility for responding to natural disasters “back to the states”—just as he’s done in North Carolina. “The governors can handle” these disasters, Trump told reporters. “If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”

The Trump administration has backed away, for now, from abolishing FEMA outright. But much of the agency has been eviscerated during Trump’s second term.

Since January 2025, FEMA has lost more than 4,300 personnel because of terminations and resignations; that includes over half of its senior executive staff. The agency has churned through five administrators, and only one, the previous leader Bob Fenton, had notable disaster-management experience. As of June of this year, seven of FEMA’s 10 regional-administrator positions were vacant.

Under Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired in March, FEMA was dogged by reports of power struggles, political favoritism, and sheer incompetence. Noem hired Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as a special government employee to be her “de facto chief of staff.” Lewandowski in turn hired an outside contractor, Kara Voorhies, an accountant who agency sources say became FEMA’s “shadow administrator,” with unusual control over access to the agency and how and where funds were spent.

Lewandowski’s and Voorhies’s influence over spending was especially notable because Noem had instituted a controversial rule that all DHS expenditures over $100,000 had to be approved by her office. A Senate investigation found that the burdensome requirement held up more than 1,000 FEMA grants and contracts for disaster-relief projects in one three-month period in 2025. The head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue division, Ken Pagurek, resigned in July 2025 after Noem’s office delayed funding for call-center response and other relief in the wake of historic flooding in Texas that killed more than 130 people.

As the expert staff left, unqualified leadership moved in. In December 2025, the White House installed the far-right conspiracy theorist Gregg Phillips to head the Office of Response and Recovery, FEMA’s biggest division. Phillips had no disaster-management experience, but he championed Trump’s false allegations of widespread election fraud. Phillips came under scrutiny when it surfaced that he claimed to have once been involuntarily teleported into a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia; he left FEMA in June.

FEMA’s willingness and ability to quickly respond to disasters has deteriorated. Andrew Rumbach, a disaster-policy expert at the Urban Institute, found that in Trump’s second term, the agency has denied 30 percent of states’ requests for disaster declarations, almost twice the rate of the four previous administrations. Declarations have also taken an average of almost 70 days to decide; before, it took just 22.

Trump removed Noem from the DHS after congressional hearings highlighted what one administration official called “many unfortunate leadership failures,” including her handling of Helene. Lewandowski and Voorhies left with her, and the DHS is conducting an investigation into their roles. Noem’s replacement, the former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, has reportedly ended her $100,000 spending-review policy. And in August, the Senate confirmed Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, to head FEMA; he had briefly served as the agency’s interim leader in 2025 before being fired after publicly opposing Trump’s call to abolish it.

The administration’s failures in western North Carolina are especially glaring given Trump’s elevation of Michael Whatley as “recovery czar” after Helene.

Born in Michigan, Whatley and his family moved to the mountain resort town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, when he was in high school; there, he got his start in politics volunteering for the state’s archconservative US senator, Jesse Helms. After law school and stints in Washington, Whatley began a 12-year career as a lobbyist for oil and natural-gas companies, including a multiyear campaign to expand offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic.

In 2019, Whatley was elected chair of the North Carolina Republican Party. He earned Trump’s appreciation when, after the 2020 presidential election, Whatley organized “Stop the Steal” rallies across North Carolina and amplified Trump’s false claims that “massive fraud” had changed the race’s outcome. In recognition of his fealty, and with an eye toward North Carolina’s battleground status in the upcoming presidential contest, Trump endorsed Whatley’s successful bid to serve as chair of the Republican National Committee in February 2024, with North Carolina native (and Trump daughter-in-law) Lara Trump serving as co-chair.

Whatley and the RNC’s success in helping Trump win the 2024 election made him, in the president’s eyes, an ideal pick to lead the post-Helene recovery. “If Michael Whatley does half as good a job for North Carolina as he did for my campaign, we’ll be very happy,” Trump said during his January 2025 visit.

But according to sources who spoke with The Nation and Facing South, there’s little evidence that Whatley has done much for their communities in his role as recovery czar.

This past July, The Nation and Facing South interviewed four mayors of North Carolina cities and towns hit hard by Helene, and all of them said that Whatley hadn’t contacted them to discuss relief and recovery after the storm.

In Boone, the location of Appalachian State University and home to about 20,000 residents, Helene’s floodwaters collapsed roads and caused more than 140 housing units to be condemned. Boone’s mayor, Dalton George (who was mayor pro tem when Helene struck), said he’s worked with many Democratic and Republican officials since the storm but has never heard from Whatley. “I would welcome a call from Michael Whatley right now if he has some solutions [for] the ongoing recovery,” George said. “But I’ve not had that opportunity.”

Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer says Whatley has never called her either, even though she contacted him after getting his phone number during a chance encounter at an event. She’s not sure what he’s been doing in his role as recovery czar: “As far as I can tell, it’s a title to hold so he can run for office with a job title.”

In the small river town of Marshall, where floodwaters crested at 27 feet and swept away 10 buildings, Mayor Aaron Haynie speaks with pride about the community’s bipartisan rebuilding effort. But he says Whatley has never reached out to help.

Mayor Zeb Smathers of Canton, a town 20 minutes west of Asheville that was still rebuilding after 2021’s Tropical Storm Fred when Helene hit, is more scathing. “Whatley, do your job,” Smathers said. “He was going to be the recovery czar but hasn’t been here, hasn’t done anything.”

There is also scant evidence that Whatley worked on Helene recovery with county governments, where much of the disaster response is coordinated. The Nation and Facing South sent public-records requests to 17 western counties heavily impacted by the storm, asking for e-mails and other documentation of Whatley’s involvement from January 2025 to June 2026. Of the 14 that responded, 11 had no record of Whatley reaching out about Helene. In the three counties that reported contact with Whatley, there appear to have been one-off meetings, with no record of any follow-up steps.

His absence earned him the “Where’s Waldo?” award from the Smoky Mountain News in December 2025. “Whatley’s critics say he’s rarely, if ever, been spotted in the disaster zone he’s supposed to lead,” the paper wrote, adding that records show he had only one conversation in 2025 with Matt Calabria, the head of the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina.

Even as money failed to move and FEMA sank into disarray, Whatley was praising Noem’s leadership at the DHS and her role in the response. In September 2025, he said on a radio program that Noem was “doing a great job” helping North Carolina after the storm. Two months later, he posted on X: “Thank you, President Trump and @Sec_Noem, for your steadfast leadership and commitment to helping North Carolina communities rebuild after Hurricane Helene.”

At the same time, Whatley has distanced himself from the “recovery czar” label, focusing instead on his role with the FEMA Review Council—a body that Trump created to shut down FEMA but which, after months of delays, proposed smaller reforms this spring. According to audio obtained by The Assembly, a North Carolina online magazine, when Whatley was asked at an event in May whether he’d get rid of FEMA, he replied, “I’ve suggested the president do that.”

Asked to comment for this story, Whatley’s campaign spokesman D.J. Griffin e-mailed a statement (which he prefaced by saying, “Thanks for checking in dude. A lotta Libtards wouldn’t be so courteous…”): “Michael Whatley served on the FEMA Review Council Board. If you look very very very very closely, you’ll notice there’s no czar in that description. Not a czar of any sort.” Griffin also said Whatley had worked with Republicans to “deliver more than $10.75 billion in federal hurricane relief for North Carolina—more than any natural disaster in state history. But the job is not yet done and Michael will continue speaking with local leaders about what they need help with.” (A state official involved in the recovery told The Nation and Facing South that Whatley’s funding estimate likely includes $1.5 billion set aside for hazard-mitigation projects; however, the precise amount and timing of the money is still uncertain.)

Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, Whatley’s Democratic opponent in this year’s Senate election, has led in recent polls—and has made Helene recovery a central line of attack.

“The president named Michael Whatley as the recovery czar for western North Carolina, and so far, he has failed miserably,” Cooper said in January. “We have the most damaging storm in the history of North Carolina; billions of dollars are going to be needed to recover. Yet the federal government has written checks for only a small percentage of it.”

Two years after Trump promised that the “days of betrayal and neglect are over,” western North Carolina’s troubled recovery looks like a warning for communities around the country facing the next climate-fueled disaster.

“Folks need to pay attention to how [the Helene] recovery has gone,” Jon Council says. “Because this may be the playbook that we’re looking at for a lot of future disasters.”

Fictional serial killers are deranged and twisted, but most of all, they are vain. Their desperate attempts to justify their perceived superiority over their victims are evident even in how they see themselves—seductive demigods that everyone else desires. Before Patrick Bateman, the investment banker turned serial killer in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, decides to go on a murder spree, he spends a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror. “I want Helga to check my body out,” he says, “notice my chest, see how fucking buff my abdominals have gotten since the last time I was here.” Bateman isn’t attracted to Helga; he doesn’t want to be intimate with her. He wants Helga to see his body as taut and Herculean. He wonders whether his attractiveness might also cloud her judgment and eventually lead to her entrapment. Bateman isn’t just a serial killer; his superficial qualities reflect American hyper-consumerism and corporate culture: Everyone wants to look good, not only for its own sake but also so they can make a killing. Even if we revile him, Bateman’s pathology is also ours.

The serial killer in Honey, Imani Thompson’s debut novel, is not all that different. Well before she embarks on her own murderous rounds, Yrsa—a Black British doctoral student at Cambridge University—already indulges in the crass aesthetics of death. After failing to help a professor retrieve an EpiPen during what eventually becomes a fatal allergic reaction to a bee sting, Yrsa is overcome with glee: “Arteries, veins, capillaries. Popping! An orchestra of justice. He’d lunged at her—that had been shocking. Exciting. The theatrics of the wheezing man. The red-hot raspberry of his face.” Yrsa’s exultation has more to do with what the victim represents than with any direct relationship she has to him. Professor Richardson is married and has been having an affair with his doctoral-student advisee, Nina, Yrsa’s friend. He has also attempted to use Nina’s original research as his own without crediting her. Adultery and academic dishonesty are the reasons that Yrsa finds him deplorable. After witnessing his death, the exhilaration she feels leads to a succession of murders that she commits at Cambridge and in the London area.

Honey is frantically twisted and sardonically dark. Yrsa is a serial killer who fashions herself as a virtuous Black feminist, both in theory and in practice, and she unequivocally and vociferously censures racism and sexism. Because of her self-declared moral high ground, she feels vindicated in terminating the lives of men she deems to be behaving badly—scholarly philanderers, finance bros, American jocks. Not only does she indict these men for society’s problems, but she also thinks she has a right to kill off the manosphere, one by one, all under the banner of critical race studies. Her revenge isn’t just visceral—it is academically grounded.

Yrsa’s attempts to provide commentary can at times seem overly prosaic to anyone who has read a social-media thread in the age of cancel culture. But that is part of Thompson’s point: The complaints may be all too familiar, but they are also acutely felt by people who feel slighted by being misunderstood or underpaid. Public shaming, which in the context of the novel makes it difficult to like Yrsa, is often the only means of addressing such complaints in a society where the authorities remain sovereign and entrenched.

With Yrsa, however, as her story unfolds and the body count mounts, one realizes that she is motivated by other reasons too—her frustration with the bad men is merely a rationalization for her actions. In this way, Yrsa is not unlike many of her fictional counterparts. They might invoke real-world politics to justify their behavior, but we all know they are pursuing far less humane ends.

As it stands, Yrsa is ultimately a monster set up to display both her obscenity and her banality. Often her hubris devolves into humor. Her comic disposition is especially evident post-coitus: “Why can’t she just shag in peace? Why do men have to speak?” she thinks after one liaison. Sometimes, we realize, she kills for revenge, other times out of boredom. After one of her love interests, Hugh, confesses that some of the men at Cambridge have a point-scoring system for the women they’ve slept with—three points for a woman with a double-barreled name (a marker of the English upper class), 18 points for a woman already in a relationship, and 20 points for someone with “Black-girl magic”—Yrsa eventually murders him. “There wasn’t much blood,” she later reflects after pushing him off a roof. “But there was a broken limb—his hand, outstretched—in the creeping buttercups.” The murders are one thing, and her motivation for them is another.

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In this way, Honey isn’t just a serial-killer novel; it is a revenge story, but also a satire of a society obsessed with rectitude. All of these elements work in tandem and to great effect. What makes the revenge plot so seductive is the buildup more than the act itself. We follow intensely as Hamlet ponders how best to avenge the murder of his father. The stakes are found in the uncertainty of his efforts—that vengeance might be the only solution, but it is also one that may never be realized. When Medea feels spurned after her husband Jason’s death, her reprisal becomes our success, because we are living vicariously through her bereavement.

Honey uses this uncertainty to help drive the story forward. But, at times, Yrsa’s psychological core gets lost amid the story’s momentum. After all, revenge as a motivating force to take down men is not all that distinctive or innovative, particularly because it echoes recent television portrayals of Black women contemplating or enacting retribution, such as Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Donald Glover’s Swarm. We get that we are being offered a satire, but Yrsa’s constant self-absolution doesn’t allow the reader to see her—or, for that matter, any other character—from within. “She does what comes easily,” Thompson writes. “People think she’s ambitious because often she’s the best, but it’s not drive.” And yet we don’t often witness Yrsa at her best, either.

After she delivers a eulogy, several of the characters applaud her. Yrsa’s childhood friend Kitty Denver says, “Your speech was absolutely beautiful. God, it had me bawling.” But was it really? Without a direct quote from the panegyric, it’s impossible to say; the reader is told these things instead of shown them.

Though Yrsa’s brilliance is often left undemonstrated, one thing is clear: that she is a bully, an irritable and unpleasant person. Sitting in the history library, Yrsa confronts a person whom she deems to be a demonic typer:

“Your typing, it’s pretty distracting and some of us are trying to work.”

The girl looks fraught, confused, on the edge of tears. It’s a typical undergraduate look.

“But I’m just…just typing.”

“Yes, too loudly.” Yrsa spells the word out for her before returning to her laptop screen and lollipop.

The girl with the typing problem gets up and moves tables. Yrsa hears a sniffle.

What does Yrsa want? For everyone to bend to her will, even if it makes them cry.

Does anyone have the right to take matters of injustice into their own hands? Honey ultimately poses this question to the reader but then holds back on answering it. In the end, nothing Yrsa says or experiences can serve as a defense for her actions. She is insufferable, not just because of her killing spree but because she is arrogant, impulsive, mean, reckless, and judgmental, which makes me think there is little to no room for compassion for a character who shows little to no vulnerability. Hamlet’s or Medea’s revenge at least appears to be somewhat relatable; they are grieving. Patrick Bateman’s and Hannibal Lecter’s serial murders are at least entertaining, given their genius. Yrsa can be wry and shrewdly observant, but she can also be jaded and insipid.

Honey is the profile of an erudite antihero who speaks in a language of redress but has little interest in it; it is a portrait of a character’s alienation from the society on whose behalf she claims to be acting. The material inequities that result from anti-Blackness, housing discrimination, or financial insecurity are conveniently absent; Yrsa is a creature absorbed by her own grievances and frustrations. Her murder binge doesn’t feel ethically complex; her homicidal ventures are just nefarious. Honey is a literary case study in which conflict is not abuse. At times, we are even left wondering: Was Yrsa actually injured, or does she only imagine herself to be? 

If one seeks a political critique of racism, literature can provide it. Yet fiction often excels at examining what is too opaque for political criticism, too ambiguous for righteous judgment, or too self-important to fully escape satire. When a novel’s protagonist kills someone, it can lead us to ask whether the act was really justified. Yet it can also invite us to ask how we arrived at this moment that is so consumed by the idea of vengeance, and that is what Honey does. As Yrsa plunges deeper into her murder spree, she also spirals into a grim cycle of queasiness, irrevocably tied to a rage that she finds all around her. Her deeds do not provide a remedy; nor do they summon any self-reflection. They often end up being as boring as Yrsa is bored.

June wasn’t the best time to be seeking an interview with Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, just as The New York Times, USA Today, and other outlets published articles focusing on the buzz around him as a potential 2028 presidential candidate. Ossoff would like to remind me, you, and everyone else in the world that first he needs to win his Senate race this November: He is still the Democrats’ most vulnerable incumbent senator, sitting as he is in a purple state that went blue in 2020, the year he was elected, but stayed in GOP hands at the state level (and voted for Donald Trump in 2024). Former state legislator Stacey Abrams, one of the architects of Georgia’s Democratic uprising, lost her two bids for governor, in 2018 and 2022, the second time by a larger margin than the first.

In 2020, Ossoff benefited from having a charismatic, locally renowned candidate on the ballot with him: the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, who was also running for the Senate in a special election. Warnock came up for reelection in 2022 and won. But in the wake of the Democrats’ 2020 wins, the GOP-controlled state Legislature has created more and more obstacles to voting: It has shortened the period for runoff elections; required an ID to verify mail-in ballots; and prohibited people from distributing food and water to voters waiting in long lines at polling places, a problem that’s mainly confined to poorer Black communities. And Trump has turned Georgia into public enemy number one in his Big Lie about how voter fraud was to blame for his and other Republican losses. Ossoff knows what he is up against. So he would like all of us to settle down about 2028 and focus on reelecting him in 2026.

I promised Ossoff’s communications staff that I shared his view—Democrats too often get ahead of themselves in off-year elections, failing to mobilize for the midterms, which this year could provide a crucial check on our authoritarian president’s abuses of power. That must have struck a chord, because in the end his folks cleared me, and I got to spend a weekend on the campaign trail with him in sweltering, soulful Savannah in June. There, I witnessed Ossoff blast Trump and indict his corrupt MAGA Senate opponent, Representative Mike Collins. But he didn’t stop there: He reminded voters of all the ways he’s helped stem Trump’s assault on Georgians’ rights, healthcare, and economic security, citing his work fighting against Medicaid cuts and the closure of state hospitals and advocating on behalf of constituents who have lost access to their cancer treatments.

Ossoff has always put himself at the center of the resistance to Trump, and now he’s at a crossroads: Can he win reelection, help Democrats take the Senate, and vanquish Trump once and for all? If he does, the speculation about 2028 will only get louder, no matter what he says he wants. That’s a problem that Ossoff is willing to face, as long as he wins reelection.

I first met Ossoff in June of 2017 in Atlanta, when he was running in a special election for former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s old seat, in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District in the Atlanta suburbs. My daughter was working as one of his field directors, so I couldn’t report on the race, but I went to Georgia anyway to cover the posse of women activists who’d flocked to his campaign. It was one of the first races to show that the flash point represented by the 2017 Women’s March would lead to sustained, local electoral organizing, often driven by women, to put anti-Trump candidates in office.

Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker, was 30 at the time but looked 20, with a preternatural seriousness but also a youthful sweetness. He was a protégé of Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died in 2020—Ossoff had read Lewis’s biography at 16, wrote him an admiring letter, and wound up interning in his Washington, DC, office—and Lewis’s backing gave him standing in the Black community. He’d wear a suit and tie when it was necessary, but on the campaign trail he liked to roll up his sleeves and shake hands, heartily clasping one of yours with both of his. Ossoff had produced hard-hitting documentaries on human rights and international corruption, but it was still difficult to imagine this charming neophyte winning, except for the big and feisty, mostly female coalition around him—oh, and the volunteers and money from Democrats all around the country that came pouring in during those first months of the Trump presidency. A fledgling chapter of Indivisible, the group Liberal Moms of Roswell and Cobb, and the women-led Pave It Blue all knocked on doors and phone-banked for him.

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The new Indivisible leaders held a meeting in a local library that February, expecting 20 people; over 100 came. One was a handsome young man in a dark suit. “I joked, ‘Who’s the young Republican?’” activist Elizabeth Luther says with a chuckle. It was Ossoff. He asked to speak, and they were impressed.

Ossoff seemed to understand early on that he would need to build a multiracial coalition in order to win. In 2017, one of his most prominent Black supporters was Stacey Abrams, then the minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, who was about to launch her 2018 run for governor. Several contenders for the congressional seat sought her endorsement, but she went with Ossoff, even though he had never held office.

“What Jon said is that you can’t win this special election by running the same kind of candidates we had traditionally run in Georgia: solid Democrats, but Democrats who were afraid to offend Republicans, which meant that you could not offend those on the right by pointing out what was wrong,” Abrams told me. “He said, ‘Look, this isn’t about conservative versus liberal. This is about right versus wrong.’” She continued: “Jon came to me with the most-thought-out plan for field engagement, for media engagement, and for talking to communities who had not previously participated. And for the first leg of the race, it worked.”

Several members of the ragtag group of suburban women activists who had assembled behind Ossoff that year told me similar things. They were beginning to see, as Abrams described it, “this new coalition that Jon saw,” as the Sixth District gradually grew more diverse ethnically, educationally, and ideologically. Ossoff and his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, an anti-abortion activist who briefly led the Susan G. Komen Foundation but was forced out by a donor and member rebellion, ultimately faced each other in a June runoff election, which Ossoff lost. But the local activists didn’t despair. “This is about the district really getting to know itself, to know who really lives here,” Essence Johnson, who later became chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party, told me in 2017. “And it’s never going back to the way it was.” A year later, Handel lost the seat to Lucy McBath, a progressive gun-reform activist. That same year, Abrams almost won the governor’s race against voter-suppressing Secretary of State Brian Kemp. “What we were able to pull off in 2018 was a turnout level that built on the energy that Jon helped harness,” she told me. “We just multiplied it across the state.”

In 2020, Ossoff ran against incumbent Senator David Perdue, a member of a powerful Georgia political family. Ossoff, Warnock, and President Joe Biden all won their races—Ossoff and Warnock in runoff elections in which the winners were declared on January 6, 2021. Georgia Democrats’ joy was muted by the violent insurrection that day, but Ossoff’s supporters still celebrated. “We’re still so proud of him,” Luther tells me nine years after his first bid for Congress.

Despite his wariness of the 2028 chatter, Ossoff isn’t afraid to nationalize his race, arguing that Georgia represents ground zero in the GOP’s attempts to impose Jim Crow 2.0. “From the very moment Georgia voters rejected [Trump] in 2020,” Ossoff said on the stump in mid-July, “he’s been on the warpath, because he was humiliated by the rebuke that Georgians dealt him. And he was humiliated and furious in particular, as a committed lifelong racist, that it was Black voters in Georgia who were instrumental in his defeat.”

In Savannah, the senator ran through the greatest hits of his Trump-the-grifter attacks. “I don’t know if you saw the mess in Washington last week. The president was so humiliated in [the Strait of] Hormuz, he threw his toys out the stroller,” Ossoff told a fired-up multiracial audience of several hundred. “That’s after he gave some felon donor a no-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool, and it filled up with algae.”

Then he moved on to Trump’s domestic agenda, which is hitting Savannahians hard. “He promised to bring down prices on day one,” Ossoff said. “Y’all know what today is? Today is day 524, and groceries, rent, and healthcare are at their all-time highs in American history. Donald Trump and his puppet Mike Collins—they doubled health-insurance premiums for more than a million Georgians and threw 300,000 Georgians off their insurance altogether. I heard from a woman with cancer who waits tables for a living and said she was going to lose her health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy. And they did this to pay for a tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich and to corporate America. Did you know that, Savannah?” Savannah roared.

Ossoff is as hard on his opponent in the Senate race as he is on Trump. Mike Collins is “unfit for office,” he said from the stage, “and the reason is that Mike Collins is a bigot and an antisemite under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars.” (Collins has been accused of funneling public funds to his chief of staff’s girlfriend.) He is, Ossoff continued, “widely known as a man of poor character, who lacks the judgment and integrity to serve in the United States Senate. He is only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman, but now he wants a promotion. But Savannah, come November, we will end his political career instead.”

“I love this guy!” the Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley, pastor emeritus of Atlanta’s Providence Missionary Baptist Church and a strong Ossoff supporter, tells me over the phone. “White women love this guy!” he adds. “And together we can win.”

I spoke with Ossoff briefly in Savannah, then had a long telephone interview with him after we’d both returned home. Despite my promises, of course I had to bring up 2028—I couldn’t help but observe that if the Democrats lose Ossoff’s Senate seat, we might not even have a competitive presidential election in 2028. The senator indulged me briefly. “Yeah, I think that the 2028 fantasy football risks distracting us from the urgent task at hand,” he told me. “If we don’t restore checks and balances in the midterms, I don’t know that we have a free and fair election in 2028.”

But there were a zillion things Ossoff would rather discuss than the next presidential election. He spoke about his work crusading “for oversight of our federal prisons” and against “civil rights abuses in prisons and jails, the mistreatment of military families by defense contractors, the abuse of foster children instate care. Because I think that that work equally restores people’s confidence in our democracy.” Some of this work has been bipartisan: Ossoff and Senator Chuck Grassley worked together on the Rural Opioid Abuse Prevention Act, which passed in 2022 and now is popular in Georgia’s drug-treatment community. He worked with GOP senators John Cornyn and Marsha Blackburn to strengthen federal oversight of foster-care agencies. Another outrage, he says, “is what Americans of all walks of life experience right now, which is surround-sound disrespect from corporate America and from government at all levels. It just feels increasingly like nothing works. You’re constantly at war with your insurance company, your bank, the cable company.” Addressing those sorts of issues can be “restorative of confidence in democracy and in the power and relevance of the vote, because people elected new representation and have seen tangible results.” During the 2021 runoff, he and Warnock argued fiercely that Democrats had to deliver on their promises of Covid-relief checks. “We had promised them [in the November election],” he told me, “and people need to see something tangible for their votes.”

Of course, Covid relief wasn’t the only thing Ossoff and Warnock delivered to Georgians. “There’s a quarter of a billion dollars of investment that Georgia’s historically Black colleges and universities received because Senator Warnock and I were elected that otherwise never would have come to the state,” he said. “Seniors on Medicare can’t be charged more than 35 bucks for their insulin because Senator Warnock and I were elected…. Georgia voters have the recent memory of our votes mattering,” he added.

Ossoff understands that he has to combine on-the-ground service delivery with the fight for voter empowerment, says Stacey Abrams, who as founder of Fair Fight Action is still a statewide leader. As an example, she tells me about how Ossoff and Warnock successfully fought to bring a public sewer system to Wilkinson County for the first time. “Wilkinson County is one of the counties that was targeted to lose one of its polling places,” she says. “These are people who don’t think government will ever do anything, so why should they vote? Why should they bother to show up? Because for 30 years they were trying to get someone to literally help them clean up their water.” Now someone has.

In addition to his attacks on Trump, Ossoff has recently gone viral for a resurfaced 2020 clip in which he rejects defunding the police, abolishing ICE, expanding the Supreme Court, and Medicare for All, among other priorities of progressive Democrats. Given the authoritarian moment we’re in, in which our legislative and judicial structures are buckling under GOP malfeasance, has he rethought increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court? Or term limits? “I’m open to various proposals for judicial reform,” he tells me mildly. “Clearly, there’s an urgent need for ethics reform. I’m open-minded about the broader conversation.” That’s not a yes to expanding the court, I note. He doesn’t correct me.

But Ossoff has refused to be drawn into the progressive-versus-centrist feuding that has recently consumed the Democratic Party. “No Georgia voter has yet asked me about elections that were 800 miles away,” he tells me. Referring to the intraparty warfare, he adds, “I don’t know why we do this to ourselves.”

The activists I spoke with who helped launch Ossoff’s political career in 2017 are optimistic about his chances this fall. Johnson, Luther, and Louise Palmer, an activist and educator, are all proud of having supported the young senator way back when. All are even prouder of the local anti-MAGA movement they’ve built. Their once-red district is pretty blue now, having sent Lucy McBath to Congress and elected Democrats as sheriff, district attorney, and county commissioner in Cobb County.

Their assessments of Ossoff’s achievements since then vary, however. Luther is the most enthusiastic, full of praise for his achievements securing improved drug-treatment programs and protecting people’s healthcare. A case manager at a substance-abuse and mental-health treatment center, she credits Ossoff with helping folks in her field, especially those in rural areas.

Johnson and Palmer also credit him with hard work on behalf of Georgians. But his and Warnock’s heyday, they note, was under the Biden administration, when post-Covid recovery programs, from relief checks to the child tax credit to rental assistance, helped out everyday Georgians, and when the Inflation Reduction Act put a lot of money into Georgia businesses and nonprofits. When Republicans pulled the plug on much of that public funding, progress stalled in the state, and Johnson and Palmer argue that Ossoff could have done more to mitigate the harm—or at least to ensure that Georgians know he feels their pain. And they hear this, they add, when they’re out canvassing voters.

“It’s a really desperate time right now out in the field,” Palmer says. “I know he’s gonna be reelected. But I just wish he would spend more time meeting with everyday Georgians, who really need it.”

“His messaging on Trump is excellent, but I just need him to touch down more,” says Johnson, who runs a small environmental firm. “The voter fatigue is real.” And Trump’s assault on social-safety-net programs is making things even more dire for the poorest Georgians. Johnson would like to see Ossoff out at food banks. “People are suffering,” she adds.

All three women admit that the corruption and cruelty in Trump’s second term has taken some of the fun out of politics. “I remember the unity in the first race, when we all were getting together. We are exhausted now,” Luther says. “It’s hard to have some of that joy we all felt. We’re just beat up.” Still, they all believe Ossoff has managed to win over a critical mass of Republicans, whose votes will be crucial in November. “There’s a segment of Georgia Republicans, they’re comfortable with Jon,” Palmer tells me. “He’s been in position for six years. He’s not done anything crazy or had any scandals. He’s really smart. He stays out of any drama.” Two Republican mayors, Scott James Matheson of Valdosta and Julie Smith of Tifton, have endorsed Ossoff in his reelection bid, even though their counties voted for Trump by double-digit margins.

“When you put that up against [Ossoff’s] opponent, I think it’s a very clear choice,” Palmer says. “Joy will come in November,” Johnson promises me.

Some observers ask me whether I think Ossoff can win without his running buddy Warnock in the race. “I would recast that completely,” Abrams says. “What Jon did was defeat an incumbent from a storied family with almost absolute power in Georgia, and that’s the credit he deserves. He did not shrink from what was an incredibly difficult race. Jon delivers, and that’s why he’s evolved into a sitting senator who is a formidable candidate.”

Abrams doesn’t like the 2028 buzz around Ossoff any more than he does. She knows firsthand what can happen when a statewide race becomes a national story. “There’s a political-class and media hunger for archetypes and for solutions that present themselves before the hard stuff happens,” she says. “And as someone who has experienced this, that has a drawback.”

But if Ossoff isn’t running for president, pundits ask, then why are his comms staffers slicing and dicing speeches and television hits in which he delivers cutting blows to Trump and the MAGA GOP and spitting them out all over social media?

Maybe because they’re really good. And maybe that’s how he’ll win reelection to the Senate. And honestly, if you want to take a minute and fantasize about Ossoff running for president, please watch his complete humiliation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July. Ossoff asks Hegseth whether he still believes, as he said on day 14 of the Iran conflict (as I write, it’s day 177), that Iran’s military had been “destroyed” and rendered “combat-ineffective.” He adds: “Was that an accurate statement?”

For almost five minutes, Ossoff repeats his questions as Hegseth huffs and puffs, getting angrier as Ossoff gets calmer. It’s a rout. One man is presidential in the exchange, and it’s not our “war secretary.” Ossoff may be trying to tamp down the 2028 speculation, but I can’t deny that this sort of stagecraft fuels it. So did his mid-August claim that Trump preferred “traveling with Natalie” [Harp, a close and worshipful aide who is blonde and 35] to doing his job, which drove the news cycle, and drove Republicans crazy, for days.

The Ossoff friends and supporters I’ve spoken with truly don’t think he will run in 2028, regardless of whether he has a resounding victory in 2026. He is only 39, and he has two young children. “He has plenty of time,” a friend tells me. Elizabeth Luther says, “You know, I just believe him. He’s that trustworthy.”

“I can’t wait to see what he’s doing when he’s 45 or 46,” Luther continues. Until then, she says, Georgia needs him. Ossoff would seem to agree.

During Claire Valdez’s campaign this year to represent New York’s District 7 in Congress, a slogan organically emerged: “Claire was there.” Repeated by labor organizers and campaign surrogates, the phrase referred to Valdez’s constant presence at worker actions in the city as a member of the State Assembly over the past several years—picket lines, union rallies, and fundraisers. Claire was there.

I was at one such event this past March, a benefit that raised money to send Amazon workers to an organizing conference sponsored by the magazine Labor Notes, where a Teamsters organizer used the phrase, possibly for the first time. As the crowd of delivery drivers and union members chanted, “Claire was there, Claire was there,” I thought back to scenes I had visited in my reporting on labor in New York City over the past few years. Indeed, Claire was there: at a freezing 2024 holiday-season picket line outside an Amazon warehouse in Queens; at a September 2025 rally over allegations of attempted union-busting at Brooklyn Defender Services, an organization of public defenders; and, earlier this year, at a strike by Long Island Rail Road workers outside Penn Station. Each time, Valdez was marching alongside workers, hyping up the crowd, and drawing media attention as one of the few elected officials—or perhaps the only one—present.

But as the slogan took off, Valdez was chagrined. “I hated the slogan when I first saw it,” she told me when we met at a coffee shop in her neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens, this summer. “It’s hard being a candidate when I really hate seeing my name in places.” Politicized in the era of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign slogan “Not Me, Us”—which she calls “probably the best political slogan that’s ever been created”—Valdez didn’t want the message of her own campaign to elevate her as an individual over the movements she came up through. “I was there because I was organized to be there. What’s so powerful about the labor movement is that it belongs to all of us,” she says. “In the moments that I have been brave, it’s because I wasn’t alone.” Now, she says, she’s come around to the slogan somewhat, but with her own addendum: “I wasn’t there by myself.”

Valdez won her primary in a wave of victories for left-wing candidates challenging the political establishment in New York City. Congressional primary wins this summer by a slate of candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander—seemed to signal a mandate for a working-class-focused policy agenda. But even among the other leftist candidates, Valdez is unique in her emphasis on the role of the labor movement in her political development and vision. “Joining my union was the first time I was a member of something,” she says. “That certainly shaped the way I thought about building collective power.” As a worker at Columbia University, Valdez was elected chair of her unit with the United Auto Workers and served on its bargaining committee. Two years ago, with the support of the UAW, she was elected to the State Assembly. Brandon Mancilla, the regional director for UAW Region 9A, which includes New York City, says Valdez had to be persuaded to jump into electoral politics. “She doesn’t come to this from a politician’s ambition,” he says. “She comes to this from ‘Where can I be most helpful to the movement?’—to the workers’ movement, to DSA, to her political homes.”

If the victories of Valdez, Avila Chevalier, and Lander can be seen as validating the mayor’s agenda, they also point to the growing political might of the UAW in New York City. In addition to the victories of the congressional candidates it endorsed, 15 of the union’s candidates for the State Assembly won their primaries along with all five of its State Senate candidates. In 10 of these races, the insurgent candidates unseated incumbents. According to the UAW, more than 500 members canvassed, rallied, and phone-banked to reach more than 50,000 voters.

“When our members decide to do something,” Mancilla says, “we throw down.”

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The UAW’s growing, member-led political program is part of a national agenda to revitalize the union led by Shawn Fain, its president since a runoff election in 2023. Fain and a slate of leaders (including Mancilla, who’d been elected the previous year) were elected on the promise of creating a more transparent, democratic union. This vision extended beyond the bread-and-butter issues of bargaining to the political sphere. Members have been highly involved in the endorsement process, gathering in local Community Action Program (CAP) councils to interview candidates and deliberate over how the union should participate in races. “They want a union that reflects their values and is organizing to change our political conditions too, not just our workplace issues,” Mancilla says. The union seeks to elect candidates who not only champion its priorities but have come up through its political machine. “These candidates bring forth not just the platform…they bring the experience of having fought for those things,” Mancilla says. “They’ve bargained contracts, they’ve organized their workplace, they’ve organized their coworkers, they’ve been a part of or led strikes.”

The UAW has long had a political program, recognizing the relationship between “the ballot box and the bread box,” as its legendary president Walter Reuther declared. “What the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls,” he famously said. But prior to the UAW’s 2023 reform process, endorsements were decided by the leadership without substantial participation from the members. Fain and Mancilla took office on a platform of broad reform, including increased democratic participation and member-led organizing initiatives, after at least a decade of corrupt leadership that made backroom deals with the bosses. That led to mass actions like the 2023 Stand Up Strike at the Big Three automakers and progress in organizing auto plants in the South.

In New York, this more militant approach has often put the UAW on the opposite side of electoral fights involving other, sometimes larger unions. Valdez’s opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, was endorsed by influential unions like 32BJ SEIU, RWDSU, and the public-sector District Council 37. In last year’s mayoral primary, the UAW was the first union to endorse Mamdani, while his main opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, made his closing remarks at a rally in Union Square joined by the leaders of other local unions. Many unions, particularly New York’s large public-sector unions, which rely on relationships with elected officials for funding, tend to stick to endorsing incumbents.

Valdez’s race served as a test case for the union’s theory of building political power that it hopes will extend across the country. “If we just simply put our logo on a poster, that doesn’t do much,” Mancilla says. “If you’re endorsing people that your members are fully behind, if you have the pulse of your membership, then you can do a lot more with volunteers.” While Region 9A has been at the forefront of building the union’s electoral program in New York, the UAW is simultaneously flexing its political muscle in other regions where it has a large membership. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won his US Senate primary in August with the backing of the union’s political engine, despite a record $60 million in outside spending supporting his opponent, Haley Stevens. According to the union, nearly 800 UAW members knocked on 15,000 doors, made 145,000 phone calls, and organized worker-to-worker conversations that helped turn out 112,887 UAW voters during early voting.

Candidates like Valdez see the UAW’s political work as a critical tool to combat the exodus of working-class voters from the Democratic Party. “America is a hot shop right now,” she says, using a labor-movement term for a workplace that’s ripe for organizing. “The right is looking at the same thing we are, and they’re seeing the same opportunities to win people over. They’re going to beat us to it if we’re not actually transforming American society.”

In the decade that legal aid attorney Hoda Mitwally has been a member of the UAW, she’s witnessed firsthand how members have become more engaged with the political work of the union. “I viewed the union as something positive, as a path to stability, but I never saw the union as being a political home,” she says. But since 2023, Mitwally has seen the union’s new agenda trickle down into its electoral work. “With reform-minded leadership coming to power…there is now a mechanism for members to be engaged with broader politics in a way that there just was not in the very recent past,” she says.

On summer evenings in 2024, the UAW’s New York City CAP Council began holding mass-membership meetings to discuss what role it should play in the upcoming mayoral race, before Cuomo announced his candidacy or then-Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges. The council compiled a 50-point questionnaire based on member submissions and hosted open candidate forums. The result of that process was the union’s initially unranked slate of Mamdani, Lander, and Jessica Ramos, all of whom had been consistent presences on the UAW’s picket lines in recent years. “There’s a direct connection between having that participation and transparency in our meetings and the success of our program,” says Jane Fox, chair of the New York City CAP Council. “Our members will move the needle on an election, because they’ll go out and knock doors.” Region 9A has grown its membership in academia, the cultural sector, legal aid, and more over the last five years, exposing young, energized members to contract bargaining and union elections for the first time. “American political life is vibrant within labor unions,” Fox says.

In May 2025, the UAW became the largest union in the city to endorse ranking Mamdani first, while he was polling nearly 20 points behind Cuomo. Members believed that Mamdani’s message about affordability would resonate if enough voters heard it, and they threw themselves into the campaign as if it were a union-organizing drive. The UAW held a kickoff canvass in the South Bronx, where Mamdani’s support was seen as weak and the fluency in Spanish of many of its members was an asset. Over the course of the campaign, members completed over 1,000 volunteer shifts.

In November 2025, weeks after Mamdani won the general election, New York Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez announced her retirement. Mancilla quickly reached out to Valdez. Other groups, including the DSA, also got in touch, encouraging her to run, but according to Valdez, it was the conversations with UAW leaders like Mancilla and Fain that made the biggest difference in convincing her. “There were plenty of people—progressives, even socialists—who could have run for this spot,” Mancilla says. “But no one was going to be able to articulate the connection between the progressive movement and the labor movement like she would, because she embodies it.” In addition to Valdez, the UAW supported a slate of member candidates who had come up through local shops. Avila Chevalier, a former investigator at Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem and a graduate student at CUNY, generated momentum for her campaign within her UAW local. Former bargaining representative David Orkin and former UAW member Eli Northrup also won their primaries for the State Assembly.

Fox says that the New York City CAP Council is actively looking to recruit more members to run for political office. The union’s constitutional convention this summer passed a resolution that will create a program to develop members as political candidates. “Knowing how hard it is to go up against a boss like Columbia University—one of the largest private landowners in Manhattan, a billion-dollar endowment—Claire has bargained against them and won great contracts for our members there,” Fox says. “Members understand those are the same skills that are going to win us something in Washington or in Albany or the City Council.”

As the corporate media breathlessly tried to make sense of the upsurge in successful left-wing challengers, candidates like Valdez were looking back on the years of organizing that laid the groundwork for this moment. “Our role as organizers and democratic socialists and DSA is to be as ready as possible for the kind of historical forces that might change our political circumstances at any given moment,” Valdez says. “You have to be building durable structures and developing members as they come in and being ready to ride waves.” In strongholds like the so-called Commie Corridor that traverses Brooklyn and Queens, groups like the DSA and the UAW have built a well-oiled political machine, knocking on the same doors for years.

Mitwally canvassed for six days straight leading up to Election Day. At a campaign victory party that night, she reflected on the many wearying hours of organizing that had led to this moment. “It means that there was something permanent about the project that we had begun building,” she says. “We had built a real constituency around these politics unlike anything that I’d ever seen before in my lifetime…. Had you told me 10 years ago that the UAW would be part of creating this political change, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

As the UAW emerges as a scrappy kingmaker in New York, autoworkers in Michigan are fighting to reclaim the influence their union once wielded to advance working-class politics. “There was a time when the UAW put out our endorsement list, and there was no question people were voting for the UAW-endorsed candidate. Because when our standard of living came up, so did the whole country’s,” says Tielece Perry, who has worked at a Detroit plant now operated by Stellantis for 30 years and serves as chair of both her local and region’s CAP councils. Throughout the mid-century administration of Walter Reuther, the union fought for gains at the bargaining table that could further the broader political horizon of the working class. In its historic strike against General Motors in 1945, the union pushed for “wage increases without price increases” in alignment with President Harry Truman’s agenda to control auto prices and boost the working class’s purchasing power. With the Treaty of Detroit in 1950, the UAW won a massive expansion in healthcare and pensions from GM at the same time it was pushing for nationalized healthcare and social pensions. But its membership numbers—and with them, the union’s political might—have atrophied since the late 1970s, particularly in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, as waves of plant closures hollowed out hubs of union jobs like Flint, Michigan. “They used to say that when the economy catches cold, Flint gets pneumonia,” says Art Reyes II, an electrician at a truck-manufacturing plant and a 35-year UAW member.

Today, the UAW’s leadership in Michigan wants to bring its members more directly into the process and push for a more ambitious working-class agenda. The union maintains a significant footprint in the state’s electorate, representing 350,000 active and retired members, more than a third of its overall membership. During the 2024 presidential election, in which the UAW endorsed President Joe Biden and, later, Kamala Harris, the union reported reaching 100,000 of its members’ households in a single weekend. Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state was just 80,000 votes.

This cycle, the UAW’s Michigan CAP held its first-ever public forums with candidates for the US Senate and governorship, which all members could submit questions to and attend. A February event marked the first time that the three Democratic candidates for Senate—El-Sayed, Stevens, and Mallory McMorrow—had shared a stage. The state CAP also interviewed each of the candidates in the International Executive Boardroom of its Detroit headquarters, peppering them with questions of concern to members: What kind of vehicle do they drive? Do they know how to read a VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) on a car? Do they know it’s possible to buy a “domestic” vehicle that’s actually manufactured entirely in China?

In early June, the state CAP board decided to endorse El-Sayed, citing his support for the union’s priorities, including Medicare for All. Universal healthcare would free up bargaining power for unions to fight for other needs, like raises and pensions. “I can’t tell you how much money is negotiated in contracts for healthcare from employers,” says AJ Freer, who has served as a bargaining representative for Local 600, the largest in the state. “If you took that cost out of there, it would be a different ball game.” And members who have long benefited from employer-provided health benefits want to see the same care extended to all Americans. “We are very fortunate,” Reyes says. “But unionized or not unionized, their children, their grandchildren, their neighbors may not have access to healthcare, and we believe healthcare is a right.” Members were also swayed by El-Sayed’s commitment not to accept corporate PAC money, while an AIPAC-backed super PAC and shadowy groups with ties to big business poured a record $60 million into supporting Stevens. “It’s the same corporations that are making these mega-donations that we sit across from at the table to negotiate wages and benefits and working conditions,” Reyes says. “And they tell us, ‘We’re broke, we don’t have any money.’”

The member-to-member organizing model can literally open doors. Reyes always wears his union gear when he canvasses in the Flint area. “We’ve been told by people at the doors, ‘The only reason I opened my door was because I saw the wheel,’” he says, referring to the UAW logo. Reyes and his brother have both served as presidents of their locals, and his father was also an elected representative with the union. “I know firsthand how difficult it is to go up to somebody and talk to them and tell them, ‘Hand me your problem. I will do what I can to help you with it,’” he says. “That, to me, is what unionism is.”

When El-Sayed clinched the Democratic nomination in August, Reyes was relieved. “It showed us that the blitz that we were doing in educating our membership on his stances—and their alignment with long-standing stances of the UAW—paid off,” he says. The union will now have to get its members out for what could be a bruising general-election cycle, during which more corporate dollars will likely flow into the state. Reyes gave himself just 24 hours to soak in the win before he started calling other members to ask them about volunteering.

The UAW’s engagement with national politics is a critical plank in its preparation for May Day 2028, when its contracts with the Big Three automakers expire. Fain has called on other unions to align their contract-expiration dates for a potential general strike, in which 150,000 workers at Michigan automakers would lead the charge off the shop floor and into the streets. Valdez says she had the date in mind when she made her decision to run. “There was this political muscle being formed within the region, but also a real necessity to have UAW members in Congress at this moment,” she says. “We need federal partners there.”

The union is gearing up for 2028 not just by advancing its candidates but by building up shop-floor leadership through the organizing process. “Campaigns are vehicles,” Valdez says. “They’re vehicles for organizing people, for developing new leaders.” As was the case with her, these organizing efforts could produce future candidates to grow the ranks of the UAW’s congressional bloc. “People are scared because they’re seeing this insurgent wave, this anti-incumbent wave,” Valdez says. “Some of them should be afraid.”

Valdez takes her mandate to deliver for working people seriously, because she knows what’s at stake for the movements she’s come up through. “When we win, we demonstrate that there’s a really broad constituency for socialism,” she says. “And then when we govern successfully, we show that it’s possible to do things…. We raise people’s expectations.” As Mancilla observed, Valdez’s candidacy made a unique proposition in marrying the socialist left and organized labor, two traditions that are sometimes in tension. But to Valdez and others, the only way forward for the left in the United States runs through the working class. “We’re not saying anything new, but we’ve built the organization that can successfully harness this political moment we find ourselves in, where working people just don’t have faith in Democratic Party leadership; they don’t have faith in Republican Party leadership; their lives are not getting better; wages are down,” Valdez says. “They want an alternative. And we have built that alternative.”

Perhaps no moment in modern history has been more consequential for Palestine than the period between the two world wars. In the early 1920s, Palestinian peasant farmers, only recently free of the Ottoman Empire, had to continue paying heavy taxes on land, cattle, and property to the British Mandate. The Ottomans had accepted payment in kind, but the British demanded cash, regardless of the cost of production or fluctuations in the weather. Unable to keep up with taxes, many farmers were forced to sell their land and become tenants. At the same time, in accordance with the promise it had made in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British government facilitated the transfer of land to the Jewish National Fund, which earmarked it for recently arrived immigrants and refugees from Europe. Farmers who had lost their lands could not work in the new settlements, which relied exclusively on Jewish labor, a situation that resulted in increased population density in those areas that remained under Palestinian control.

The peasant farmers, locally known as the fellahin, began to migrate to cities in search of work, settling in crowded shanties. But as it turned out, life in Haifa or Jaffa was not any better. The British Mandate set the minimum wage for government jobs at 30 to 50 percent higher for Jewish immigrants from Europe than for Palestinians, out of a racist belief that Europeans were accustomed to a higher standard of living than Arabs. As the historian Mahmoud Yazbak has demonstrated, these economic factors were decisive in setting the stage for an uprising.

In the late 1920s, a Syrian preacher by the name of Iz al-din al-Qassam, who had fought against Italian and French occupiers in Libya and Syria, settled in Haifa and began to seek out and organize the large number of dispossessed farmers and low-wage workers who dwelled in the city’s slums. The discovery that Zionists were smuggling weapons into the port of Haifa inflamed tensions further, and episodes of violence, which were sporadic at first, increased. When the British police killed al-Qassam and some of his followers in late 1935, the discontent among Palestinians reached a new pitch.

In April 1936, a general strike was called. The grand mufti of Jerusalem, appointed to his lifetime position by the British 15 years earlier, brought a handful of local notables together to form the Arab Higher Committee, whose goals were to establish a national representative body in Palestine, put a stop to Jewish immigration, and somehow maintain a leadership role over the revolt. But the uprising remained largely worker-led and would last three years, pitting the poor and poorly armed indigenous people in Palestine against the world’s biggest empire.

In an unprecedented show of force, the British government deployed 100,000 ground troops, demolished thousands of Palestinian homes, destroyed farmers’ crops, detained insurgents without charge, tortured prisoners, executed or exiled rebel leaders, and used civilians as human shields. The violent crushing of the revolt laid the groundwork for what would happen later in Palestine, not only in the shorter term with the founding of Israel and the Nakba of 1948, but arguably also with the war of 1967, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, and the October 7 attacks. In all of these pivotal events, we can find traces of what the British Mandate set in motion during its colonial administration and what the Palestinian workers’ revolt expressed: anger at dispossession and discrimination, aspirations of social justice, and dreams of self-determination.

This history is the subject of two fascinating works by Palestinian women artists: The Lord, a sophisticated and beautifully written novel by Soraya Antonius, and Palestine ’36, the recent film directed by Annemarie Jacir. Working in different mediums and separated by nearly 40 years, Antonius and Jacir nevertheless share a concern with how history is created: how people weave together concurrent but sometimes disparate events into a coherent narrative of their collective pasts. What happened in Palestine between 1936 and 1939 is “an argument without end,” to borrow Pieter Geyl’s phrase, but by dramatizing it in fiction and film, Antonius and Jacir bring us closer to real life than any historical account ever could.

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October 2026 Issue

Soraya Antonius’s The Lord is shaped by a frame narrative. We begin in the 1980s with the narrator and a gentleman friend visiting a former Crusader castle in Lebanon, where they have come in search of a tomb, “a stony mound, as long as a tall man’s height.” The narrator, a journalist, is never identified by name or nationality, but she is familiar with the Arabic spoken by the Syrian children who crowd around her, finds her way around using a Guide Bleu, the French-language travel guide, and converses in English with her companion. The children comment on the couple’s dusty car without ever suspecting that the narrator understands them; in effect, she passes as British.

The tomb that the narrator has come to find belongs to Tareq, a mysterious figure from the era of the Palestinian revolt. To learn more about him, she interviews Miss Alice, an elderly missionary who used to be his teacher in Jaffa. Tareq was a hardworking yet mediocre student—that is, until the final exams of his last year in school, when he turned in papers that should have earned him 95 percent in every subject and 100 percent in three of them. Tareq was accused of cheating and expelled, which drastically changed his family’s fortunes. Graduating from a colonial school would have virtually guaranteed him a job with a good salary. Instead, he becomes a traveling magician, gaining minor fame in the rural villages where he performs.

For the grand finale of his act, Tareq produces a hat, waves it around, and turns it into a scarf. In the annals of prestidigitation, this isn’t much of a trick. And yet because it is performed in Palestine under the British Mandate, and the hat is a silver homburg like the one that the British High Commissioner wears, and the scarf is the keffiyeh of peasant farmers, the scene takes on a political meaning that Challis, a local colonial officer, finds impossible to ignore. Over time, Tareq’s tricks become rather extraordinary: He is said to walk through walls; he puts out brushfires from miles away; and once, in front of an entire village, he makes the High Commissioner’s clothes disappear, revealing him in all his nakedness. Challis becomes fairly obsessed with proving that Tareq isn’t just poking fun at the British occupiers or expressing support for the rebels, but that he is in fact their leader.

As a novel, The Lord stands out for a series of interesting choices that complicate the standard rebellion narrative pitting a male freedom fighter against a male colonial villain. Instead of focusing only on Tareq, the conjuror who drives Challis mad, Antonius also brings in Um Tareq, his cold and calculating mother; Buthaina, a farmer’s wife who has miscarried several times and seeks Tareq’s “blessing” in conceiving again; Frank Egerton, a clear-eyed British journalist; and Kit Farren, the High Commissioner’s assistant, who courts the respectably poor Miss Alice.

Through these characters, we get glimpses of life in rural areas as well as urban centers, as both landscapes undergo massive change under the colonial administration. In the village of Tarshiha, for example, farmers have sold most of their animals to pay fines and taxes, so they can’t offer the visiting Challis and Egerton meat with their dinner. In Jaffa, meanwhile, an entire Palestinian neighborhood in the old city is bombed with dynamite in a “beautification” project. When the project map is passed to Challis, he draws a squiggly line to ensure that Tareq’s family home is destroyed too.

Antonius also explores the overlapping forces that governed the lives of Palestinian women during the British Mandate: the patriarchal order imposed from within, the political occupation imposed from without, and the class dynamics that cut through both. Buthaina is married off at 12 to Abu Ramzi, a widowed farmer who already has teenage children. She spends several years learning how to maintain the household—the description of her daily chores is one of the novel’s most affecting sections—but to preserve her status, she must produce a child. The repeated deaths of her babies drive her to seek out Tareq.

Tareq improvises a mystical cure (clipped nails, a lock of hair, some water) that he intends as a comfort to Buthaina, but to their mutual delight she becomes pregnant and delivers a healthy baby boy. Unfortunately, Challis gets wind of Tareq’s visit to a married woman and uses it to blackmail him. The conjuror’s sleight of hand now produces a Union Jack instead of a keffiyeh. When Buthaina’s house is searched by British officers, all the work she has put into canning, jarring, and otherwise preserving food for her family is destroyed. Dishonored by the rumors spread by Challis and with her home now in ruins, Buthaina has to fend for herself by selling embroidery.

Antonius’s interest in the lives of women in Mandatory Palestine extends to the British as well. Miss Alice displays some sympathy for the struggles of Palestinian women, yet she is unable to set aside her loyalty to the colonial order. To the end, she remains faithful to the civilizing mission of the British Mandate, despite her lowly position as a teacher in her father’s missionary school. When Kit Farren, the High Commissioner’s assistant, takes her on a week-long trip to Jerusalem, Miss Alice frets about the fact that she owns “only one possible dress for dinner, when invited to five or six.” She has high hopes that Farren will make a proposal of marriage to her, which would lift her into a higher social class, but instead he chooses a wealthy aristocrat.

The Lord frequently reminds us that its narrative is spoken—a tape recorder is on—and while we hear the voice of Miss Alice, we also get the unnamed narrator’s observations or reflections. The clues we are offered suggest that she is a woman of the Levantine upper class, likely a Palestinian educated in British schools. This ingenious setup allows us to hear the elderly British teacher recount the story and the narrator to correct or contextualize these memories. For example, in the scene where Miss Alice describes the “beautification” project in Jaffa that resulted in the bombing of Palestinian homes:

“But you mustn’t get angry with me,” said Miss Alice. “It’s not only that more than twenty years have passed: we really and truly didn’t know what was happening until we heard the explosions and saw the people running to the school. They were screaming.”

I was angry though, and there was no one else to take it out on.

The forces of nationality, gender, class, and language shape the lives of all the characters in The Lord, whether it is Tareq, the conjuror; Buthaina, the farmer’s wife; Miss Alice, the schoolteacher; or, for that matter, the narrator herself.

Antonius’s sensitivity to these concurrent forces is perhaps no surprise given the contours of her own life. She was born in Jerusalem in 1932. Her father, George Antonius, was a historian and a diplomat, best known for his book The Arab Awakening, which tells the story of Arab nationalism from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Her mother, Katy Nimr, was a socialite and philanthropist who founded Dar al-Awlad, a boys’ orphanage in the city. The couple was wealthy and well-connected, hosting numerous soirées in Karm al-Mufti, their mansion in Sheikh Jarrah, where British Foreign Service officers mingled with Palestinian artists and aristocrats.

The Antoniuses sent Soraya, their only child, to English schools. The experience, she later wrote, provided her with “a long, expensive, and in neutral subjects a good schooling,” but “without the faintest knowledge of the geography, history, economics or literature of one’s own country and this last omission seems to me now the most seriously corrupting of all.” Colonial schools trained the children of the ruling class, hoping to turn them into technocrats who could help maintain within the empire the order imposed from thousands of miles away in the metropole. In many of their pupils, like Soraya Antonius, they left a long-lasting sense of shame and regret.

History can interrupt a person’s destiny, to disastrous effect, the way an avalanche diverts a river from its course. In addition to the insidious trauma of her colonial education, Antonius also witnessed or lived through a series of violent and politically significant events. In July 1946, when she was 14 years old, Soraya and her mother were near the King David Hotel when an explosive device detonated nearby. The two managed to get away just moments before the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group, bombed the hotel itself, killing 91 people. When Soraya was 15, the Irgun bombed a house close to Karm al-Mufti, leading her now-widowed mother to flee her home in fear. The Irgun then occupied the mansion and confiscated its assets. An even greater catastrophe unfolded when Soraya was 16 and in boarding school—the Nakba of 1948, in which more than 75 percent of Palestinians were expelled or displaced from their homes. Soraya’s mother moved to Cairo to escape the violence, returning in 1949 to Jerusalem, where she lived in a different house and resumed her philanthropic work at the boys’ orphanage.

By the early 1950s, when Soraya Antonius earned her degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, her childhood home was lost, her neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah had been placed under Jordanian rule, and her native city was divided by the Green Line that separated the newly founded state of Israel from its neighbors. Antonius eventually settled in Beirut, where she worked as a journalist, editor, curator, and activist. Her work spanned very different subjects. She wrote a column for the French-language Lebanese newspaper L’Orient. She edited political articles for Middle East Forum (a now-defunct publication of the Alumni Association of the American University in Beirut). She wrote and produced the documentary film Resistance, Why?, in which Palestinian writers and intellectuals like Ghassan Kanafani shared their views on revolution. Antonius even edited the proceedings of a conference on science and technology in developing countries. In 1980, she published an important document in the Journal of Palestine Studies—a list of 1,229 Palestinian women who were imprisoned by Israel between 1967 and 1979.

Yet something must have felt missing to her, because at the age of 54, Antonius set aside the nonfiction that she’d been producing in one form or another for more than three decades and released a novel. In an article written for the journal Alif, she reflected on the conundrum that so many of us who received colonial educations faced and continue to face: whether to stay silent or write in a language not your own. “I realized that even if I couldn’t write in Arabic,” Antonius observed, “I could still write as an Arab. ”

In approaching the figure of Tareq, Antonius draws a parallel with the most famous miracle worker ever to emerge out of Palestine—Jesus himself. Tareq gives to the poor, heals a desperate woman, stands up to the foreign occupiers, and puts out brushfires “without buckets of water.” Little surprise that Challis, like the Romans before him, wants to make an example out of the Palestinian rebel. “He thinks he can defy us? That cheap little tuppenny pier-head conjuror?” Challis fumes. Where there is a Jesus, there must be a Judas. Late in the novel, a betrayal of great political and personal significance takes place at the hands of an unexpected traitor. And in a nod to the syncretic tradition, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice also plays a role.

The use of Jesus as a metaphor naturally brings up the question of Jewish characters in the novel. During the interwar period, hundreds of thousands of European Jews arrived in Palestine—refugees fleeing antisemitism and fascism in their homelands as well as settlers pursuing the Zionist dream of a Jewish ethno-state. In The Lord, there are passing references to some of these Jews: a Hebrew-speaking police inspector as well as Orthodox Jews in a comical scene in which representatives of the Latins, Armenians, Copts, Muslims, Greek Orthodox, and other religious denominations vie for a place in the cortège behind the High Commissioner.

As it happens, the High Commissioner—referred to throughout the novel as “HE,” for “His Excellency”—is Jewish (as was Herbert Samuel, who served as the real-life high commissioner from 1920 to 1925). On a visit with Miss Alice’s school, HE berates a child who playfully pulls him to the ground during a ball game: “You little—you little Arab.” Kit Farren, his assistant, rushes to explain things to Miss Alice. “It’s not at all because he’s Jewish,” Kit says. “HE leans over backward to be fair—the trouble we have with the Jews, you wouldn’t think it, but they expect him to favour them and he won’t.”

Elsewhere, antisemitic prejudice pops up in the dialogue of British characters. “You talk like a Jew,” Egerton complains when Tareq dares to counter the logic of an argument he’s made. Another official, charged with drafting legal papers that would allow British officers to quell the revolt in Jaffa, murmurs, “Thank the Lord we’re not dealing with the Jews.” But aside from these incidental references, The Lord doesn’t interest itself in Jewish characters or the Zionist movement. Its focus remains on the British occupation and the revolt to its rule that started among dispossessed Palestinian farmers and urban workers. If history is an argument, then the one that The Lord wants to have is over colonial occupation and national aspiration.

The anti-colonial struggle is likewise a concern of Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ’36, which is set in the fictional Palestinian village of al-Basma during the revolt. The opening scenes of the film, composed of colorized archival footage, introduce us to a time and a place on the verge of radical transformation. A teenage boy on a donkey cedes the road to a car. The Alhambra movie theater in Jaffa is open. A British lady, a gentleman in a tarboosh (or fez), a colonial officer in uniform, and a priest in black robes pass each other on the street. Ships wait in the harbor for their cargo to be unloaded, and a train pulls into a station in Jerusalem. “The year you were born,” a title reads, suggesting that the fight for Palestinian liberation did not start with the founding of Israel or the Six-Day War but decades earlier, in the interwar period.

As he gets off the train in Jerusalem, Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya) is immediately asked by a British officer to show his identification papers. There are tensions in Nablus; colonial forces are cracking down on protests. But Yusuf is not overly concerned with the headlines shouted by the newsboys. He has come to the city to work as a driver for an aristocratic couple, Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine) and Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri). The two live in a white stone mansion that bears a striking resemblance to Karm al-Mufti, the Antonius family home in Jerusalem.

When Yusuf arrives at the house, he finds Khuloud dressed in men’s clothes, furiously typing an article under the pen name Ahmad, while a radio plays “El Huerfanito,” a mournful song by the Cuban singer Antonio Machín. Desperate for news of the rebellion against the Mandate, Khuloud peppers Yusuf with questions about his village until Amir pulls the young man aside and shows him the car. Yusuf drives the couple to the inauguration ceremony of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Ramallah, at which High Commissioner Wauchope (Jeremy Irons) delivers a speech insisting that the service will not be concerned with politics; its main object will be “the spread of knowledge and culture.” Watching the scene, I smiled in the darkness. Then as now, there were people insisting that culture should be entirely divorced from politics. And then as now, they were the very people whom politics favored.

In Yusuf’s home village of al-Basma, life moves at a different rhythm. The widowed Rabab (Yafa Bakri) and her daughter Afra (Wardi Eilabouni) walk across lush fields, passing a newly established Jewish settlement surrounded by barbed wire. “Why did they come to live here?” Afra asks. “Their countries don’t want them,” Rabab tells her. The Palestinian villagers harvest their crops together, all the while worrying about the land confiscations that have affected a neighboring town. In the evening, Rabab’s parents (Kamel El Basha and Succession’s Hiam Abbas) read the newspaper to find out the latest on the protests.

Meanwhile, in Jaffa, Khalid (Saleh Bakri) unloads cargo at the port where weapons smuggled in by the Zionists are discovered. With the influx of European immigrants and refugees providing a new pool of labor in the city, British employers have begun firing Palestinians. “Either we stand up for ourselves, or we sit back and watch,” a dockworker warns. When the British cheat him out of his overtime wages, Khalid joins the revolt, becoming one of its leaders.

At the heart of this sprawling epic is Yusuf’s slow and almost reluctant transformation from a quiet, apolitical worker into a rebel. Several events drive him to political engagement: the transfer by a British court of 35 dunums of village land to a nearby Jewish settlement; the killing of his father in the resulting protest; the jailing of his younger brother; and the shocking disinterest of the Palestinian elite, especially the large landowners, in the plight of the dispossessed farmers. “Our interests are different,” one of Amir’s wealthy friends tells Yusuf. “Is Zionism really so bad for us? For business?” When Yusuf mentions land evictions and the near-starvation of tenant farmers, another aristocrat responds, “I understand it’s a difficult time for you all, but not all villagers pay their debts to the landowners.”

Annemarie Jacir has had a lifelong artistic interest in Palestine. Born in Bethlehem in 1974, she was raised in Saudi Arabia and educated in the United States, where she studied literature and politics. After college, she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a production assistant and script reader for a few years. But she found that she wasn’t learning all that much about how to make movies, so she went to graduate school at Columbia, earning a master of fine arts in 2002.

Her first film, Like Twenty Impossibles, was a 17-minute short about a film crew navigating checkpoints during the Second Intifada. It premiered at Cannes in 2003, an honor that propelled her into the limelight. Several other short films followed; then, in 2008, Jacir released her first feature film, Salt of This Sea, about a woman who returns to Palestine after years in the United States to claim her grandparents’ inheritance. It starred the poet Suheir Hammad as well as Saleh Bakri (who appears as the lead rebel in Palestine ’36).

In an interview with the American Film Institute, Jacir said she spent eight years writing, researching, and putting together the financing for her latest film. The preproduction took many months, as her team found and restored a local village, planted the kinds of crops that Palestinians planted in the 1930s, and located or built replicas of British military vehicles and machinery. The principal photography was set to begin in the West Bank on October 14, 2023.

The brutal Hamas attacks put the project on hold. Jacir’s producers warned that she might lose her funding and suggested that she move the production to Morocco, Cyprus, or Greece—but given that the land was such a prominent character in the film, she refused. In the end, Jacir shot part of the movie in Jordan and part of it in Palestine, with the production starting and stopping four times before wrapping. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was Palestine’s official submission to the 98th Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category, though it was not selected. (Tunisia’s entry, The Voice of Hind Rajab, made the cut.)

Palestine ’36 is a film that rewards a patient viewer. The pace is slow, but Jacir’s attention to detail is keen. We see history being written both in the moment, in Khuloud’s articles, which she is forced to write under a male name in order to protect her position as a woman and as an aristocrat, and in the archival footage that Jacir restored, colorized, and inserted seamlessly throughout the story. In fact, the archive is so well integrated that at times the line between fact and fiction blurs, a nod to the malleability of history.

The sonic landscape of the film is likewise carefully orchestrated. Antonio Machín’s song “El Huerfanito,” which plays in Spanish in the happy early minutes of the film, can be heard again at the end, this time in a rendition that the Syrian singer Asmahan made famous throughout the Arab world, “Ya Habibi Ta’ala,” while a woman’s voice reads out a list of the revolt’s leaders who have been imprisoned or expelled. Like Antonius, Jacir appears to see women as the narrators and guardians of their people’s history.

In the second half of the film, the mood shifts to suspense as Yusuf goes into hiding and we follow the intertwining strands that Jacir weaves into the story, all of them connected by an Ottoman-era gun that Rabab finds and hides. There are moments here that recall Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, such as when a bomb explodes near the winding stairs of the Old City, or when the British colonial adviser Charles Tegart (Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham) delivers a speech about the difficulty of putting down insurgencies, in an echo of Col. Philippe Mathieu.

And yet for all the violence and horror of this period, Jacir manages to find room for the innocence of children, not just in Rabab’s daughter Afra but also her playmate Kareem, the son of the village priest, as well as the children playing in the Jewish settlement while their parents build homes.

Time passes. The descendants of the dispossessed farmers and poorly paid workers who rebelled in 1936 now mostly live in the West Bank in a set of enclaves connected by segregated roads, in the rubble of Gaza after a two-year campaign of genocide, or in exile across the world. But as James Baldwin once said, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

In narrating the Palestinian revolt, both Antonius and Jacir sought to draw lines to their present moment. Their works show us that whether it is Beirut in the 1980s or Gaza in the 2020s, the violence that flickers across our screens today has its roots in a colonial history that unfolded in the interwar period. Back then, the British Mandate shut down newspapers, set up checkpoints, imposed curfews, banned the keffiyeh, deported leaders, demolished houses, and confiscated lands. Yet it could not crush the Palestinian people’s demands for dignity and self-determination. Why should these same tactics, which Israel adopted after its founding, work any better? Even if one quibbles with some aspect or other of Antonius’s novel or Jacir’s film, the questions posed by their works of art remain—above all else: Should a people’s desire for freedom and dignity be forever met with violence and repression?

“We are living not only in the age of america but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.” So begins Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 work of literary criticism—now being republished by New York Review Books—in which he sets out to explain a few home truths about American culture through his Freudian analysis of the American novel. From that perspective, Fiedler begins, “our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent…almost juvenile.” “Why?” the reader might ask, and the answer is not long in coming: because “our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”

Throughout much of the Western world, at least since the 18th century, Fiedler elaborates, love has remained the novel’s central theme, much like “battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama.” In American fiction, however, for the female protagonist, love means getting married, while for the male protagonist, it means flight. The typical male hero is “a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman.” In short, “the moment at which Flaubert was dreaming Madame Bovary was the moment when Melville was finding Moby Dick.”

Fiedler had already begun to develop this thesis in his 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” in which he posited that, in direct relation to the American novelist’s fear of mature heterosexual relations, we have an enormous concentration on homoerotic relations between boys who never become men—a practice that Fiedler labels an “innocent homosexuality” and attributes to America’s ever-recurrent “dream of an escape from culture” into a permanent “renewal of youth.” This insight causes Fiedler to write many spectacular pages on some of our most legendary novelists, among them Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.

Love and Death appeared at a time when, due to a serious depletion of spirit throughout postwar Europe, US literature was riding high in the Western world. Everywhere, people who read, wrote, or reviewed books—and they were legion!—welcomed the infusion of literary energy alive in every kind of American writing. The 1950s alone had seen, among many other memorable titles, the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Invisible Man, and On the Road, as well as Fahrenheit 451, Charlotte’s Web, and Strangers on a Train.

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Fiedler’s book landed like a bombshell in the place where opinion on culture and literature meet, which at the time felt significant. Everyone under the sun—those who read and those who didn’t—seemed to have a response to it. Although, in the main, those responses were negative—Fiedler was seen as an intellectual vulgarian possessed by an idée fixe, someone whose Freudian takes knew no bounds, and who was writing to shock, not to illuminate—Love and Death was nonetheless impossible to dismiss. For starters, the depth and breadth of its erudition—it seemed to trace the development of novels from the beginning of time—was in itself a marvel; and then there was its sheer readability. Throughout his career, Fiedler was at (often pugnacious) pains to insist that although he’d been teaching for a good 40 years, he was a writer, not an academic; and indeed, although Love and Death is wildly overwritten—the book weighs in at 500-odd pages—and its tone is uniformly aggressive, most of its sentences, unlike those in academic writing, go down like ice cream. These two elements alone brought on a fury of critical challenge.

By 1960, the authority of the independent literary critic—typified by writers like Edmund Wilson—was in severe decline, as everyone in literature seemed to be working in academia. Yet it was still a time of high book culture, and critics of every kind, whether they damned him or applauded him, were at pains to prove themselves as erudite as Fiedler. One of the most interesting of these critiques appeared in Commentary magazine. In an immensely long pair of reviews, one critic, Paul Levine, reviled Fiedler’s book as an assassination of the American imagination, unforgivably reductive, and in the end “boring rather than shocking,” while another, Benjamin DeMott, agreed with many of these complaints—he referred to Fiedler’s Huck Finn essay as an example of “muckraking irreverence”—but concluded that Love and Death was filled with literary glories. Even if the “general bent” of Fiedler’s criticism tempted many readers to regard him as “a Freudian exhibitionist capable of amusing or shocking but unworthy of respect,” DeMott argued, such a conclusion was simply wrong. Fiedler’s main subject was not the “fear of sex” in American literature but the “fear of the loss of [one’s] humanity, the self—wholeness.” At the heart of the myth Fiedler was describing was “a human figure afraid of losing either his right or his capacity to speak out of the center of his being.” (Get the uniform use of he?) The book, DeMott concludes, has “major achievements to its credit…. It offers an imaginative, unified view of our literature and history which defines qualities of American character that even the novelist himself has had difficulty naming.” Reviews like this established Fiedler as a major figure in the growing discipline of psychoanalytic lit crit.

I was in graduate school, majoring in British and American literature, when Love and Death was published; for me and my friends, the book spoke a language we welcomed with open arms.

These were years when I was constantly being told that I talked about characters in books as though they were real people, and now we were in the presence of a literary interpretation that was giving us back the world as many of us were beginning to suspect it really was: a world of women and men with a long history of making instrumental use of one another. Certainly the book revealed our own intimate relations as attachments compromised by sexual fear, social conflict, and massive self-deception.

With the publication of Love and Death, we foresaw a different future for literary culture in particular and social history in general. After this book, many of us thought, who would dare either blush or bristle at the mention of Freud or object vociferously to a Freudian interpretation of a literary text? We hoped as well that Fiedler’s jeremiad against American literature’s devotion to emotional immaturity would influence writers for generations to come, as alas it has not. (Philip Roth, anyone?)

The world in which Love and Death was written is long gone. The book’s intellectual structure is now less than electrifying, and liberationist movements have brought about a revolution in novel writing. Even the move away from the novel of conventional realism to modernist interiority could not have predicted the further development of the transgressive novels being written today by gay, feminist, and Black writers. Certainly the traditional novel of heterosexual seduction “from Clarissa to Marjorie Morningstar” no longer signifies, and many of Fiedler’s analytic interpretations have become the conventional wisdom. Still, rereading the book today, some 60 years after its publication, has given me a nasty jolt, recollecting as it does an insight I’ve felt pierced by many times before and now found myself feeling pained by anew. In essence, it was the way literature can illuminate, even embody, the historical gap between a culture’s recognition of a social injustice and its active deployment of the will to correct it. Revisiting Love and Death reminds me of one of the first moments when I experienced this insight viscerally while reading a book. The book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I read for the first time as a grown woman, and the insight came when I realized that the New Orleans slaver Augustine St. Clare was the key figure in the story.

St. Claire is the Ashley Wilkes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Intelligent, wealthy, and educated, he knows that slavery condemns Southern culture to hell everlasting yet cannot bring himself to endorse abolition. St. Claire is a man whose sensibility is undone by a crucial absence of will. He sees clearly the existential horror of one man owning another, but at the same time he dreads the disruption of life that is sure to follow abolition. In the end, he’d rather live with slavery than risk social chaos. Through Stowe’s powerful rendering of this character, we see clearly why it can—and usually does—take centuries to bridge the gap between a society’s knowing that a thing is evil and acquiring the urgency necessary to fight it. This realization struck me anew while rereading Love and Death.

Throughout the book, with novelist after novelist, Fiedler—in nailing his thesis about American literature’s infantilism—makes repeated use of the fact that our writers struggle to put a living, breathing woman on the page. In fact, he tracks their misogyny up to the 1940s and ’50s, when the proletarian thriller—as written by authors like Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane—displayed a hatred of women so raw that Fiedler describes the genre as “undressing its bitches, surveying them with a surly and concupiscent eye before punching, shooting, or consigning them to the gas-chamber.”

It’s not that Fiedler is something of a feminist himself; he is not. There are next to no female writers in sight in Love and Death, no Edith Wharton or Flannery O’Connor or Shirley Jackson—no one. Instead, he sees the absence of real-life women in our fiction for the literary retardant it is and makes critical use of its fallout. In this regard, Fiedler’s work is somewhat companionate with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer to whom he pays his most brilliant attention.

The women in many of Hawthorne’s novels, Fiedler tells us, are divided between the Fair Maiden and the Dark Lady, with the Fair Maiden serving as the respectable female protagonist, while the Dark Lady is the bold outlier whose transgression provides the story with its necessary conflict. Together, the Maiden and the Lady work to embody and dramatize Hawthorne’s central intention: to explore the fractured human psyche up against life as we live it as opposed to life as it feels.

The darkest of Hawthorne’s Dark Ladies is Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. She is beautiful, intelligent, independently wealthy, and a driven feminist, outspoken in her resentment of the devastating inequality under which women labor. “Did you ever see a happy woman?” Zenobia asks at one point. “How can she be happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?” Hawthorne lets Zenobia speak so vividly for herself that it’s hard to believe she won’t prevail. But alas, she has thwarted Hawthorne’s moral code too dangerously—that is, she’s no longer a virgin—and thus, as Fiedler writes, “For having sinned in the flesh” without repenting, “Zenobia must…die, the victim of her own despair.”

On the basis of the speeches that Hawthorne puts in Zenobia’s mouth, one would think he was sympathetic to the cause of women’s liberation. But no—he’s only using Zenobia to illuminate, in Fiedler’s words, “a mind which has been condemned to live outside the law and society itself.” He’s actually repelled by the “emancipated ladies of his own time” and intent only on their predicament as an embodiment of humanity’s treacherous self-division. But here’s his saving grace for Fiedler: While “punishing and mocking” the feminists, Hawthorne—and this is most important—“still sees the situation clearly.” Ah, I thought, I want more on this, but there was no more. He “sees the situation clearly”: That was enough for Hawthorne and, I couldn’t help thinking, enough for Fiedler, too. It was then that I recalled St. Claire and identified my own growing unease with Love and Death itself. From here on in, the reader is free to challenge my every sentence. What follows is based not on anything I know, only on something I feel.

Love and Death is a book that aimed to throw a strong light on the self-deceptions of American culture then in evidence, with a special emphasis placed on the depth of its misogyny. Since that misogyny was abundantly available in everyday life in 1960, there was no need, Fiedler’s tone of voice seemed to be saying, to get unduly excited about it. After all, he wasn’t here to militate on behalf of women’s emancipation; he was here to show the reader how sexism worked in American fiction. And, in fact, I found that tone of Fiedler’s—its surprising neutrality—rather pleasing on this score. He was giving the plight of women its due, no more, no less, and that was fine with me.

In time, however, as the 500-odd pages of Love and Death made their stately way forward, and the sexism was repeatedly made use of and examined in an evenhanded way, Fiedler’s neutral tone began to lose its charm for me, became in fact wearisome. I began to want something more than neutrality, some exasperation actually; without exasperation, there could be no urgency, and suddenly I wanted urgency on behalf of the women being made literary use of. All in a moment, Love and Death began to feel oppressive.

In 1960, countless men and women knew that sexism was an evil, but at the same time, everyone could still live with it. Apparently, Fiedler—nothing if not a man of his time, just as St. Claire was a man of his—could also live with it. Therein lies the strength and the limitation of this famous, still exciting book, whose author stopped at seeing the situation clearly. Love and Death in the American Novel was definitely at one with its moment—a moment that had much to recommend it but was one many of us, wanted—and still want—to see pass.

In 1965, The American Scholar published an essay on morality by Joan Didion. As a matter of substance, what she turned in was not compelling—at least not to those of us who believe, contra Didion, that it is possible to discern good and evil in the world with reference to principles that lie beyond “the social code” of the societies we happen to live in. But as a matter of craft, it proved to be a fine and memorable piece of writing. “At least some of the time,” Didion wrote, “the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch,” and in those instances, the dictates of her conscience directed her to a vantage point somewhere near Los Alamos, New Mexico, looking out at the mushroom clouds of atom-bomb tests, “praying,” as Norman Mailer’s character Marion Faye does in The Deer Park, “as if for rain… ‘let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink.’”

We cannot know for certain what Didion would have made of the current state of American politics. But the spirit of that passage is present in the kinds of cynical remarks one hears all the time now—for instance, the line that, with this administration’s having established that a long-suffering people may be unilaterally liberated by a well-targeted airstrike, we should hope that the United States is next in line for regime change. Because morality is real, we’re better off not indulging this kind of thinking. But what if we really could—peaceably—start afresh? What kinds of democratic institutions would we build, and what would we expect of them? Whether one believes that working our way to a full national reset is plausible or not, revisiting our democratic intuitions and aspirations—and what “democracy” is to begin with—can help us understand the present sources of our political dysfunction and inform the development of practical solutions for the future.

Over the course of the past decade, few people in the world of democratic theory have worked harder to challenge those intuitions than Yale University’s Hélène Landemore. Her latest work, Politics Without Politicians, is a précis of the arguments she has developed in a series of texts for academic presses and a variety of more public engagements, including a 2020 profile in The New Yorker that gives this book its name. “Landemore,” Nathan Heller wrote at the time, “has spent much of her career trying to understand the value and meaning of democracy. In recent years, she has been part of a group of academics, many of them young, trying to solve the problem of elected democratic representation—addressing flaws in a system that is widely believed to be no problem at all.”

The solution to the flaws of electoral representation that Landemore presents in Politics Without Politicians is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever. “Electoral democracy is beyond repair,” she declares. “A system based on electoral representation is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.” Instead, she argues, we the people should finally take it upon ourselves to rule directly.

That message has drawn the praise of luminaries from Lawrence Lessig to Thomas Piketty. “This thought-provoking book,” Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has declared, “argues that the solution to dwindling support for our political institutions is more democracy, not less.” It is truly unfortunate that the book does no such thing. Read carefully and within the context of Landemore’s other work, Politics Without Politicians instead makes the case that we must rescue the democratic idea by wringing the democracy out of it. Landemore’s proposals really would disempower the politicians. But they would also, just as surely, disempower you.

Few who pick up Landemore’s book will disagree with its opening premise: that liberal democracy, by the lights of perhaps most in the West, isn’t going very well at the moment. “Consider,” she writes, “that in three of the world’s so-called most advanced democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—over two thirds of the population think their governing elites are corrupt…. In both the United States and France, large majorities think their political system needs drastic changes. Sixty-three percent of Americans express little confidence in the future of the political system, and 56 percent of the French want a Sixth Republic.” Their frustrations are legitimate, Landemore adds: “When political scientists crunch the numbers, they find that the preferences of rich people shape policy outcomes and law substantially more than those of the majority do.” And that reality is largely overshadowed by the rubbish and refuse heaped upon us by the political media, which is given to covering “the horse race, the scandals, the strategizing, the posturing, and rarely—at best superficially—the substance of issues.”

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These criticisms aren’t novel, and most books on the state of democracy tend to offer an equally familiar set of diagnoses and prescriptions to address them. But Landemore names and dismisses them immediately. “We could blame these problems on external factors and forces, such as globalization, capitalism, the fast-paced changes brought by new technologies, foreign threats, or immigration—all of which undeniably make the job of governing at the scale of a nation-state quite difficult,” she writes. “But excuses can only go so far. Chronic underperformance and widespread dissatisfaction with the system—along with a growing retreat from it—should make one thing clear: There’s a fundamental problem with the system itself.”

As she tells it, that’s a conclusion that she reached only fitfully and painfully. “Like many people, I initially blamed empirical, external factors for the increasingly glaring inefficiencies and injustices of the system. My thinking was remedial: How can we improve the system without fundamentally changing it?” So she cycled her way through the standard remedies of most democratic-reform agendas—fixing campaign financing, elevating women and minorities, improving civic education, and all the rest—before landing on an idea that many voters have arrived at without the benefit of advanced degrees in political science. It was the damned politicians, Landemore realized, who were actually the problem. The clowns in Congress—indeed, in any elected office anywhere—really are wealthier and worse than the rest of us. And they govern us poorly in the service of their own interests rather than the interests of their voters or the common good. “Not only do politicians not generate optimal laws and policies,” Landemore writes, “they often do not even give us what we want, which—whether good or bad—one might expect in a democracy.”

Research also suggests that politicians are most likely to give voters what they want when their desires happen to align with those of the wealthy. Even in countries to the economic left of the United States, such as Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, Landemore observes, “policies and laws are more responsive to the preferences of rich voters and economic groups.” Electoral politics, she concludes, is oligarchic by design—not just because inequality is rising, and not just because the wealthy have more resources to throw into politics, but also because elections select for the kind of people likeliest to be rich. “Elections thrive on the ability of individuals to stand out and compete,” Landemore writes. “They oversample and empower the extroverted, the confident, and the downright arrogant and entitled.” In fact, she says, extrapolating from the work of the political scientist Brian Klaas, they oversample psychopaths, who “are characterized, among other things, by an overconfidence in their own judgment, which, if anything, seems a job requirement in electoral politics.”

As persuasive as all this might sound to readers fed up with the noise and nonsense of our politics, many will come to Politics Without Politicians with a fair question in mind: What democratic alternatives to politicians and elections do we realistically have? For Landemore, our best option remains a form of governance used most famously in the ancient world—sortition. Like the city-state of Athens well over 2,000 years ago, which had a legislative assembly open to all adult male citizens and appointed them to public office by lottery, we should be represented and governed by ordinary people, chosen at random:

Imagine hundreds of everyday people from all around the country, from every age and walk of life, all selected by a national lottery. They come together for extended periods of time in a parliament-like institution to deliberate and decide ways to address the housing crisis or the opioid crisis, or how to do something about gun regulation. They are paid for their time and all their expenses are covered. Their deliberations are enriched by input from the larger population and by the support of experts and civil servants. Their recommendations either feed into the legislative process, are sent to a referendum, or become law.

Landemore goes to great lengths to prove that this idea isn’t as quixotic as it might seem at first. For starters, assemblies very similar to what she describes are already being tried out around the world: As of 2023, more than 700 “deliberative minipublics” of ordinary people have been convened in over 50 countries. “These randomly selected bodies are used to generate ideas, policy recommendations, and, in some cases, legislative proposals,” she explains. “They consistently demonstrate that, under the right conditions, ordinary citizens are capable of informed deliberation, reasoned judgment, and even competent lawmaking. In fact, evidence shows they perform as well as, or better than, professional politicians in many respects.”

Political and social scientists have lent this supposition some empirical support in recent decades, and Landemore has drawn substantially from the research of the University of Michigan’s Scott E. Page. “In his book The Difference,” she explains,

he shows how, under certain conditions, it is more useful for a group trying to solve a difficult problem to include people who think very differently from one another relative to the problem at hand, rather than to include only the smartest people, who are likely to think similarly (because, say, they went to the same elite school). To crack a code, for example, it could be more useful to have a mathematician, a poet, and a linguist working together, rather than three top mathematicians.

Even Aristotle, a critic of democracy, seemed to acknowledge this dynamic as one of democracy’s main advantages, Landemore adds: “The importance of the cognitive diversity found in larger numbers of deliberators is arguably why Aristotle claimed in the Politics that democracy had the superiority of a potluck dinner, which can never disappoint, compared to feasts organized by one person only, which can go awry if the host’s tastes are too specific, however refined.”

More than anything else, that metaphor implies that Landemore—like Aristotle, evidently—has been remarkably lucky with potlucks. But the allusion she makes to the film 12 Angry Men is perhaps more convincing. In it, 11 jurors voting to convict a man on trial for murder are carefully prodded and challenged by a lone holdout and gradually draw enough insights from their own diverse experiences and perspectives to conclude that they ought to acquit the defendant instead. “It’s not one man against all,” Landemore writes. “It’s all of these men, flawed and complex as they are, helping one another figure out the truth of the matter.” This kind of deep discussion and intimate persuasion, she adds, is easiest in small groups—a democratic electorate of many thousands or millions can’t talk things out in the same way. This is where sortition, or selection by lot, comes in. Randomly choosing members of the public for representative bodies, Landemore argues, would allow small groups that mirror the public and its diversity to debate and deliberate on issues in ways that the public at large cannot. Imagine, basically, the respondents to a political poll gathering in person to actually talk things out, with some help from facilitators guiding the discussions and experts brought in to inform them.

Again, this idea has already been put to the test, including, Landemore notes, in her native France, where “minipublics” have been thrust to the center of national politics in the past decade as part of the Great National Debate project that President Emmanuel Macron launched in 2019 in response to the yellow-vest movement then roiling the country. That initial foray was followed by the Citizens’ Convention for Climate, also in 2019, and the Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life in 2022 and 2023. Such assemblies “make room for one emotion that is vanishingly rare in politics as we know it: love—specifically civic love,” Landemore writes. That love is “instrumental” to the very nature of these experiments, “allowing everyone, including the shy, to contribute their views.”

To its credit, Politics Without Politicians assembles quite a lot of evidence, empirical and anecdotal, that minipublics are useful and even inspiring bodies that prove ordinary people can play a meaningful role in the crafting of public policy. But Landemore is making a larger, more audacious argument: Electoral representation is so fatally flawed that government by minipublic should replace politicians and elections altogether. The ideal democratic government, she explains, would consist of “a central agenda-setting and legislative chamber based on lot,” while also allowing the public to vote on “relatively frequent referenda” of ambiguous authority. “My favored system thus does away with politicians entirely,” she writes, “by centering a large parliament-like assembly of randomly selected citizens as the primary site of legislative power.”

Problematically, though, it’s politicians who would have to bring such a system about: “Reforms and changes will have to happen through them and with their help,” Landemore acknowledges. That’s an awkward conclusion to land on, given how unequivocally the book begins: Politicians, she insists at the outset, constitute a “political class that is homogeneous along too many dimensions to govern well and justly,” and are exceedingly unlikely to act for the common good. If that’s the case, how plausible is it that we can elect politicians who are selfless and noble enough to disempower themselves and transform democratic governance as Landemore recommends? And if it really is plausible, doesn’t that suggest we can simply elect politicians decent enough to govern well in the first place?

Landemore’s certainty that we can’t drives the book. And many of her readers, understandably, will come to share her pessimism—enough so that they might fail to notice that Landemore’s project is the obliteration of democratic rights. In the ideal system she hopes to see, the ability to vote for one’s representatives or to seek public office would be eliminated. And the “possibility of doing the governing yourself ” through sortition, in her words, would clearly be very remote in a country like the United States, for instance—with an adult population of roughly 270 million people, it would be extremely unlikely that any given person would be randomly selected for a national assembly small enough to allow for deep deliberations. Landemore points out that we might have better luck being chosen for a state or local assembly, but representation clearly isn’t fungible in the ways that she implies—the chance to have a say on a local bike lane isn’t a substitute for the chance to have a say on whether we go to war or reform the American healthcare system.

In the end, Landemore’s hope is that democratic government by consent, as conventionally understood—the distribution of some formal political power to all citizens in a given society on the basis of “one person, one vote”—might be replaced someday with a system that “distributes power…on the basis of ‘one person, one lottery ticket,’” given the fact that all citizens would have at least a nominal chance of being chosen for her assemblies. But a losing lottery ticket, of course, is just a piece of paper—arguing that assemblies distribute power even to those who aren’t selected for them is akin to saying that Mega Millions makes everyone who buys a ticket richer.

Conceptually, the fact that most people wouldn’t end up in one of Landemore’s assemblies is also supposed to be offset by the representativeness of the chosen few. With some careful statistical work and algorithms, she argues, each assembly could reflect the demographic characteristics of the wider population as closely as possible. You might not be in the assembly or able to choose who is, the bulk of the public will be told, but someone close to your demographic profile will be there saying and doing things similar to what you probably would have said and done.

While this is the principle at work when survey researchers attempt to take snapshots of raw public opinion through samples in polls, the implication that people who share the same race, gender, or class are functionally interchangeable for the purposes of democratic representation discounts the role that individual personalities, judgments, and experiences would be sure to play in actual political debates within these assemblies. Two people of the same overall demographic profile might behave quite differently in a debate, and might have vastly different experiences, hold different worldviews, or respond to arguments and information in different ways. What’s more, one cohort of assembly members might contain more individuals with direct knowledge of a given subject than another that could have been drawn. One side of an argument might be better represented by more charismatic, eloquent people in one potential cohort than in another. Because of all this, two different randomly chosen assemblies, told to discuss and debate the same subject or policy, might reach two different conclusions. Which one would truly represent the public at large?

Given the magnitude of these and other dilemmas that sortition poses—the privileges that deliberative spaces afford those with the time, resources, and physical ability to deliberate at length; the power that biased moderators or administrators might wield over the assemblies—the strength of the case that Landemore initially made against politicians and elections is worth revisiting. To begin with, the book’s assessment of electoral politics is built largely on stereotypes. “Close your eyes and picture in your head ‘a politician,’” she instructs early on. “What comes to mind? Chances are it’s someone in business dress (in the West, a power suit), speaking from a lectern, posing for pictures, cutting a ribbon, shaking hands, or kissing babies in a crowd.” That may well be the image that first comes to mind for most readers. But even in the United States, politically benighted as we may be, many if not most of our politicians aren’t really the handshaking, baby-kissing kind. There are more than 90,000 elective bodies in this country across all levels of government, comprising (by one 2012 count) more than 500,000 elected officials, from the tiny but well-known coterie of politicians in Washington all the way down to the many thousands of school-board members, county administrators, and other far less prominent officials serving, largely anonymously, in our mind-numbing jumble of municipal districts and jurisdictions.

It is true, as Landemore suggests, that wealthier Americans tend to dominate politics at all levels. But the actual electoral landscape in America does complicate Landemore’s account. “While an ‘ordinary’ person might eventually make it in electoral politics, a shy person never will,” she claims. “They hate posing for pictures, shaking hands with strangers, asking for money, pretending to have levels of knowledge they do not possess, and vying for attention amid a shouting match. You will not catch a shy person shamelessly self-promoting on camera. Indeed, you will simply never catch a shy person seeking power if that power can only be accessed through public-facing elections.” But does one really need a megawatt smile, debate-team bravado, and a willingness to stop for selfies to win a seat on a local sanitation board?

And as maddening as politicians often are, it’s also not obvious that sortition produces better policy outcomes. For instance, Landemore herself describes the proposals produced by the citizens’ climate convention in France as not “better than” but rather “comparable to what could have come out of a parliament.” Ideally, the ordinary citizens of the climate convention would have outperformed government by elected “psychopaths” significantly. Similarly, readers are told that an effort to have Iceland’s citizens draft a new constitution produced a document that was “not strikingly better,” but “better in ways that are crucial,” to the drafts written by experts, even though it’s not clear what makes the provisions that Landemore cites—a proposal that Iceland’s parliament should decide the status of the national church and a longer list of citizens’ rights—objectively better, beyond the fact that she agrees with them.

Yet the idea that there might be objectively correct answers to most political questions has been central to Landemore’s thought. An “independent standard of correctness,” she writes in her 2012 book Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, “is the condition of possibility of any normative thinking about politics.” And democracy’s knowledge-producing or “epistemic” qualities, like the cognitive diversity of the public, she believes, should help us discover them—indeed, Democratic Reason, like much of Landemore’s work, implies that democracy would be irrational absent those qualities. “As long as democracy is interpreted as the rule of the dumb many, it seems hardly justifiable (if not legitimate) as a collective decision rule,” she writes. The concept of cognitive diversity, in Landemore’s view, saves democracy from its critics: Given that diversity, democracy can be understood and defended as “a political system capable of turning the input of not-so-smart citizens into relatively intelligent decisions.”

But as useful as cognitive diversity might be for solving certain kinds of problems and answering certain kinds of questions, jurors deciding whether an accused murderer is guilty are engaged in a fundamentally different kind of task than deciding whether a nation should have a death penalty, what immigration policy would be best, or, for that matter, whether there should be a national church and what kind of relationship it should have with the government. While hard facts should inform our political debates, for many or most of the issues we face in politics, deciding what to do isn’t simply a matter of discovering the policies that are neutrally and unambiguously right. Obviously, people often disagree profoundly about how to evaluate which policies are correct in the first place—including well-informed wonks and academics with the same data and research at hand.

This is both the challenge and the point of democratic politics: We have conflicting values that can’t be proven right or wrong by the same means that facts can, and a multitude of competing interests that have to be adjudicated or reconciled. Democracy allows us to work through these tensions and come to collective decisions through a process of fair contestation—without surrendering our agency to some class of elites or betters supposedly possessed of all the right answers and the benevolence to act in our collective interest. While Landemore concedes in Democratic Reason that her model of democracy isn’t suited to some societies—in Lebanon, she muses, “a country deeply divided on religious and cultural fronts[,] the degree of value pluralism is such that it probably makes it impossible for the epistemic properties of democracy to be expressed”—she remains optimistic that the crises of contemporary American politics are, largely, information problems.

A lot of apparent “value pluralism”—for example, the disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the legitimate size of government—can arguably be explained by a disagreement about facts. This disagreement about the facts of the world leads to a disagreement about political principles that are dependent on these facts. At the bottom, however, both Democrats and Republicans may share a common core of basic normative principles.

But that reading of our politics is contestable at best. The last quarter-century of American life—and the last decade in particular—suggests that it is at least as likely that Democrats and Republicans disagree about how the world actually works, because they disagree about how it should work, as well as about the kind of society that the United States should be. Even to the extent that we do disagree about the facts themselves, both a wealth of political-science research and recent political events tell us that we often do so because the facts are colored, distorted, or obscured by the sources of information we trust and by cultural and ideological presuppositions that shape how we receive information. This is an existential problem not only for democracy in America but for democracy’s prospects in any large and diverse society. And though there are ways we might improve our political debates and information environments, it’s really not a problem that can plausibly be solved. Instead, we should understand it as an ongoing struggle—the price we pay for the ability to collectively choose our own ends rather than having them foisted on us.

It is not clear that Landemore agrees. One of the passages in Politics Without Politicians that is likely to stay with attentive readers appears early in the book, as Landemore details the flaws of electoral representation. “The fact is that any selection mechanism for representatives based on human choice (and in fact any selection mechanism other than random selection) will have inegalitarian consequences,” she writes. “Why is that? Because human choice is inherently discriminatory and homogenizing.”

Beyond the question of whether this is true, the claim is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it undermines Landemore’s case for sortition—if she’s right, would the choices made by the humans managing and participating in Landemore’s system of assemblies and referendums be any less discriminatory and homogenizing? The second is that Landemore has taken a serious interest in AI.

Her 2024 paper “Can AI Bring Deliberative Democracy to the Masses?,” for instance, explores the roles that AI might serve in sortition assemblies, from fact-checking and “providing accurate information in real time” to substantively organizing the ideas and arguments raised. “An AI algorithm,” Landemore offers, could “track the arch of the conversations,” perhaps using the metrics of a “Discourse Quality Index,” and inform the participants when the number of new and worthwhile ideas in their discussions drops. “If quality drops,” she explains, “AI may need to step up its facilitator or fact-checking functions or bring in a human supervisor.”

Unlike Politics Without Politicians, this paper also contains an estimate of what proportion of a given society would ideally participate in the assemblies that Landemore envisions. “The cut-off point would probably be somewhere between the 1.5 percent participation rate of the Great National Debate, which seems too little, and 50 percent of the population, which seems too large to be realistic,” she writes. “I could see a case made for a threshold as low as 10 to 15 percent. In other words, as long as 10 to 15 percent of the population ends up being enrolled in randomly selected assemblies rotated a sufficient number of times, we might have met the legitimacy threshold for mass deliberation.” This, then, is democracy perfected: a system in which most power would be vested in randomly selected, rotating assemblies, comprising perhaps as little as 10 percent of a given population, deliberating under the careful moderation of not discriminatory and homogenizing human beings, but neutrally engineered artificial-intelligence systems programmed to keep their wards on the path toward optimal and correct policy solutions.

Landemore is a democratic theorist in the deliberative tradition, a school that came to prominence in the 1980s and ’90s with the belief—significantly influenced by the work of the recently departed Jürgen Habermas—that democracy could be made both more just and more rational by improving how we communicate. These theorists have devoted an unprecedented amount of attention not only to the nature of the communicative environments where we democratically decide what we believe and what we want, but also to the obligations we might have, to one another and to ourselves, to explain and justify what we believe and what we want as best we can.

Their contributions to our understanding of democracy have been vital, and Landemore, for her part, is surely right that cognitive diversity matters. But democratic politics cannot be reduced to the process of accessing a superior intelligence. While we should all want a more reasoned and intelligent public discourse, paternalistically shrinking that discourse to a size that allows it to be managed by experts and software is a nonsolution—a remedy that wrings all the democracy out of democracy.

Why? Because whatever else it is, democracy is most fundamentally a way to harness collective power over the vicissitudes of our circumstances and the depredations of those in society who hope to dominate us. And as despicable as the politicians who loom largest in the public mind may be, democracy cannot work without the choosing of representatives. The very act of deciding who among us might be the best stewards of our values and interests forces us—as many of us as the ballot can reach, not a fraction of a fraction of the governing public in a particular room or place—to take stock of what our values and interests are and give accounts of them. It is the only means by which most of us—who cannot always be in the streets and cannot spend all of our time poring over budgets and bills—can come together to decide, authoritatively, who we are and what kind of society we’d like to live in.

As rendered in Politics Without Politicians, sortition, as an alternative, reads like a caricature of liberal technocracy devised by the demagogues she urges her readers to reject—those who have convinced much of the public, here in America and elsewhere, that democracy, as conceived and defended by out-of-touch elites, is nothing more than an instrument of control. A few months ago, Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp, who studied under Habermas in the 1990s, penned a pitying remembrance of him in Politico. Habermas, Karp wrote, “believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse. I believed, and still believe, such a discourse must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” These two visions are now driving American politics. We are asked to choose daily between the “more corporeal and traditional” delusions and evils of Karp’s and Donald Trump’s fascism and what remains of the dream that, in Habermas’s words, the “unforced force of the better argument” may finally prevail someday. But there is another possibility available to us: an understanding of democracy built from the conviction that we can improve our lives and societies not only by appeals to reason but through political organization and mobilization in the defense of principles that are not reducible to matters of demonstrable fact. There are people who believe in the value of human choice and people who do not. There are people who believe in the dignity and worth of all human beings and those who—out of prejudice or for profit—are working to undermine the idea that there is anything of significance about the human being as such. And those of us who bear existential and not merely instrumental commitments to democracy and the continued development of human agency will only prevail if we present democracy as an ideal that can genuinely empower us anew—ideally, on a sounder and surer basis than “one person, one lottery ticket.” Anything less risks, among other things, driving the masses further into the arms of our worst politicians.

For many years, Angie Nixon has led the charge against the nefarious schemes of Florida Republicans to ban books that present an unfiltered history of the United States. This fight is just a part of what makes the Democratic state legislator an inspiring candidate for the US Senate. But it strikes us as a qualification that deserves special note at a time when the right to read is under attack. As we publish The Nation’s Fall Books issue, we’re thinking a lot about the role that books play in opening up this country’s discourse.

We value texts that reflect on the injustices of the past and the present—and that amplify activism to remedy those injustices. But there are plenty of right-wing politicians who see a threat in books that provide a full picture of the struggle for a more perfect union.

Florida has in recent years been ground zero in the battle over the freedom to read. And Angie Nixon has bravely stood on the right side of history. Long before she won a surprise victory in the Florida Democratic Senate primary on August 19—and, because of her progressive positions and membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, suddenly became a national figure—Nixon started a bookstore in her hometown of Jacksonville that puts banned books front and center on the shelves. In so doing, she offered a contemporary expression of what Frederick Douglass described as “a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom” that has always animated the greatest of American activists and leaders. The story of her bookstore, Café Resistance, is one of courage and words-into-deeds action, and it gets to the heart of how Democrats should position themselves in the so-called culture wars that Republicans always gin up at election time. Instead of cowering, Democrats should take a cue from Nixon’s inspired efforts to embrace and celebrate historically marginalized and oppressed peoples.

Nixon stepped up four years ago, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was laying the groundwork for his failed 2024 presidential campaign with initiatives designed to position him as his party’s most ardent critic of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Florida branch of the ACLU complained that DeSantis “sought to censor Black history in classrooms and called slavery ‘beneficial’ for Black people.” The governor’s assault on the truth included advocacy for legislation that empowered local book-banning schemes and what PEN America Florida has described as “rampant free expression infringements in Florida.” These “speech-constricting laws, policies, and book bans,” PEN argues, advance an agenda with “very real consequences for students, educators, and the freedom to read in this state” and “have become a template for conservative activists and lawmakers behind the movement that has led to nearly 6,000 instances of book bans since 2021.”

Nixon offered an alternative template that defended, as she puts it, “the freedom for our children to learn true history and not have books banned for political purposes.” She was an outspoken foe of the book-banning legislation on the floor of the state House of Representatives, to which she was elected in 2020. And when the Republican majority rejected her arguments, Nixon started the bookstore and community hub. “In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1467, and Florida became the state with the most book bans in the country,” she says. “So I stocked the books they tried to pull off the shelves. And Café Resistance was born. They banned the truth, so we put it right here in the community: free tutoring, coffee, and the books they don’t want kids to read.”

That’s what the owners of independent bookstores do in urban neighborhoods and small cities and towns all over the country. They make their shops havens not merely for books and their authors (including Nixon, who has cowritten a children’s book with her daughter) but also for young readers, many of whom find a sense of possibility in books by and about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, and the 1619 Project. The same goes for public libraries and school libraries, where so many librarians have bravely stood up to the red-state politicians who attack the right to read—and the honest discourse that extends from that reading.

We imagine a good many shop clerks and librarians will be cheering Angie Nixon on, because the US Senate has enough establishment politicians. It could use a bookstore owner.

Iran has now been crushed, Trump says.
America has won that war.
He’s always on the winning side
If he’s the one who’s keeping score.

On a Monday in mid-April, I walked through the informal settlement in the Thapathali neighborhood of Kathmandu, situated on the banks of the sacred, flood-prone, and sewage-filled Bagmati River. The sights were familiar. I’d visited the decades-old community of about 150 poor and landless families two years earlier while reporting on riverside slums that were facing threats of forced eviction and increasingly frequent and ferocious floods.

This time I was just passing through, retracing a route through the Bagmati’s dense urban corridor, its riverfront alternating between informal settlements, high-end apartments, shiny office complexes, and sleekly designed parks with pedestrian paths beside the fouled river. The pricey new buildings often loom over the slum dwellings like a taunt.

There are many such informal settlements across the Kathmandu Valley’s chaotic urban sprawl, and they’re home to tens of thousands of people. Across the country, there are at least a million informal settlers. Many are internal migrants to the cities from rapidly depopulating rural districts, fleeing droughts, floods, landslides, and poverty. (Roughly one in five Nepalis live below the official poverty line of less than $1.50 a day.) Because these families occupy public property, the government and many Nepalis call them “squatters.”

That day in Thapathali, I paused to chat with a young father who stood in the doorway of his improvised home. Five days later, by the evening of April 25, that home and the entire Thapathali settlement—along with other settlements in Kathmandu Valley—were gone. On the orders of the recently elected prime minister, Balendra “Balen” Shah, bulldozers leveled the community, with thousands of armed security personnel, including national police and the Nepali Army, enforcing the evictions. The government gave the residents 24 hours’ notice—at most. Households scrambled to save what belongings they could. Thousands of people were moved to hastily prepared and ill-equipped temporary holding centers, where they waited for a promised resettlement plan. Many more simply fled, fearful of the authorities. In all, according to advocates for the landless, more than 2,800 households and close to 17,000 people were displaced. At least five people have died because of the evictions.

The razing of the riverside settlements was one of the first initiatives of Shah’s premiership. In March, he had swept into office on a wave of hope and change after last September’s Gen Z uprising and the ensuing violence. His Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) had won almost two-thirds of the vote in the snap elections—unprecedented in Nepal’s 30-year history of unstable parliamentary democracy—and then, in April, Shah exploited widespread anti-squatter (and anti-poor) sentiment for populist effect. As the mayor of Kathmandu from 2022 until this past winter, he had tried and failed to demolish the Thapathali settlement without regard for due process, but he was met with fierce resistance on the streets and, ultimately, was stopped by the High Court pending a government resettlement plan. This time, as prime minister, he moved with overwhelming force—and without any such plan.

The evictions dominated headlines and social media for weeks in April and May and were cheered by Shah’s middle-class fan base. But prominent members of Nepali civil society decried the campaign, calling out Shah’s “authoritarian” disregard for the rule of law and “grave violation of basic human rights.”

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What I saw from my vantage point was all of that and more. One of the justifications for the mass evictions, offered by Shah in a social-media post (his preferred means of communication), was to rescue the riverside residents from the deadly floods, as if he had only their welfare in mind—and not the real-estate developers eyeing the city’s riverfront. What I saw, in other words, was the fraught intersection of climate change, social justice, and human rights. To be sure, the people of these riverside communities should be moved out of harm’s way and provided safe and secure housing—but only through a legal process, established under Nepali and international law, of consultation and mutually agreed-upon resettlement options, with plenty of notice before eviction. Not bulldozers at dawn and decades-old neighborhoods reduced to rubble and the debris of precarious lives.

There is a tendency among advocates, especially in the Global North, to talk about global climate justice in terms that are abstract and idealized, disconnected from the social and political realities within specific countries. In Nepal, efforts to implement meaningful climate-adaptation policies at scale have long been stymied not only by a lack of money and institutional capacity but by the political instability and endemic corruption of the revolving coalition governments ruled by the three major legacy parties for the past three decades. The political earthquake in September, combined with the RSP’s election sweep in March, seemed to offer the possibility of a new era—a new generation of leaders who might transform Nepal’s governance and make real progress. But the reality is far more complicated.

If “climate justice” is to mean anything in places like Nepal, where catastrophe is already unfolding, it will depend as much on conditions on the ground as on the amount of funding for adaptation and climate-related “loss and damage” that may or may not materialize through the United Nations and other geopolitical processes. Climate justice will have to be fought for—and equality and human rights will have to be won—not only among countries but within them.

The week before Shah’s bulldozers rolled into the riverside settlements, I sat with two landless women in the informal settlement on the Manohara River, near Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. The women, members of Nepal’s Dalit community (that is, “untouchables”), told me about their struggles, not least with water—both flooding and scarcity.

The elder of the two, 67-year-old Shanti Devi, migrated from western Nepal and had lived in the community for more than 20 years. She spoke about purchasing drinking water in large jugs, while those who can’t afford them queue up at 4 am at the free public water tap 45 minutes away. “You have to wait for three to four hours,” she said. “There used to be a large amount of water; now it is only a small amount.” The younger woman, Karun, a 31-year-old mother of two, told me about a flood three years ago that inundated her home: “Everything was lost—the children’s books, clothes, food—because of the huge mud inside the house.” It took 15 days to clean out the house with the help of neighbors, while family members fell ill with fevers and skin ailments. “I was only able to save my life and my children’s lives,” she said.

When I asked Karun what she thought of Shah and the new government, she was surprisingly sanguine. “We are hopeful that he is not going to evict us,” she said, unaware of what was to come. “If the government evicts us, where will we go? How will we survive?”

Nepal is among the foremost places on earth where some of humanity’s poorest and most marginalized are living on a knife-edge of climate breakdown and sociopolitical polycrisis. That describes much of the Global South, of course, but Nepal is uniquely situated not only geopolitically, between India and China, but geographically, as the central and iconic Himalayan nation, where the Indo-Gangetic Plain transitions into the Himalayan foothills. Indeed, the plains and hills make up most of Nepal’s territory and are home to the vast majority of its roughly 30 million people (a population about the size of Texas’s or Venezuela’s).

The Nepali people now face an accelerating climate emergency on multiple fronts. Disastrous river flooding is just one facet of it. With climate change, it’s always too much water or too little—and the latter is fast becoming Nepal’s new reality. From villages in the high Himalayas to urban and rural districts in the hills and plains, the country’s extreme vulnerability may soon reach an inflection point in the alarming water-scarcity crisis affecting much of the population.

Madhukar Upadhya is one of Nepal’s leading water and environmental experts. Writing in The Kathmandu Post, Nepal’s most widely read English-language daily, in the weeks leading up to the March election, he warned of “ever-escalating climate impacts” amplifying the daunting economic and social challenges at the root of the country’s political instability. “The earlier the aspiring leaders acknowledge that we are fast descending into this abyss of intersecting polycrisis—worsened by decades of performative politics—the greater our capacity to mobilize the much-needed collective action would be,” he writes.

I’ve met and spoken at length with Upadhya, who has worked on water and climate issues in the government and academia for three decades. When I reached out to him last winter about Nepal’s growing water crisis, he suggested that I visit the Panchkhal Valley, a major agricultural area amid the hills east of Kathmandu that has suffered severe water scarcity over the past decade or more.

The day I took a car out to Panchkhal in mid-April was warm and sunless, the air thick with the Kathmandu Valley’s notorious pollution. The smog combined with a dense soup of wildfire smoke from the west, and I could barely see the other side of the steep, narrow valleys as we ascended into the hills. Once in Panchkhal—the skies clearer but still hazy—we stopped at the small bridge over the Jhiku Khola, its principal river, now down to a trickle, its sandy bed mostly weeds and scattered pools of water.

Following a footpath between the fields beside the river, I saw that most were green with crops and new plantings, fed by irrigation water carried down ditches and pumped through long hoses. In recent years, farmers have resorted to digging deep pits in the dry riverbed from which to pump water into the parched nearby fields, but a farmer we met by the road told us that they were now using water stored on the low hill across the river. When I visited the municipality office down the road, a spokesman for the mayor’s office told me they had recently created rainwater-harvesting ponds on the hill. But I could see that many fields farther from the river lay fallow and dry, and on the steep slopes at the valley’s edges, most of the terraced fields, dependent entirely on rain and spring water, had been abandoned.

Upadhya, who has studied the Panchkhal Valley for decades, told me how he swam in the Jhiku Khola 20 years ago, when it was already in decline but still flowing. Here was a proud agricultural community that had once supplied the largest share of Kathmandu’s vegetables, Upadhya said, its future now uncertain. Food production, the valley’s primary source of income, has declined over the years, and according to the municipal spokesman, a proposed irrigation pipeline has yet to win government support.

In a remarkable series of articles over the past several years for The Kathmandu Post, Upadhya has tried to raise the alarm on the depth and scale of the water crisis—and of the climate crisis more broadly—and to rouse the country’s political class into action. Pointing to a recent UN report on the imminent threat of global “water bankruptcy” and its growing evidence in Nepal, Upadhya issued a grave warning: “What was thought of as a crisis—large-scale but manageable—has turned into a paradigm-shattering realization of irreversible bankruptcy on a planetary scale…a state where local hydrological systems have been pushed to the point of collapse.”

In Nepal, as in many other places, warming temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns have led not only to drier winters in large swaths of the country and increasing pre-monsoon droughts, but also to extreme downpours. “Instead of jhari,” Upadhya writes, using the Nepali term for low-intensity continuous rain, “monsoons are dominated by short-duration, high-intensity localized rain,” which increases flooding while at the same time reducing the recharge of groundwater, even as its depletion surges. A 2022 government survey of 6,500 households in every region of the country found that an eye-popping 43 percent of Nepalis have seen their local streams and rivulets dry up over the past 25 years. And when it comes to springs, 38 percent of Nepalis have seen them dry up completely, with 58 percent overall in the hills and more than 75 percent in the hardest-hit areas. That 38 percent “is more than a third of the population,” Upadhya told me. “So 10 million people have lost water sources already. That is serious.”

Last year, the monsoon arrived six weeks late in the plains, leading the government to declare a drought disaster in Madhesh, an ethnically and politically marginalized province (and Nepal’s second-most-populous) on the border with India, where the shallow hand-pumped wells ubiquitous among Madheshi households had already mostly dried up. By way of response, the government sent water tankers and proposed to drill more deep-boring wells, tapping into aquifers that have already been dangerously depleted. Food production took a major hit, with approximately 10 percent of Nepal’s rice-growing capacity in peril.

Upadhya questions the new government’s grasp of the situation and whether it “possesses the resolve to address it effectively. The hard truth,” he writes, “is that one cannot build a secure and prosperous future on an empty aquifer.”

Upadhya and other experts offer a familiar list of measures to address the crisis. Writing in the Nepali Times in May, Ngamindra Dahal, a hydrometeorologist at the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation, argues that water security is central to the country’s future. Protecting water sources, he writes, “calls for sustained investment in watershed conservation, recharge ponds, soil moisture retention and community-led spring management.” Even more so, the government “must stop treating water as a sector isolated from everything else.” Nepal cannot stop climate change—after all, it contributes just 0.1 percent of global greenhouse emissions—but responding to it, Dahal writes, means “treating springs, watersheds and local water systems not as peripheral environmental concerns, but as the foundation of national resilience.”

Over a long lunch in Kathmandu’s Gyaneshwor neighborhood, I asked Upadhya—who is now in his 70s and a gregarious talker with decades of stories from the field—what he sees as the most important things to be done at this point. “There are two things you have to understand,” he said. “Even if you can only stop groundwater from depleting further, that is an achievement.” Second, “water is a local thing, right? Very, very local. When it rains, it’s in a decentralized way, so you have to manage in a decentralized way. And only through community is it possible.”

As an example, Upadhya proposes mobilizing a nationwide grassroots effort, organized through high schools, to create tens of thousands of water-harvesting ponds throughout Nepal—and educate a new generation about water. “We need to create an army of people to understand water and then act accordingly,” he said. “Harvesting the rain, they’ll have practical, hands-on understanding of the hydrology at the ground level. When these students become leaders, you won’t have to tell them the problem of water.”

There is scant evidence that Shah’s administration and the RSP will prioritize the water crisis or Nepal’s advancing climate emergency—and on this issue, they are not much better than previous governments. In fact, the national budget presented by Finance Minister Swarnim Waglé in May deprioritizes climate action, as critics in the press have pointed out.

One of those critics is Sonia Awale, the editor of the Nepali Times and an accomplished climate reporter. When we met in Kathmandu, I asked her where climate fits into the new political landscape. One might think, given the way corruption and political instability were obstacles to climate policy under the old regime, that the RSP’s nearly two-thirds majority, its centrist technocratic reputation, and its promise of effective governance could translate into much-needed action.

“It’s a little too early,” Awale said, “but for the first time in I don’t know how many years, people in Nepal are generally hopeful about everything. So I am optimistic.” On climate specifically, “a lot of people [within the RSP] who have advocated along these lines are now policymakers themselves. But it has to be a priority of the leadership.” And at that level, she added, “I’m not seeing a lot of focus. The RSP’s 100-point agenda does not reflect environmental issues.” The government’s immediate priorities are the issues that swept it into office: ending corruption, reforming the bureaucracy, jump-starting the economy, and creating jobs to address Nepal’s massive out-migration of workers.

Even in the best case, I asked, if the RSP and the prime minister were to focus their minds on the urgency of, say, the water crisis—using it as a broad, unifying issue that touches the lives of nearly all Nepalis—and were able to implement smart policy, does the country have the resources and the capacity to address climate change at scale without the long-promised international assistance for adaptation and climate-related loss and damage?

“That process is very slow,” Awale replied. “We simply don’t have time to wait for that money. And, honestly, it is not money enough. Even if it does come through, are the people who actually need it going to get that money?”

In other words, Awale was telling me, Nepal must assume that, as a country on the front lines of climate catastrophe, it is on its own. “Each country will need to prepare in their own way,” she said. There are things that Nepal won’t be able to do without assistance—large infrastructure projects to protect highways, for example, or regional early-warning systems for catastrophic floods. But what can be done, especially at the local level, must be done, she added. “I’ve seen local communities do their own thing, something as simple as rainwater harvesting or planting sugarcane—which is a cash crop—on the banks of the river as a natural buffer [against floods]. Those local solutions become so important—and local government’s role becomes so important, working directly with people.”

Abhishek Jha is a 30-year-old political and policy analyst at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Kathmandu, where he does research and advocacy on climate, governance, and other issues. Of the many Nepali experts and activists that I’ve interviewed, Jha offered one of the clearest answers to the puzzling question of why the climate emergency is not a government priority, especially given Nepal’s vulnerability.

“Climate is not political yet in Nepal,” Jha told me. “The fulcrum of Nepali politics is socio-ethnic. If a politician or party campaigns on climate, they won’t gain any traction. It has to be approached as a social issue. The social becomes the political in Nepal.”

Jha spent a year and a half working on water scarcity and conservation in the plains of Madhesh Province, where his own family is from. “If you go and tell people in Madhesh that it is drying up—heading toward large-scale desertification—and if you say that the Himalayas are melting and that’s why there is water scarcity, they won’t understand,” he said. “We have to make people aware that ‘this is your issue’—this is a social-justice issue, a livelihood issue, an existence issue.”

“Working with local government,” Jha continued, “I see some organization comes and says that you should make this policy, and they make it. But people don’t relate to it. The state doesn’t own it. And these organizations, their work is done. But change at the ground level does not materialize in the way it should. It has to start from the community.”

In Nepal, climate advocacy comes across as “an academic-activist adventure,” Jha told me, with conferences and dialogues held in air-conditioned hotel banquet halls. “There is a barrier that advocates have to cross. It has to be a bottom-up approach, people-driven, community-driven,” so that the government cannot ignore it.

Gen Z can also play a pivotal role in forcing the government to pay attention, particularly by prioritizing climate as a grassroots, social-justice issue. “The Gen Zs aren’t thinking from that perspective,” Jha noted. “But there is an opportunity.”

While Nepal lacks a strong climate-justice movement, a few Gen Z activists have been trying to elevate the issue, with mixed results. Monisha Choudhary, a 24-year-old law-school graduate from a Madheshi family who’s been deeply involved with the Gen Z Movement Alliance, said they see a difficult road ahead.

I caught up with Choudhary in early May, after they had just come from court, where they and other Gen Z lawyers were supporting landless-rights advocates in the legal challenges to Shah’s demolition of the informal settlements. As soon as word got out in late April that the evictions were imminent, Gen Z activists sprang into action, both on the streets—where they joined protests attempting to stop the destruction in Thapathali—and in the courtroom.

I asked Choudhary whether they and other Gen Z climate activists see the plight of the riverside settlements in the context of climate justice, and their response was direct. The week before, they told me, they had spoken at a conference of young climate activists in Pokhara. “I was really, really shocked to find that the young people there did not connect human rights or climate justice with this issue. The language they used was ‘[If you don’t evict the informal settlements,] then how do you develop the country?’ This is something climate activists in Nepal come up against, that you are anti-development.”

“It feels like we’ve hit some sort of moral collapse,” Choudhary said, “this excessive atomization where people are unable to sympathize with the poor.”

Nirajan Thapaliya is the director of Amnesty International Nepal and a veteran human-rights campaigner. When I met him at his office in Kathmandu, I asked whether he sees any movement emerging that prioritizes human rights around the issue of climate adaptation and resilience to safeguard the poorest and most marginalized in Nepali society. “There is no political movement,” Thapaliya told me. There is a growing awareness, he added, and climate has recently entered mainstream human-rights discussions. But the idea “that the climate crisis is fundamentally a human-rights crisis is a late realization.”

It is legitimate to ask what sort of climate justice may still be possible on a burning planet without a coordinated and equitable global response from the world’s wealthy nations. And it may well be that the only answers will be found on the ground, one country and one people’s struggle at a time.

Now, with a super El Niño on the way riding on top of some of the highest global temperatures in recorded history, Nepal may soon face a genuine reckoning. The hope that current approaches will be enough to address the impacts, Upadhya argued in The Kathmandu Post in June, is a “dangerous illusion.” Though some “remain naively optimistic” about the prospect of international aid that isn’t coming, he writes, Nepal “cannot afford to wait as climate shocks intensify. We must embrace self-reliance…using what we have, where we are.”

“The whole geopolitics has changed,” Upadhya told me in Kathmandu. “You’ll have less money coming from NGOs or governments. USAID is closed. And funders are reducing [grants] and putting money in their own security now.” As a result, “community resilience is more important now than anytime in the past.”

I asked Upadhya whether Nepal can really do this on its own. His answer, in essence: What choice do Nepalis have?

Everything in Gaza is crucified on the edge of loss: the air is broken, the sky is perforated, and mothers give birth to silence that has neither beginning nor end. Nothing here is born whole, even the stories come out truncated. And laughter, when it happens, seems strange, as if trying to escape madness and failing every time. The remains of the houses speak for themselves, telling tales of death and survival, whispering what has not been heard, and what will never be heard. Every window beneath the rubble preserves the image of an explosion, and every corner remembers those who left and never returned. The birds are silent, as if the sky itself is afraid to tell us what is to come. We fear the light as we fear the darkness. We fear falling asleep lest the dream be obliterated, and we fear waking to find our hearts have changed their address. The night is long, hope is short, and survival is postponed until further notice. Schools are empty of children, yet the echo of their voices reverberates through the demolished alleys. Gaza is a city that, whenever it buries its children, gives birth to new patience. It experiences death for the thousandth time and does not die. It rises as if redefining the miracle every day. We are not okay, my friends.

Looking back on a debate with Edward Said in 1978, Irving Howe recalled, among other sharp-elbowed moments, one in particular: When it came time for questions, an old Bundist with a thick Yiddish accent let loose a thundering attack on Israel. Howe said he was “ashamed that a fellow Jew, and a socialist at that, would talk this way.” By the time you get this far into Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a history of the Jewish Labor Bund (and you probably will, because the book is absolutely spellbinding), you will have become accustomed to such denunciations.

Born in the same year, 1897, Zionism and Bundism were bitter and intimate rivals from the beginning, struggling for the souls of poor Eastern European Jews. The Zionist program—to resolve the Jewish question once and for all by establishing a homeland in Palestine—is well-known, the Bund’s much less so. In Here Where We Live, Crabapple seeks to revive what she can of the Bund’s project. As her title reminds us, the Bund wanted to stay and fight—for Jewish and working-class emancipation through socialism—where its members lived. In the Bund’s eyes, the Zionists wanted exactly what the antisemites around them wanted: for the Jews to self-deport. Staunch opponents of self-deportation, the Bundists were well placed to predict, early and accurately, what the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine would mean for the Palestinians. Crabapple makes it a matter of pride that the Bund was so prescient.

Crabapple routes her history through her great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbort, a Bundist born in czarist Russia who came to the United States in 1904 and became an artist of a vanishing Yiddish-speaking world. Rothbort taught his granddaughter, Crabapple’s mother, to paint. She then taught Crabapple, who has made a name for herself as a visual artist and a writer for left-wing magazines, publishing the words-and-pictures memoir Drawing Blood as well as illustrated accounts of Guantánamo, the Syrian rebels, and the Greek financial crisis. If the evidence had permitted, one would have wanted more of Samuel, who makes only walk-on appearances. While her great-grandfather’s example intrigues and inspires her, Crabapple’s retrieval of her family history is really there only to help her tell the story of the Bund, especially its anti-Zionism.

There are many ways of telling this story. The Bundists were Jews, but they were also secularists who rejected their parents’ religion. They were labor organizers who sought to defend poor Jewish workers, who were the victims of antisemitism as well as exploitation. And, first and foremost, they were revolutionary socialists. They led strikes by Jewish workers against Jewish factory owners; in New York City, they led the fight of Jewish tenants against Jewish landlords. David Dubinsky, the leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, was a former Bundist. In those years, organizing involved the near-certainty of street fighting. The memoirs of tough-guy enforcer Bernard Goldstein have enough material to fill a Hollywood action flick. If that movie gets made, it will give a well-merited boost to the moral status of antifa.

Crabapple enjoys telling these stories, and they are good ones. A mass movement of working-class Jews is a thing of the past, but Zionism is very much an antagonist of the present, and she wards off nostalgia by putting the Bund’s anti-Zionism front and center. Her own political commitments aside, she has good historical reasons to do so. Crabapple quotes Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who became the first president of Israel, in 1903: “Our hardest struggle everywhere is conducted against [the Bund].” At the same time, the Bund was describing Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.”

For the Bund, Zionism was not just a distraction; it gave local antisemites a convenient means of eliminating the Jewish population. Instead of building power for working-class Jews, Zionists encouraged the Jews of Eastern Europe to give up the fight (to the Zionists, a losing fight) and move elsewhere. The Bundists, on the other hand, advocated doikayt, or “hereness”: Here where we live is our country. Here where we live is the place where freedom has to be won, freedom for everyone. During the 1905 uprisings against the czar, the American socialist Meyer London, who in later years would come to voice his own criticisms of the Zionist project in Palestine, gave this motto an allegorical spin straight out of the Passover Seder. He told his New York audience that in Poland, the young people “pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”

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This program of hereness ultimately depended, of course, on the reciprocal solidarity of the Egyptian (or Polish) working classes, which is to say those who were not Jews. Muslims and Christians had to want to join in a common struggle. In the United States, where London was based, this appeared more likely than in the old country, especially in the first decades of the 20th century, when his Socialist Party appeared to be on the rise. But given the steady drumbeat of antisemitic violence in Eastern Europe that Crabapple faithfully records, it is something of an understatement to say that working-class solidarity in Poland and Russia—or, for that matter, in Europe as a whole—could not be taken for granted. “Only a fool would try to free Egypt, many Jews reckoned,” Crabapple writes. “It was, after all, filled with drunken, violent Egyptians.”

Along with the issue of whether solidarity was possible between Jews and non-Jews, the largest question hanging over the Bund’s program was who or what the Jews were supposed to be once they no longer defined themselves by religion. What was the substance of the Bund’s Jewishness once it had broken with Judaism, once even the exodus from Egypt had been lopped off the traditional Jewish narrative of liberation? Is it enough to assume, as the Bundists did and as many of us continue to assume today, a paradoxical but real relationship between a former attachment to Judaism and a present assertion of universal values? Inside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, while trying desperately to tell the world about the extermination of the Polish Jews, the Bund also put out a statement demanding the release of Mahatma Gandhi, who had just begun a hunger fast in prison.

For Irving Howe, discussing the movement’s transplantation to North America, the Bund’s secular universalism was a self-betrayal and a political mistake. The Bundists’ denial of religious parochialism became “a parochialism of their own.” “To show any sensitivity, let alone fellow feeling, for the religious or cultural sentiments that immigrant workers had brought from Europe, was to open oneself to ridicule for still being under the sway of Jehovah.” How, he asked, would the rejection of their religious heritage stop short of assimilation?

Then as now, it is not an easy question to answer. Fellow socialist Jews like Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg were undaunted by the prospect of assimilation. They held that there was no excuse for the existence of a Jewish political organization that would remain separate from the social-democratic left, and after 1917 from the Communist Party. For Luxemburg, as Crabapple puts it, “Jews were not a nation but a caste…. Once legal oppression ended and medieval prejudice stopped, Jews would cease to exist as a separate group.” Trotsky applauded the Bund’s “fruitful work in developing the consciousness of the Jewish proletariat” but wanted it incorporated as “a section within a unified party.”

One might imagine that the Bund’s strongest argument for its autonomy would be the prevalence of Yiddish. It is true that after the movement’s failure or defeat (Crabapple calls it the latter, pointing to implacable structural forces), the now-displaced language would become a “portable homeland” for Bundists, a language and culture doing its best to survive on its own, most often without the Bund’s socialist politics. But at the outset, speaking Yiddish did not determine the Bundists’ identity, even if it became a practical aid in organizing. The dominant language of its founders, in fact, was Russian.

Wanting to be too Russian was arguably one of the Bund’s fatal errors in 1917. While Lenin and the Bolsheviks were proposing an immediate end to Russia’s participation in World War I—a proposal that would soon help put them in power—the Bund supported the position of Kerensky and the provisional government, which wanted to keep pursuing victory now on behalf of the new revolutionary Russia. By July 1917, Kerensky’s failed spring offensive and the hundreds of thousands of Russian lives lost to the war had led millions to turn against the provisional government. It seems possible, though Crabapple doesn’t make this argument, that it was not the Bund’s Jewish particularism but, on the contrary, a misguided desire to be good Russian patriots—a desire to be more Egyptian than the Egyptians, so to speak—that led it astray at what turned out to be a decisive moment. Some of the antisemitic violence that Crabapple chronicles appears to have targeted Jews as loyal representatives of Russia. For some Poles and Ukrainians, it didn’t matter that the country had had a revolution; Russia was still Russia.

The Bolsheviks themselves tended to see the Bund, in Howe’s words, as “a disguised version of Jewish nationalism.” As Crabapple notes, “Georgi Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist theoretician, had made a famous joke dismissing the Bundists as Zionists with seasickness.” The joke puts Bundists and Zionists in the same boat. It’s not far from Howe’s own contemptuous view of the Bund’s anti-Zionism.

What, after all, was the Jewish identity that the Bund wanted so much to preserve? Why not do as Trotsky and Luxemburg advised, dissolving the Jewish socialist movement into the existing organizations of socialist allies? Why not pursue a “race-blind” politics, as many have championed since then? The best answer the Bund had to offer was the experience of antisemitic persecution: Jews had suffered antisemitism not as workers but as Jews. Both experiences were essential to their identity; how else could they understand themselves fully and intimately? Unfortunately for the Bund, that explanation of Jewish distinctness was less a solution than another problem. The more evidence that Crabapple collects of antisemitic violence—and she collects a lot—the less plausible is the plan of uniting with the Egyptians to liberate Egypt. European antisemitism was the Zionists’ ace in the hole: Every pogrom scored points against “Here where we live is our country.” As Crabapple notes, “the darker things got for Jews in Poland, the more seductive Palestine seemed.”

Inevitably, the reader’s foreknowledge of Hitler’s Final Solution weighs heavily on the entire book. But the Nazis were not alone in bolstering the Zionists’ argument for emigration. What do you think when you hear, for example, that more than 100,000 Jews were murdered much earlier, in pogroms between 1918 and 1921? Or that “in the first weeks of World War II the Soviets rounded up hundreds of Bundist activists”? Or that Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who were already very few, were sometimes caught and murdered not by the Germans but by Polish nationalists, who in the 1930s had made antisemitism into state policy? The Bund’s internationalism is burdened by relentless instances of antisemitism in the world they insisted on winning; eventually, even in this book, that world stops looking winnable. Hence the Zionists come to seem almost right after all—not right about Palestine, but right that there was no hope for Jews in Eastern Europe. They had to get out. While Crabapple takes the Bund’s side, her book is also bold enough to stage an argument with itself.

As Here Where We Live recognizes, another country to which the Jews of Eastern Europe could escape was, of course, the United States, where Crabapple’s great-grandfather found refuge and achieved some recognition as an artist. Going to America may not have been a self-consciously political option, but it managed to save a lot of Jewish lives. Should that alternative denouement also shape our judgment of the Bund? Getting out, rather than staying to fight, did not necessarily mean colonizing Palestine; it might also mean learning to fight somewhere else, for example in the United States, as it did for many immigrant Jews.

Crabapple does not sing the praises of America as a place of prosperity and security. She includes it in “Exileland,” along with the European capitals that Jews fled to from the Pale of Settlement, not from Israel. By character, she sounds like what the Bund called a tuer—a doer, an activist. At any rate, she is eager to celebrate the lives of the Bund’s rank-and-file activists, whose names are unlikely to show up in the archives. And because she talks like a tuer herself (and, for that matter, also like an artist; artists have to be tuers), she is always noticing the named and nameless injustices here in America that call out for action. Chief among them—this gives her story a pleasing roundness—is America’s unconditional support for Israel. She interrupts her history repeatedly to make that and other connections with recent politics. This intense presentness stops the book from getting stuck in a familiar paradox: a commemoration of past activism that has few if any consequences in the present—activism as a venerated museum piece rather than a practice in the here and now.

For Howe, the Bundists were “opposed to Zionism” primarily on the grounds that it was a “utopian fantasy.” The objection that colonizing Palestine was impractical did come up and was one reason for their opposition. But the primary reason was the Bund’s internationalism. In 1929, after riots in Palestine in which many Jews and Palestinians were killed, the Bund refused to participate in ceremonies mourning the Jewish victims. A leader in Warsaw, addressing 3,000 workers, said that what was needed was “the renunciation of the Zionist plan to rule the land against the will of the majority…. The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger.” Even in 1937, with Hitler in power and the Palestinians again in revolt, the Bundist line was unwavering. The Zionist movement, the Bund declared, “has taken it upon itself to settle people in a home that is for the most part occupied by others, in order to take control of all of it.” The issue for the Bund then, as it is for Jewish anti-Zionists today, was justice for the Palestinians.

On the subject of antisemitism, one can also glean wisdom from the Bund. The upsurge of antisemitism in recent years has certainly lowered the temptation to draw any absolute contrast with Eastern Europe. No matter how much better it might appear than the Pale, the United States today looks less like a haven. Still, it helps to remember that Donald Trump’s dog-whistle presidency and the rise of the even crazier antisemitism to his right—the Hitler-admiring Nick Fuentes and his fans, for example—have coincided with Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The genocide has been a generous gift to antisemites here and everywhere. History takes and also gives. However different in quantity and quality, antisemitism in Eastern Europe a century ago was also a historical product, though not one for which any Jews bore as much responsibility as Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump do for the rise of antisemitism today. It was “a kind of counterreaction,” Mark Mazower writes, summarizing what many scholars have concluded, “to the accelerated rhythms of modern times”—a response to the new capitalist modernity of which Jews appeared to be the bearers, however untrue that might have been in reality. Blaming the Jews for disturbing older and familiar ways of life had many disadvantages, and not just for the Jews, but it “had the advantage of giving a physical embodiment to the otherwise abstract forces behind social upheaval.”

Zionists have always liked to pretend that antisemitism is eternal and inexplicable. It’s a conveniently self-justifying way of portraying your antagonist. What the evidence shows, however, is that antisemitism is a product of historical forces and thus neither eternal, however disquieting its resurgences, nor inexplicable. What the evidence shows, in other words, is that the Bundists, though defeated, were not wrong. The antisemitism that stood between the Bundists and the liberation of Egypt was as open to change as the emergent capitalist order was—not something that would ever be easy to change, but not unalterable either.

The Bund’s spirit survives in the unprecedented proportion of Jews, especially young people, who have refused to allow antisemitism to be weaponized. It survives in the fact that a present-day Irving Howe, however surprised at a Yiddish accent, could no longer be shocked at hearing a Jewish denunciation of Israel. In the last 50 years, Howe’s outrage at Jewish critiques of Israel has become less intellectually respectable. The groundswell of praise that has greeted Crabapple’s book is a testament to its many virtues, but also to the change that has overtaken moral common sense, especially since Gaza.

The Long Shadow of AIPAC

New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s letter in response to Joseph Dana’s article “The Long Shadow of the ‘Jewish Question’” [March 2026] does not align with reality [Letters, June 2026]. The Holocaust, though horrible, did not make obvious the need for, or in any way justify, a sovereign Jewish state or any other sovereign religious state, aka theocracy. Theocracies are inherently elitist, antisocial, and antidemocratic.

After the Nazis were defeated in World War II, there was no reason for European Jews, whose descendants now comprise the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel, to leave their home countries. Beginning in 1948, Jewish invaders, soon to call themselves Israelis, undertook vicious pogroms of occupation, home stealing, subjugation, dehumanization, and ethnic cleansing on the native Palestinian people.

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The irony of the commission of genocide by a people who were themselves victims of genocide is truly beyond comprehension. How can a people go from victim to victimizer, virtually overnight, for exactly the same crime against humanity? Israel may have claimed in its Declaration of Independence that it was to be “based on freedom, justice and peace,” but as we have seen, this applies only to Jews and not to Palestinians and other non-Jews. Anyone who supports this ongoing brutality is not a progressive Democrat. Furthermore, Congressman Nadler’s opinion is biased. According to Track AIPAC, as of August, he has taken $309,889 in bribes, er, donations, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to protect and advance the interests of Israel.

J. Alfred Clem
santa rosa, california

The AI Revolution Will Not Be Televised

As a child of the baby-boom generation, I found your AI special issue a wonderful kaleidoscope of seven different takes on this revolution upon us [May 2026]. It was the article by John Nichols, “Luddite Renaissance,” that related more to me as I toddle my weary legs into antiquity. It’s about time that the Luddites return from their beginnings in the early 19th century. They might provide a bit of resistance amid the gathering storm of the new Industrial Revolution that confronts the values of work and a livable wage. Lord Byron (George Gordon) addressed Parliament in defense of the Luddites and wrote “A Song for the Luddites.” More recently, Richard Brautigan wrote a poem entitled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” in the 1960s that I have carried in my wallet for the past 50-plus years. The title of the editorial by Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols should be a marching chant for the current Luddite generation: “Humanity Over Profit.”

Richard Thorum
midvale, utah

All thinking persons should pay serious attention to the two interrelated questions that US Senator Bernie Sanders raises regarding artificial intelligence: “What happens if we can’t regulate the things that we create? Could that create an existential threat to humanity itself?” [“AI Dangers,” May 2026].

No one can brush aside the concern that unregulated AI could result in human extinction. Our current economy and technology do not adhere to the self-limiting principle, and the faith in undifferentiated economic and technological growth has become central to our culture. It is fair to say that any economic and technological system based on continuing unlimited expansion can never lead to dynamic balance. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault wrote, “As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” He wagered that “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” in the last sentence of his book. As humans, isn’t it our collective responsibility to make the late philosopher lose his wager, for the sake of our descendants’ survival and well-being?

Yeomin Yoon
basking ridge, new jersey
The writer is professor emeritus of finance and international business at Seton Hall University.

Speaking of Taxes

A progressive should never use the word tax as an invective. The right has worked for a half-century to tarnish that term and everything about citizens’ contributions to the commonweal. Adding fuel to those flames only strengthens their bonfires. And yet that is precisely what Zephyr Teachout does in her article “Hidden Taxation” [May 2026].

Teachout attaches the term as a nasty epithet to the endless ways electric utilities and their investors gain at others’ expense. She uses the concept of taxation to dramatize the lack of public choice in how hidden processes result in hidden costs. So why not use the term “hidden costs” instead of “hidden taxes”? That would make it clear that these dollars are going to private entities, not into public coffers, where they might (in some better world) serve the public. Calling these plunderings “private taxes” and putting variations of tax in quotation marks are not clever work-arounds. They simply indicate an inability to think outside of the reflexive negativity about taxation that right-wing activists have instilled in our everyday language.

Pamela Walker Laird
denver, colorado
The writer is a professor emerita of history at the University of Colorado Denver.

Teachout Replies

I’m actually sympathetic to Dr. Laird’s argument, but it’s not a matter that I feel settled on. The idea is that “taxation” forces a reader to see a pricing relationship as a governing relationship, and a problematic one at that, because unlike public taxes, private taxes are created like those of King George: without representation. The problem is taxation without representation, not taxation itself. Calling oligopoly charges private taxation is supposed to turn the libertarian intuition against private power. It comes from the monopoly-as-private-government tradition.

Zephyr Teachout
new york city

Reporting on Abortion

Re “This Could Be You,” by Regina Mahone [May 2025]: I was dismayed to see The Nation publish a piece that amplifies a grieving mother’s misplaced blame on doctors for the death of her daughter, Amber Thurman. The article centers Shanette Williams’s heartbreaking story but fails to fully contextualize the direct role that Georgia’s abortion ban played in Thurman’s tragic death. That ban is what forced her to travel out of state in the first place, missing her surgical-abortion appointment and leading to the complications that followed.

While I understand the power of personal storytelling—and the raw emotions that come with it—The Nation has a journalistic responsibility to ensure clarity around cause and effect. Georgia’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee specifically cited the abortion ban as the reason that Thurman did not receive timely, appropriate care. The doctors in her case were working under vague, punitive legal restrictions that made them fearful of intervening too soon. To repeatedly highlight the word murder in relation to healthcare professionals—without correcting the narrative—risks putting those same professionals in the crosshairs in red states where they are already under threat. This framing undermines public understanding of how abortion bans work: by criminalizing necessary care and making doctors hesitate until it’s too late. It also does a disservice to other American women and birthing people who may read this piece and walk away with the belief that the enemy is negligent doctors rather than dangerous policy.

Elevating voices is important, but we cannot sacrifice truth and public safety in the process. I also urge The Nation and its contributors to reexamine the phrase “whether it’s medically necessary or simply their choice.” This language subtly reinforces a damaging narrative that has long served the anti-abortion movement: that some abortions are valid while others are selfish or “elective.” All abortions are medically necessary because they are necessary to the person seeking them. They are medically necessary because they prevent health complications, protect mental and physical well-being, and, in many cases, save lives. We are in this crisis partly because too much of the public accepted the lie that abortion is optional or rare or shameful. Journalists and editors who care about reproductive freedom must reject this framing and speak plainly: Abortion is healthcare. It is preventative care. And everyone who needs it deserves compassion and access. No qualifiers.

Colleen Luckett
denver, colorado

Mahone Replies

I see my role as a writer as elevating the voices of people who are the most marginalized and underrepresented by traditional media. A mother’s visceral pain was the story I was telling in “This Could Be You”—not the challenges medical professionals are experiencing under abortion bans. I had the privilege of interviewing a mother in raw pain after her daughter’s preventable death. A mother who, months before the conference I covered in my article, had grieved in public during an online town hall as Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, promised to do all she could to codify abortion-rights protections. The country voted another way. And now here was Shanette Williams after the election, not retreating from the spotlight but saying unequivocally, “I’m not stopping.” 

Shanette’s voice, and the voices of mothers like her, deserves to be centered in reporting on abortion access, not sidelined. They understand perhaps better than most the true costs of bans. And their experiences must not be separated from the medical industry’s long history of undermining reproductive healthcare (care predominantly provided by community midwives) to kill any competition for services; experimenting on the bodies of patients of color without their consent; and providing inadequate healthcare to Black patients due to myths about how we feel less pain than white patients. Medical professionals today who face terrible risks to do their work are part of a system that by design puts politics and profits over their patients. Of course, there are incredible doctors advocating for change within the field, and providers who are jeopardizing their lives  and jobs to ensure that patients get the care they deserve. All of these experiences and histories and realities exist at the same time. Writers can hold them all at once, but we cannot necessarily emphasize them all at once.

Regina Mahone

Do you know you can invent the dead and that a
poem can be infused into anything? What do you
know about intention? What’s natural, and how
can you be in tune with the planet? Tell me about
public doting? Am I doing it now? I love poetry,
but will it help the world? What is more interesting
than a search for something? I think there’s nothing
better than a good cry—Do you agree? Did you know
that the moon is in Cancer, so you should feel everything?
I think it would be hard to feel everything, but maybe
there are no sad questions—(is THAT a sad question?)
A student told me writing a good poem is putting your
heart into a poem, and caring for it, and is that the
answer to life as we know it, or what? OR WHAT!?

For more than a generation, this country has told young people the same thing: Go to college. A college degree wouldn’t guarantee wealth, but it would provide ballast and keep you out of the most precarious segments of the labor market. If factories closed and clerical work was automated, a college degree would serve as insurance. The alternative was to risk falling into a widening service economy defined by unstable hours, flat wages, and a shrinking sense of control.

After the Great Recession, this advice became a recurring theme in political speeches and policy debates. In his 2009 State of the Union address, Barack Obama implored Americans to commit themselves to “one year or more of higher education or career training.” “Every American,” he decreed, “will need to get more than a high-school diploma.” Obama offered this guidance as a matter of realism but also as a type of social contract: If you go to college, then we will find you a job.

But who paid for young people’s college education? As public funding for state universities continued to erode and tuition at private universities skyrocketed, the bill fell more and more on students and their families. By 2023, the country’s total outstanding student-loan debt surpassed $1.7 trillion. The labor market, meanwhile, did not produce a matching supply of stable, degree-indexed jobs to justify this debt. A 2024 report found that one year after graduation, more than half of recent four-year college graduates were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree, and nearly half still lacked a degree-level job a decade later. The social contract wasn’t working: Going to college did not ensure anything other than monthly loan payments and unstable and often low-paying work.

Noam Scheiber’s new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, takes place against this backdrop. Scheiber, a labor reporter for The New York Times, follows the organizing campaigns—often led by college-educated workers—at Starbucks, Apple retail stores, Hollywood writers’ rooms, universities, video-game companies, and Amazon warehouses. These sectors differ in prestige and pay scales, but the job design often doesn’t. Tasks are modularized. Performance is monitored through dashboards and software. Chances for advancement thin out. Authority consolidates upward. Contracts shorten or schedules fluctuate from week to week.

In these workplaces, workers acquire what the sociologist Ruth Milkman calls “class confidence”: that moment when workers stop seeing their woes as the result of personal miscalculation and begin to understand them as structural. A college degree was supposed to be the path to advancement. Increasingly, collective action feels like the safer bet.

Scheiber approaches these fights as labor disputes, not as the generational melodramas they’re often reduced to in airy commentary. He lays out the material reasons for the new wave of labor organizing—those changes in pay scales, scheduling systems, contract language, and management tactics—and focuses on how workplace organization itself produces organizing.

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TV writer Sydney Mitchel’s journey from an NYU Tisch undergraduate carrying substantial debt to a job in the television industry captures the volatility of migrating into work that still advertises itself as “professional.” For a brief stretch, Mitchel’s career looked like the story that aspiring screenwriters are often still told: Get into a TV series’ writers’ room and start moving up the ladder. Mitchel became a staff writer and then a story editor for the NCIS franchise, paid on a union-negotiated scale. For a moment, her career path looked promising: steady employment on a durable television franchise, incremental advancement, and a middle-class life in Los Angeles.

That stability disappeared in February 2021. While the show’s writers raced toward a season finale, the showrunners announced a new series, NCIS: Hawai’i,and dissolved the existing writers’ room with about a week’s notice. Mitchel and her coworkers called one another trying to understand what had just happened. The ladder she was climbing turned out to be modular: The franchise continued, but the personnel rotated.

Hollywood has always been precarious, but streaming has upended the structure for everyone—from those yet to break into the industry to those at the top. It has shortened seasons and created “mini-rooms”—brief, preproduction writers’ rooms which map out a season and then disband—that compress writing timelines. Studios now often separate writing from production. Residuals no longer function as the reliable floor they once were for mid-level writers. Mitchel went more than a year without writing work. To make ends meet, she took a job as a personal assistant for a wealthy family in Los Angeles. The work was logistical and steady. It was also a reminder that the career she had sought to build could be reduced to a series of short engagements with long gaps in between.

Mitchel eventually returned to NCIS: New Orleans as a writers’ assistant. The move could be read as a step backward in title, a retreat in a career that is supposed to be linear. But she took the job because she needed the income. This is one of Scheiber’s recurring subjects: employers and industries that keep insisting on a merit story even as they redesign jobs into something closer to temping. You can do everything “right” and still find yourself out of work.

During the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, Mitchel became a strike captain. On the picket line, writers compared notes and discovered how much they had in common: fewer weeks of guaranteed work, fewer writers employed, pay structures that made it harder to bridge the downtime, and employers that treated instability as the new baseline. The strike became a place where people stopped treating job insecurity as a personal failure and started treating it as a strategy. The industry’s decline turned out to have primed its workers for a prolonged strike: Months without work in their chosen field was nothing new for most of the picketers.

From Hollywood, Scheiber moves to Towson, Maryland, where work was being reorganized in a local Apple retail store, with workers experiencing the changes as a loss of autonomy. Under founder Steve Jobs, Apple treated retail as a design object. Its stores were architectural monuments—gray stone imported from a single Italian quarry, glass staircases, titanium. The employees also received generous benefits, under the theory that a worker who felt second-class would make a customer feel that way, too.

When Tim Cook became the head of Apple, the company’s priorities shifted. Cook’s expertise lay in operations: inventory reduction, outsourcing, margin optimization. Apple shifted its focus toward services like Apple Music, iCloud, and the App Store—recurring revenue streams rather than one-off device purchases. AppleCare+ became a multibillion-dollar product. And while Apple’s stores still had a quasi-professional aura and attracted young employees who hoped their proximity to innovation would translate into social mobility, almost everything else had changed. If the stores had once had a “creative” role—employees taught sessions using Apple products for filmmaking, music production, and design—now Apple’s retail workers were more like sales clerks. The company’s branding kept talking about “creativity,” yet once its workers arrived on the sales floor, they encountered a labor process that kept moving their work toward standardization. This fact did not necessarily dissuade people from working there: With many young, college-educated people in debt and looking for jobs, Towson was not exactly a workers’ utopia—especially for recent graduates who were Black. “In this grim landscape,” Scheiber notes, “an Apple Store job could look pretty promising.”

Chaya Barrett, for example, had done everything that she was supposed to do. She’d worked hard in school and graduated from Towson University. A lifelong Apple enthusiast, she then took a job at the Towson store, attracted by a foothold in a company that marketed itself as creative rather than extractive. But as Apple shifted her role toward that of any other salesperson, Barrett began to see the store less as a stepping stone and more as a ceiling—as did her coworkers. Soon they organized a union drive to renegotiate the terms of a job whose foundation was falling out beneath their feet.

The Towson workers unionized with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and eventually won a contract—the first collective-bargaining agreement at an Apple store in the United States. Scheiber is attentive to the banality of this process: the meetings in addition to work shifts, management’s predictable anti-union tactics, and the slow move from an election to collective bargaining to an agreement.

Throughout the other industries that Scheiber examines, the same pattern appears. In higher education, the same types of labor relations emerge and the same organizing drives follow. Just as Apple and Hollywood advertise themselves as spaces for creativity, one also finds this at the university. Graduate students and adjunct instructors are told that the work they do as poorly paid preceptors and TAs and RAs is part of an apprenticeship that leads to a life of professional scholarship. And yet the numbers rarely support that story: Universities expand graduate admissions while tenure-track hiring stagnates or even constricts. Departments rely on contingent teaching labor to subsidize a business model built on tuition, branding, and real estate. “Training” becomes a convenient label for employment that is cheap, insecure, and structurally oversupplied. It can also function as a way to avoid allowing workers to unionize.

Scheiber is attentive to how this has led to a resurgence of labor organizing within the university and by the United Auto Workers, which now represents many graduate employees. The union’s increasing presence in university departments might seem strange at first—auto manufacturing and higher education are sectors that look dissimilar, but as Scheiber notes, they are structured using similar forms of segmentation and managerial control. Autoworkers fight tiered wages, temporary workers, speedups, and management’s insistence on “flexibility”—the ability to adjust staffing, hours, and job assignments at will. Graduate workers fight short appointments, unpredictable funding, workload creep, and institutional structures that split workers into categories with different rights. Different industries, same logic: Management fragments workers into different tiers and classifications so that insecurity becomes individualized.

Starbucks and Amazon complicate this story. These are not jobs that were ever marketed as creative, yet they do often share a similar demographic of workers: downwardly mobile college graduates, shackled with debt and forced to take jobs defined by tight managerial control and algorithmic scheduling. At Starbucks, Scheiber follows a group of college-educated organizers whose degrees delivered them jobs that provided them with health insurance and a modest paycheck as well as workplaces that were perennially understaffed, overly Taylorized, and ruled by software optimization. They were also ripe to be organized—and a series of union drives spread across the country, beginning in Buffalo and then replicating from store to store as workers compared notes and followed the same playbook. The speed of that spread reflected how standardized the job was: Once one store organized, others could recognize their own conditions almost immediately.

At Amazon, on-the-job surveillance is overt and the pace relentless. The Amazon Labor Union’s victory at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island was remarkable and briefly punctured the company’s aura. But what followed were legal appeals, bargaining delays, and the grind of turning a union election into shop-floor power. Scheiber follows what happens after the election win: discipline, internal strain, and the education of a new union in how long the road from certification to a contract can be. Examining Amazon’s labor regime through the organizing efforts of Chris Smalls and his coworkers, he shows both the possibilities and the limits of insurgent unionism inside a company built to resist it. The Amazon Labor Union’s early success depended on a loose, worker-led structure that could move quickly and win trust on the shop floor; yet that same structure proved hard to sustain once the task shifted to legal fights and keeping a fragile organization together in the face of an intransigent employer determined to defeat them. 

Across these industries, employers have been taking complex social or creative work and reorganizing it into something closer to an assembly line. Hollywood writing gets chopped into mini-rooms and contract fragments. Apple’s “creative” role fades as the store becomes a traditional sales pipeline. Universities turn teaching into contingent labor and treat research training as a flexible labor pool. Starbucks and Amazon intensify control through scheduling software and productivity surveillance, causing the already poor working conditions to decline further. The workers Scheiber follows occupy roles in a variety of industries, yet they increasingly find themselves in the same position: They are measured, monitored, and replaced in ways that their credentials were supposed to prevent.

In placing these stories in the same book, Scheiber captures the downstream consequences of a society that told everyone to invest in themselves—and to pay for that investment of their own accord—and then expanded credentialing without expanding the value of that credential. People have long understood the mismatch between credential and outcome as personal failure. But as things have gotten more dire and work more standardized, Scheiber shows, that interpretation has now eroded as workers compare notes and recognize a shared pattern.

The book is less interested in situating that pattern historically. Scheiber gestures toward history and nods to international movements in his epilogue, yet Mutiny offers relatively little historical context for this “middle layer” of radicalization, and as a result Scheiber concedes too much to the idea that the workers he examines are anomalous, when they are not. American labor history, in fact, has seen repeated waves of organizing among workers with some degree of skill, education, or authority who faced the erosion of that authority and the narrowing of their prospects. In the late 19th century, railroad engineers and conductors—workers with specialized skills and a degree of control over the labor process—organized nationally as companies consolidated and standardized operations, reducing their autonomy. Skilled machinists and printers followed similar trajectories, building unions in response to the spread of managerial control and the de-skilling of their trades.

In the early 20th century, foremen and lower-level supervisors formed associations as corporate consolidation compressed their autonomy. Their ability to organize workers worried lawmakers and employers, and the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act sought to harden the boundaries between workers by excluding supervisors from bargaining units. The postwar “labor peace” depended on this kind of sorting. Unions traded certain forms of disruption for contractual governance. Employers traded wages and benefits for managerial prerogative. The state policed the boundaries of legitimate bargaining. Skilled workers and foremen once occupied a volatile position in this arrangement; their partial autonomy made them difficult to discipline, and their exclusion helped lock in a more stable hierarchy.

Scheiber’s reporting doesn’t depend on this history, but bringing it into Mutiny would have given his portrait even more context to explain why the current wave of organizing is not simply some generational quirk but a response to political economy: credential inflation, debt financing, employer strategies that standardize labor, and legal regimes that shape who can bargain.

Even so, Mutiny also offers sustained on-the-ground reporting. Each chapter is full of the unglamorous things that determine whether an organizing campaign survives: who shows up to meetings outside of a shift, how discipline is administered, how a first contract gets negotiated, how people manage fear. Scheiber tracks the bargaining committees, internal disagreements, and procedural delays by employers determined to wait out the union.

The country told these workers to invest in themselves. They did. Now they are bargaining over what that investment is worth. They are bargaining over wages and benefits, but also over authority—who controls the pace, who controls the scheduling, who decides whether a writers’ room dissolves in a week, whether a store is staffed, whether teaching labor is treated as employment.

In Towson, that dispute surfaced in a retail job that still advertises creativity while quietly reorganizing around upselling and metrics. In Hollywood, it appeared in the speedy dissolution of the writers’ room on a popular TV series, with one screenwriter taking a personal-assistant job to bridge a year without writing work and then returning as a strike captain. In universities, it took shape as graduate-student workers insisted that their institution was an employer first and foremost, because that’s how it acted. In an Amazon warehouse, it became the slow education of a new union learning how long the road from certification to contract can be.

The credential economy has expanded as workplace autonomy has constricted. Employers have been building assembly lines in places that were once sold as career ladders. People are noticing, and some of them are organizing. Mutiny traces what that recognition looks like on the ground. The outcome is still being negotiated.

A tradwife influencer with millions of followers wakes up in the mid-19th century and has to be a farmwife for real. That’s Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel Yesteryear in a nutshell. The time travel doesn’t make a lot of sense (no spoilers), but it doesn’t matter—by the time the totally unconvincing switcheroo arrives, you’ll be in too deep to care.

No wonder Anne Hathaway is making it into a movie.

As many have noted, Yesteryear’s protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, Idaho mother of six, tireless content creator for her millions of fans on social media, and one very sharp businesswoman, bears a resemblance to Hannah Neeleman, slim and beautiful Utah mother of nine and proprietor of Ballerina Farm, from which she portrays a picture-perfect life of adorable blond children, cows, chickens, and homemade bread while selling overpriced kitchen supplies to her approximately 23 million followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Skeptics tear her down for selling raw milk (ceased after health authorities found E. coli in a batch of it) and $259 cutting boards (Walmart sells a virtually identical board for around $17), and of course for kowtowing to her husband, Daniel, despite obviously being the brains of the operation. (In her videos, he has all the alertness of a stunned ox.) While she’s idolized by Christian nationalists as the perfect white obedient super-fertile butter-churning Mormon mom, she only occasionally touches on her religious beliefs and does not mention politics. If you want to keep your numbers in the multimillions, you probably want to keep things a bit vague.

Natalie is Hannah’s id. Warped by fundamentalist Christianity, taught by her mother that a woman’s job is to be sweet and uncomplaining, frightened of venturing beyond her rural background, she drops out of Harvard and marries a young man she barely knows, who has no ambition, the IQ of a rock, and is impotent in bed. In return for producing lots of babies, her rich right-wing father-in-law bankrolls Yesteryear Ranch, which Natalie reverse-renovates to look like a 19th-century farm: The modern conveniences are tucked away behind wood cabinetry; the two nannies and Mexican farm workers are never shown on-screen. Trouble arrives when she hires a savvy young video producer, and that’s all I’m going to tell you.

What is a tradwife, anyway? The linguist Amanda Montell traces the term to the manosphere, in which the ideal woman is a fecund “traditional” housewife who marries young and submits to her man. But it was when women started to buy in that the concept really took off. Today, the face of tradwifery is a beautiful young mom who wears prairie dresses with full makeup, cooks a lot, and wants to please her husband more than he deserves. Nara Smith, a 24-year-old South African–born biracial fashion model and mother of five married to Lucky Blue Smith, another model, makes industrial food in her kitchen (bubble gum? Seriously?) while speaking in a babyish voice. Gwen the Milkmaid, a former feminist bisexual and OnlyFans performer who found Jesus and says that “men are better,” makes Cinnamon Toast Crunch from scratch.

Actually, there is nothing traditional about tradwives. What’s traditional about constantly filming your personal life and putting it on the Internet for the world to see? Women leading a true traditional life—ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, say—are very private. Online tradwives are doing something else: They are monetizing a fantasy, in which the exhausting labor of housework and childcare is hidden from view and the results are made to seem effortless and relaxing. No slaving over a hot stove, no scrubbing the toilet, no fussy children having meltdowns, no wondering how the heck you ended up like this after graduating with honors. Even childbirth—Neeleman posted clips of her most recent unmedicated home birth—looks easy, practically painless, with no complications. Who do they think they’re kidding? In fact, Neeleman told The Times of London that for her sixth birth, her husband was absent and she had an epidural: It was “kinda great.”

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Much has been written about the exhausting, unfulfilling lives of women in the corporate world—told to lean in but overworked, denied the rewards bestowed on their male coworkers, and still doing way more than their share at home. But seriously, how many real-life converts to tradwifery are there? There have always been women whose goal was to marry a breadwinner and stay home with kids, but the statistics show young women forging ahead—getting their degrees, entering the workforce, using birth control, leaving organized religion, moving left. The revolt of women from conservative lifestyles is so pronounced that the Trump administration is doing its best to push them back into the kitchen. Unplanned pregnancy, particularly among teenagers, is just what society needs to get the birth rate up: Ergo, cut funding for sex ed and contraception, ban abortion, mock single women as miserable cat ladies, and get rid of DEI so women remain in the lower ranks of the workplace. Maybe they’ll get frustrated and quit.

There’s a catch, though: To live the tradwife life depicted online, you need to have a lot of money. Neeleman’s father-in-law founded JetBlue. Smith’s net worth is estimated to be $6 million (her husband only has $1 million). These women don’t have to worry about ending up divorced and poor with no marketable skills, chasing their ex-husbands through family court for child support. Like Phyllis Schlafly and other propagandists for stay-home domesticity, they’re not staying home: They’re working.

Has tradwifery peaked? The success of Yesteryear suggests it may be passing its sell-by date. After a brief return to posting lingerie and ASMR, Gwen the Milkmaid has wiped all her public videos. And true to form, despite all evidence to the contrary, Smith and Neeleman now deny they were ever tradwives—they are just women choosing their choice. In other words, feminists.

When The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy was published in 2006, Washington was aghast at its assertion that Israel’s lobbying machine was a malign influence on US politics. Twenty years later, that argument might be met with a shrug.

This is partly a testament to the prescience of the book’s authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. At the time, criticizing the Israel lobby was considered to be a third rail in American politics, and the pressure to ignore or vilify the two writers was intense.

Fast-forward to 2026. Much has changed in the past two decades—major political shifts in the US and Israel, the ongoing collapse of Palestinian political representation, as well as upheaval in regional and global geopolitics. And the Israel lobby—particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—is on the ropes as never before.

Even so, it would be premature to conclude that the lobby’s power to distort US foreign policy is coming to an end. While the lobby’s machinations have been dragged out of the shadows during Israel’s war on Gaza, pro-Israel campaign funding in the United States is operating on a grander scale than ever (often promoting issues that are totally unrelated to Israel in order to obscure the intentions behind the lobby’s support for the candidates it favors). And while Democratic voters are turning away from Israel in unprecedented numbers, the lobby’s allies still maintain power at the party’s highest levels.

Which raises the question: Can the Israel lobby continue to win where it matters—in the White House and Congress—even as it rapidly loses popular legitimacy?

This is the consideration that underpins the new book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, which serves as a kind of spiritual sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt’s study. (Both men have endorsed the new book.) Its authors, Ian Lustick, a political-science professor and Israel-Palestine watcher, and Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist and cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, emphasize the outsize influence that Israel has exerted over US foreign policy, how that influence threatens American domestic freedoms, and how it is now being challenged. Assessing how the landscape has shifted in over 20 years, Lustick and Clifton highlight how contemporary political funding structures allow even greater access for unregulated money to flow from a small cadre of “plutocratic” pro-Israel megadonors alongside the expansion in aggressive techniques for quashing Israel’s critics—including legal pressure and attempts to co-opt campus disciplinary proceedings.

The frenzied spending and the intense resistance to change we have seen recently among Israel’s supporters are due in part to the precarious position in which the lobby currently finds itself. What might happen next can be summed up in three simple scenarios:

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1. Despite all the tumult, the lobby maintains its grip on Washington, and the US continues to enable Israel’s destructive drive to displace the Palestinian people and dominate the region.

2. The jig is up: The United States stops genuflecting to Israel, and Israel is forced to figure out what it can get away with (answer: far less) in this new landscape.

3. The debate around the Israel lobby and its impact is superseded by the bigger story of the United States’ declining influence in the Middle East.

It is worth unpacking how each of these scenarios might play out.

Despite some high-profile and even spectacular losses for the lobby—most notably its failure to stop a string of pro-Palestinian Democrats from winning primary races—its staying power should not be underestimated. Which brings us to our first scenario: that the lobby comes up with a way out of its current predicament.

Given that Israel and its leaders appear to take pride in their extremism, cruelty, and callousness, it should come as little surprise that their echo chamber in the US is struggling to make popular arguments and to win debates.

But the lobby doesn’t necessarily need the masses on its side if it can maintain its dominance in elite spaces—and in some ways, it has more tools to do so than ever before. Lustick and Clifton rightly cite the significance of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the door to “independent” campaign expenditures, enabling AIPAC and its allies to intensify their interventions in political campaigns throughout the country in the past few years.

All that money doesn’t guarantee victory, but it can still sway elections and act as a deterrent to potential candidates. The 2026 Republican primary in Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District is a case in point: The incumbent, Thomas Massie, a prominent critic of Israel, found himself facing the most expensive House primary in US history, thanks overwhelmingly to the funding against him from pro-Israel PACs. Massie was successfully defeated.

While this phenomenon is certainly not unique to the Israel lobby, the scale of money involved is exceptional, and the lobby often goes to great lengths to obscure its fingerprints by using front organizations. Add to this the exponential growth in the wealth of the billionaire class under the Trumpian regime of deregulation and corruption. Consider, for instance, how the eye-watering gains that tech moguls are accruing in the current IPO mania may funnel more money into the coffers of pro-Israel campaign financing.

The lobby is also attempting to show how adaptable it is by overhauling the material, strategic, and moral cases (what Mearsheimer and Walt referred to as the three “pillars”) at the core of its argument for unstinting US support for Israel. The pro-Israel narrative is being questioned in each of these three cases.

The material case—that Israel requires endless military assistance from the United States—has become the most difficult to defend. Why should American taxpayers be forced to be complicit in the genocide in Gaza, especially while funding for US domestic programs is being slashed?

Israel has cleverly attempted to preempt that argument. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in Congress are trying to pull off a bait-and-switch: an offer to taper off the use of conventional military aid and instead embed Israel’s defense and tech industries more deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Under this new configuration, the United States would still subsidize the Israeli military, but it would be able to dodge scrutiny by replacing a visible aid check with spending that could match or exceed the previous levels.

Making the case that this alliance is both strategically vital to American interests and morally aligned with US values is more complicated. It’s being attempted in two key ways. The first is the development of a radical political vision: incorporating Zionism as a touchstone of contemporary far-right Western politics and looking at Israel’s ethnonationalism as an ideal type to be replicated elsewhere, including in the US.

The second way involves the weaponization of antisemitism by recklessly using it as a cudgel to criminalize and shut down debate. In particular, the Israeli government and its allies in the lobby have attempted to redefine criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic and thus out of step with American values. As a form of Israeli statecraft, it absolutely makes sense to stipulate that key critiques of Israeli policy and of Zionism should be redefined as antisemitic. As a method of silencing Israel’s critics, this tactic has been effective. As a way of actually combating antisemitism, it has been wholly counterproductive.

Finally, as Israel draws more scrutiny from legal institutions like the International Court of Justice (which is hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel) and the International Criminal Court (which is pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials), the United States has not only continued to ignore the ICJ’s rulings but has moved to attack the ICC. The US sanctioned nine ICC judges and the court’s chief prosecutor, freezing their assets and restricting their travel, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently committed the US government to “dismantl[ing] the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”

Clearly, then, the lobby is not about to roll over, and it could continue to hold considerable ground. But what if all these efforts fail to stem the tides of change—especially since the tactics described above, which have been successful until recently, are now generating more backlash than allegiance? This brings us to the second scenario: that of a genuine decline in the power of the Israel lobby.

To put it mildly, the lobby’s defense of the status quo is not one that can sustain widespread bipartisan support. Though its opponents might struggle to establish a broad consensus around a settler-colonial critique of Zionism, there is a widely shared public disgust at Israel’s inhumane actions and at the US government’s military, financial, and diplomatic support for them. One does not have to be a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America to recoil at the decades of occupation, the killing and starvation in Gaza, the relentless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, or Israel’s desire to wage perpetual war against its neighbors with the backing (and the bombs) of the US.

If Israeli voters oust Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in this fall’s elections, then pro-Israel propaganda in the United States might experience a new blossoming. But a post-Bibi honeymoon, if it arrives, may be short-lived, given that Israel’s anti-Netanyahu bloc is still committed to maintaining apartheid and rejects any reasonable compromise with the Palestinians. As opinion polls reflect, Americans’ attitudes are hardening toward Israeli policy as a whole, irrespective of which leaders are in charge.

The Israel lobby’s problems look even more foreboding when one goes deeper into what is happening in the two most critical bastions of support for Israel in the US: the Jewish and evangelical communities.

Whether out of shock at Israel’s conduct in Gaza or disgust with the lobby’s cynical weaponization of antisemitism, many American Jews are beginning to turn against what Israel stands for—eroding in the process a key element of the political architecture that sustains US acquiescence to Israel’s policy agenda. A Washington Post–Ipsos survey last year found that 61 percent of American Jews believed that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, and polling now shows that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a staunch critic of Israeli policy, is more popular among American Jews than the prime minister of Israel.

Perhaps even more crucial are signs of declining support among evangelical Christians, especially in the community’s younger members. As the journalist John Judis has argued, the popularity of end-times prophecy is fading in favor of a justice-focused theology as a framework for engaging with the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Inside the MAGA movement, the antagonism between the America First and Israel First wings has intensified. On June 18, Vice President JD Vance admonished Israel on a New York Times podcast: “You’re a country of 9 million people, you just can’t kill your way out of solving every single national-security problem.” On his own popular podcast, Tucker Carlson regularly excoriates Israel Firsters to a receptive audience.

There’s even more of a groundswell on the Democratic side. In response to this shifting terrain, some Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel, are cynically changing their rhetoric about Israel without changing their policy commitments. If Democratic voters are mollified by these moves, the lobby will breathe a sigh of relief. But there is little evidence that is happening. Mamdani, the most compelling politician of his generation, has shown how to change the terms of debate while maintaining the support of a significant portion of the Jewish community.

That the most prominent defenders of Israel are assuming an ever-more-grotesque quality, and showing less and less of an interest in broadening their appeal, only adds to this changing reality. Witness, for instance, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s launching a so-called Mamdani Monitor “for Israel” or Commentary editor John Podhoretz’s celebrating the role of “Jewish money” in Thomas Massie’s defeat.

The war against Iran may one day be regarded as a watershed moment. It is widely held that Israel played a major role in pushing the United States into the conflict, which has been a disaster for US interests. This has led many observers to begin grappling with the ways in which US and Israeli interests diverge, a reckoning that is likely to intensify over time.

Which brings us to our third scenario.

Perhaps the greater challenge that Israel faces is not the decline in its standing in the US, but rather the decline of the US itself. We no longer live in a world of American primacy, even if much of Washington is unwilling to acknowledge that fact. The catastrophic US-Israeli wars in the Middle East and West Asia are only accelerating that decline.

This could prove to be a vicious cycle: The further Israel hurtles down the path of regional overreach, the more dependent on the US and the less popular with the American public it becomes; and the more the United States is pulled into such wars, the weaker its own geopolitical position becomes.

Is it reasonable to speculate that Israel is preparing for a future in which the United States is no longer the world’s dominant power? If so, that might explain why Israel was willing to risk pursuing the Iran war.

The evidence is mounting that the Greater Israel project is recklessly overambitious. Israel is attempting to use US power (while it is still available) to establish an unassailable position of regional dominance, one that would make Israel less reliant on the United States. Netanyahu has spoken, for instance, of a “hexagon” of alliances centered on Israel, including countries in the Horn of Africa, South Asia (India), the southeastern Mediterranean, and the Gulf.

It’s unlikely that Israel can achieve this ambition. It is now viewed by most of the states in the region as a radical threat to stability. The extent of popular anger at Israel’s cruelty in Gaza has forced many of the leaders of those states, who were previously inclined to strengthen their ties with Israel, to sit up and take notice.

While it’s premature to conclude that a new regional bloc will emerge as a counter to both the Israeli- and Iranian-led axes, the pieces are beginning to be put in place. One notable development is the creation of a “Quad”—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan—that has been coordinating at a high level. For these countries and others, the Iran war has demonstrated the perils of relying on a United States that can be so easily swayed by Israeli hubris. In other words, it may be that regional dynamics could ultimately lead to a more concerted and effective effort to contain and deter Israeli expansionism. Simultaneously, the Israeli attempt to deal a definitive defeat to its enemies has backfired.

Even Israel’s military edge and the success of its armaments industry may come under challenge—whether or not the current effort to further integrate the Israeli and US military succeeds. As an arms developer and exporter, Israel will face stiffer competition from South Korea, the rapidly revamping European military-industrial complex, and the burgeoning Ukrainian arms industry once that country’s war with Russia ebbs. Meanwhile, non-Western-aligned states will be able to draw more on supplies from the vastly expanded Russian arms industry and on increasingly effective Chinese military exports.

The conditions are more favorable than ever for curtailing the impact of the Israel lobby, both inside the United States and in the Middle East. The lobby is being called on to deliver more just as it is facing unprecedented challenges to its effectiveness.

It is a major achievement to have reached this moment, albeit at an astronomical cost to so many. Much will depend on how the next phase is navigated—by political movements inside the US; by regional actors, including multiple Palestinian factions; and by Israel and its supporters.

If Israeli Jews are to be compelled to reevaluate the expansionist and radical guiding ideology of their state, then there is still much work to do. Walt and Mearsheimer, and now Lustick and Clifton, have helped demystify how the Israel lobby works in the United States. If the US has indeed entered an era of genuine potential for change, including challenging Israeli impunity, then the need for a Palestinian movement to assume the mantle of strategic leadership and for an Israeli counterpart capable of thinking beyond zero-sum destruction is more acute than ever.

Abdul El-Sayed’s bid for Michigan’s open US Senate seat could well decide which party controls the chamber after November’s midterm elections. Historically, a candidate in such a position might run cautiously. Not El-Sayed. A Rhodes scholar and epidemiologist who, at age 30, earned national attention for his transformative work as director of the Detroit Health Department, the progressive Democrat boldly advocates for Medicare for All, ending US support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, and adopting a fresh vision of capitalism that empowers people rather than corporations. After his primary win in August, Nation editors Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols spoke with El-Sayed at a favorite haunt of his, the Alba coffeehouse in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.

The Nation: You’ve spent much of your life working in public health. Can you diagnose what’s wrong with American politics?

Abdul El-Sayed: One of the things that you learn pretty quick in medical school is that heart failure is about the heart, but it’s also about the kidneys. They have this really important relationship where your kidneys often regulate for your heart—because if the heart is beating against too much pressure, it’s on the kidneys to push water out. But what tends to happen is, once you find yourself with insufficient heart [strength], the kidneys don’t get enough pressure to know to offload. So they stop doing what they do, and the thing runs in reverse, beating up your heart, in effect. And I think what we have right now is a level of corporate capture of our politics, in every single part of American society, that is loading more on and running the system in reverse.

Our political system was always supposed to be able to act as a check on the richest and most powerful…. And now, what’s happened is that [we] have a political system that acts as a handmaiden to the richest and most powerful, accelerating the inequality that we have in our society. Our political system has become part and parcel of that inequity. It shows up in every part of our lives: whether it’s the food system, which is controlled by a couple of very large corporations and agribusinesses. Or it’s our healthcare system, which is captured by a few very large pharmaceutical companies and health-insurance companies. Or it’s our foreign policy, which is captured by a few very, very large weapons manufacturers and special interests. All of it is operating in a way that tends to drive money away from us and toward the very top.

I think if we don’t address that system of capture, we will find ourselves paying more for less, being squeezed in our work, and watching as our systems operate more to make rich people a lot of money than to actually do the things they’re supposed to.

TN: How do you talk about this system of capture in the context of a campaign where you’re being massively outspent by the wealthy and powerful?

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AES: If you know you’re going to be outspent in paid media, then you have to build really, really robust earned and [self-generated media] and a really, really robust movement on the ground. That’s what we did. We started out going everywhere, talking to everyone. I did 530 public events in the primary, across 110 different cities. We have been communicating and listening and showing up in people’s lives.

TN: You have argued that when candidates rely on lots of outside money, it’s a sign of weakness.

AES: If they’re getting huge amounts of outside spending, that’s a sign of weakness because it’s a crutch. It’s like, why do you need outside spending? That’s [my opponent, Michigan Republican US Senate nominee] Mike Rogers in a nutshell. That system of politics is the problem. And it’s based on this old idea that all that matters is how much money you raise to buy media. The money isn’t spent on town halls; it isn’t spent knocking on doors. It’s spent on 30-second attack ads.

TN: You’ve complained that candidates in both parties neglect the voters in order to chase after big donors and outside money.

AES: Yes. When you go out and meet with people, you’re learning a ton in a reception line; you’re learning a ton in a small roundtable. People are telling you what they want you to focus on. Whereas when you’re fundraising or having meetings with [lobbyists for special-interest groups], all you’re learning about is what the lobby wants from you.

TN: That message resonated in the primary. How do you build on it in a general election, in a swing state that backed Donald Trump in 2024?

AES: You keep listening and learning. I think it involves identifying the ways that your central message applies across a number of different issues. You know, some of the most important issues that I think a lot of folks who voted in 2024 for Trump are paying attention to right now are data centers and ultra-processed food. And I’m looking forward to having that conversation with them.

TN: Do you see ultra-processed food as one of the major public-health issues of our time?

AES: No doubt, absolutely. I mean, look, this is the thing about [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: He’s right about a lot of the problems—he’s just completely batshit when it comes to the solution. He’s right that ultra-processed foods are a problem. But the answer is not beef tallow and raw milk. The answer is getting [Big Agriculture and food-industry] money out of our politics.

TN: You’ve argued that there are issues that people care a great deal about but that are not well discussed in campaigns or by the major media. One of these is the Israeli assault on Gaza.

AES: The selective attention to polling is really quite fascinating to me. Like, [Gaza] is an 80/20 issue. Data centers: 80/20 issue. Healthy food: 90/10 issue. Guaranteed healthcare: 70/30 issue. I think the mistake that traditional media makes is to think that they read in for the median voter, and to miss the notion that the median voter is not always aligned on “red” [or] “blue” questions. They’re aligning more on people-versus-the-elite questions, and that’s the big miss [by the media].

I go on CNN, and they consistently ask me about the right of a foreign country to exist, which is not an issue that most people are asking about, right? They’re asking about “Well, does that foreign country have a right to my tax dollars?”

TN: Groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have spent heavily against you, attacking you personally rather than discussing Middle East issues.

AES: They don’t campaign on their issue. They are ultimately conceding public opinion [without acknowledging it], and that’s a pretty scary thing when you think of it from a democratic standpoint. How’s democracy supposed to work, right? If you have an argument to make, make the argument and then the public can decide. But when you come in and run 30-second attack ads, trying to assault somebody’s character because they disagree with you on an unrelated issue, that is an admission to having lost the democratic debate.

TN: You’re not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. You’ve said, “I’m not a socialist. I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.” Talk about what you mean.

AES: We have a corporatist system; we don’t have a capitalist system. Go back and read Adam Smith: He talks about how there are no markets without morals. He talks about the central challenge to markets being monopoly, not government regulation. In fact, you need government to secure markets. And what’s happened right now, going back to the central diagnosis that you asked for, is that government has not only stopped securing markets; government has become a system by which the largest players can rent-seek, which is to destroy markets.

Capitalism relies on free entry and exit in markets, and supply and demand allocating the flow of capital. We don’t have that anymore. I would like to move us back to a capitalist economy [with] people being able to know that they are not subject to monopoly power when they’re seeking employment, and not subject to monopoly power when they’re acting as consumers.

TN: You’ve also talked about public goods, including healthcare.

AES: So, classically, public goods are the ones that everybody benefits from but are, as they say, non-rivaled and non-excludable. They’re the things that are the substrate of the market. Infrastructure is one of those things. Public safety is one of those things. Public education is one of those things. I think healthcare is one of those things. And even then, Medicare for All is not actually government healthcare; it’s government health insurance…. Medicare for All recognizes the fundamental provision of health insurance as a public good akin to infrastructure or public safety or public education, as part of the soil in which the economy works. That enables an actual market system in healthcare provision to function.

TN: Democratic Party leaders have resisted Medicare for All. Do you think a doctor who’s a big enthusiast for Medicare for All can change the debate in Washington?

AES: Hopefully, yes. Number one, I’ve spent a lot of my time studying this policy, wrote a book on it, understand the nuts and bolts of the legislation well, and hope to be able to work with like-minded colleagues to make the argument.

Second, there is a public conversation that still needs to be had, and part of my job is to be a leader of that public conversation in communities where we’re told we can’t win. The problem with the way that, too often, our party does politics is that we assume that people’s positions are fixed and then operate accordingly—rather than assuming that people want to engage in a thoughtful debate and want to be engaged on the broader issues of our time, and are willing to engage with us in a good-spirited conversation about what the best world ought to look like. A lot of what I’m testing out is the ability to go and have that conversation across places in the state of Michigan and win people over on that policy.

I think we need that in the party, to challenge the status quo. Too often, the industry is funding our party. So if you think that protecting your donors is more important than providing the best possible policy for your constituents, then you’re going to take it as fixed that you have to have an insurance industry that does what it does, and that the best thing you can do is incrementally move in directions to offer a little bit [better than the Republicans]. I just don’t think that is fixed. And I don’t have donors to protect—aside from the everyday people who support our campaign. So I’m not interested in what the health-insurance industry thinks, or what the hospital industry thinks, or what the pharmaceutical industry thinks. I’m a lot more interested in what the 10 million people in my state think.

TN: The New York Times says you’ve been the target of “a wave of Islamophobia,” much of it coming from President Trump. As a Muslim candidate, how do you speak about faith and politics?

AES: You know, it’s interesting because, for a lot of people, I’m the novelty. For both the people attacking me and the people just meeting me, I’m the novelty. I’ve been a Muslim in America my whole life, so I’m a lot more interested in the things that bring us together. Once people get past [the rhetoric from Trump and the Republicans], they will ask the more thoughtful question, which is not “How do you pray?”—it’s like “What do you pray for?” And I think I’ve learned that that is such an important space for connection. And it’s an opportunity for a broader conversation about what we all hold dear. So, yeah, people are going to attack me. Mike Rogers and Donald Trump can’t help themselves. But they want an America that’s small—and I’ve always known an America that’s big. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to show us just how big we really are, and how much more brings us together than separates us.

I got to be a twentysomething watching a guy named Barack Hussein Obama run for the presidency. What that told me about America and my place in America was profound. I believe in an America where, rather than be told how small we have to be by people like Donald Trump or Mike Rogers or JD Vance, we continuously prove just how big of an America we really are by coming together around the things that we need and deserve. This is one of those moments, where I can’t wait for Michigan and this country to remind us just how big we are. That, you know, an Abdul El-Sayed can be elected not because of or despite his name, but because we want to get money out of politics, put money in our pockets, pass Medicare for All.

TN: Do you see your campaign as opening the door to a new kind of politics that gets beyond petty partisanship and focuses on more fundamental questions?

AES: I hope so. Trump’s politics is entirely about punching down and groveling up. I do the exact opposite, and I think that’s what makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. You’ll never hear me talk down to somebody who, you know, is out trying to live their life. But I’ll talk down to Donald Trump every day, because he’s worthless. Same with Mike Rogers—worthless. These are terrible people who have weaponized their own greed against other people. I hate that. And I see it as everything that’s wrong with the way that we’ve allowed society to work. We allow the richest and most powerful to use their power and their money to game the system against everybody else. Do you remember when Donald Trump was defending his tax evasion? [Some people were] like, “Oh, he’s just so smart.” I’m like, “Bro, you’re greedy, and you lack any sense of scruples. And the system has been built to benefit people like you.”

When you ask about a new politics, we need a politics that is not afraid to stand up to power, whether it’s the power of large corporations [or] the power of a bully politician. We need a politics where we stand up to power and where we move the government to uplift people who don’t have it. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

In 2019, a strange image began to circulate on social media. It showed an empty hallway aglow with sickly fluorescent light, calling to mind the rear corridor of a movie theater or the cavernous antechamber leading to a mall bathroom. It’s actually a photo of a Wisconsin furniture store under renovation. It was taken in 2003, which explains its blurry patina.

The image was originally posted anonymously in a thread on /x/, the paranormal board on the bulletin-board site 4chan, in response to the prompt “Post disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” One user dubbed the space “the Backrooms,” describing it as “six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” This exchange sparked an online phenomenon, popularizing the so-called “liminal space” Internet aesthetic.

The concept of the Backrooms has long fascinated me, more from the architectural side than the horror side. There is a generational element to it: Most of us who were children in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s logged many hours at vast malls waiting for our parents. It’s also rich both theoretically (being a postmodern concept par excellence) and architecturally (being a vernacular interior par excellence).

A 16-year-old visual-effects autodidact named Kane Parsons released a series of short YouTube films in 2022 that take place in and elaborate on the eerie realm of the Backrooms. The series caught the attention of the film-production powerhouse A24, which gave Parsons the budget and resources to realize a feature-length adaptation, released theatrically this past spring. It was a watershed moment: A Gen Z content creator had penetrated the traditional, institutional studio system, and his work was so high-grossing that it broke records. In an era of exhaustively rehashed IP, Backrooms was sourced from public-domain Internet content.

Although it was inspired by a static image, the film’s plot is sprawling. Clark, a failed architect relegated to running a discount-furniture store in a California strip mall, has been kicked out of his house by his wife and now sleeps at the store. Outrageous electricity bills and strange ambient noises prompt him to investigate the store’s basement, at which point he passes through a solid wall and into the apparently interminable Backrooms.

The Backrooms set is Parsons’s pièce de résistance. It’s a disorienting, labyrinthine series of largely soundless, yellow-hued rooms. It’s littered with inanimate objects that scan as wrong: items fused together, or misshapen, or inappropriately scaled. Stairs lead to nowhere. Walls morph into chutes. Space expands and contracts. It might be endless. Also, there’s some kind of monster element.

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The B-plot concerns Clark’s therapist, Mary. She has her own demons, having been raised by an agoraphobic hoarder mother, and she’s resentful of her selfish and controlling patient. A cryptic message from Clark lures her to the Backrooms. Mary has a showdown not only with her intransigent patient but with (spoiler alert) his manifestation as a monster, a gnarled, unnatural version of himself. And this is Backrooms’ key gimmick: The monsters are, in fact, ourselves, our worst qualities, our most pernicious instincts.

Monster Clark ambushes his shrink, and the ensuing chase scene is the best part of the movie: It is dramatically shot, revealing the terrifying scope and sheer infinite modularity of the space. In one memorable moment, a deep chasm reveals the extent of the Backrooms, which replicate endlessly into the void. Also, the Backrooms are being monitored by a company called Async, which has been trying to investigate the space after unwittingly discovering it. When asked what this place is, Clark answers, “It’s every place that ever was.”

Parsons is trying to do a lot, perhaps too much, with Backrooms. The movie’s plot and underlying message are undercooked. (Are the Backrooms the unconscious? A secret government project? Something else?) His aesthetic choices, however, are interesting and convincing. The 21-year-old director is clearly a digital native. Though he plays with found-footage tropes, aping a lo-fi VHS look, his world operates under a resolutely digital, video-game-inspired spatial logic, in which characters “no clip,” or pass through impenetrable barriers such as walls.

Parsons’s work is postmodern in the original, architectural sense of the term: The Backrooms are simulacra, copies for which no original exists—they approximate recent pasts through pastiche. The malls of the 1990s, whose heyday Parsons is too young to have experienced, were usually themed, using referential architecture with elaborate, exaggerated set pieces (such as those displays of giant plastic fruit in a grocery store). Backrooms boasts distortions of these already distorted visuals.

Parsons’s 1990s are communicated to the audience through a series of signifiers and winks: a washed-out teal-and-pink color palette, wall-to-wall carpeting, chunky furniture, wide ties, etc. What is striking about these choices is that they are misremembered—not the decade as it was, but as reproduced via nostalgia threads on Internet forums. Fredric Jameson famously described how certain films set in the mid-20th century made the leap from depicting the 1950s to a “1950s-ness.” Parsons similarly invents a highly mediated “1990s-ness.”

Backrooms seems to be a movie about architecture: about the innate horror of the mundane, the liminal, the places that induce a level of boredom that a director who grew up with a smartphone has probably never suffered through. But it isn’t, at least not directly. Watching someone as young as Parsons attempt to capture the horror of a now-defunct suburban mundanity is a bit like watching a kid get behind the wheel of a parked car and pretend to be his dad. The pantomime of steering by someone whose feet can’t reach the pedals is a little silly, but it’s also unsettling; likewise, the film’s misremembered nostalgia produces something genuinely new and interesting. Backrooms the movie is flawed, but Backrooms the phenomenon may offer a compelling preview of the next generation of filmmaking.

Since she was elected to Congress in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had her every move scrutinized. In a 2021 interview, Vice President JD Vance condemned Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake in [our country],” citing AOC’s lack of children as a matter of public concern. Now the 36-year-old New York representative has embraced the attention in order to change that narrative, posting a series of Instagram reels documenting her egg-freezing journey and demystifying this fast-growing type of reproductive care. Her chatty, informative reels offer a calm counterpoint to the fevered lectures we’ve heard from Vance and others in the “retrosexual” crowd (pro-natalist, masculinist, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-DEI) about departures from old-school patterns of women’s work and fertility.

Vance and company ignore the underlying issue: The government wants people to have children but provides few resources for families. Before birth control was widely available, that approach “worked” to maintain a high birthrate, while forcing many parents into low-wage jobs to feed unplanned children (their desperation ensuring their bosses’ profits).

But people now have a choice, and many delay having kids until they feel ready to provide for them, a point that arrives for some but not all as the affordability crisis worsens. Others choose not to become parents at all. As a result, the country’s fertility rate has declined 23 percent since 2007—most notably among women ages 15 to 19 (down 72 percent) and 20 to 24 (down 51 percent).

As a highly visible working woman sharing her own biological-clock story, AOC is addressing the concerns of millions about how to plan for a family while pursuing a career. Her videos walk viewers through the egg-freezing process, from injections to ultrasounds to egg retrieval, detailing the high costs and complex science of fertility preservation with humor (one episode in her kitchen begins “Today we’re making—eggs!”).

While her videos are casual and friendly, AOC’s job title (and national recognition) remind viewers that there’s more to this story. Her ability to delay starting a family has likely been crucial to the success of her political career, something that viewers all over the country can relate to. By sharing her fertility choices, she’s demonstrating that it’s possible for her generation to change expectations around forming a family—and to demand better support for it. One reel shows the congresswoman efficiently injecting her belly in the green room of ABC’s This Week, before cutting to a clip from her interview there: “Millennials are…starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us—on everything from the economy to climate.… We’re taking the reins.”

Unlike Vance, AOC addresses why Americans are starting families later: “Hello—we don’t provide healthcare, we don’t provide childcare, and…a lot of people struggle to find a suitable partner. No one gender’s fault: That is a collective issue.” Subsidized healthcare (including fertility treatments) and childcare would do much to mitigate the concerns of potential parents.

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The retrosexual “tradwife” model also clashes with economic reality: If women all went home, the GDP would immediately fall by a third, followed by massive drops in productivity and consumer spending. Given that women are disproportionately represented in essential sectors like healthcare and education, the exit of even a small percentage of them from the workforce would be catastrophic.

AOC understands that many people don’t want kids at 26—they’d rather establish careers, see the world, and find a long-term partner first. That means more older parents, egg freezing, egg and sperm donation, adoption, and fostering—and more child-free adults long-term. She affirms that viewers “do not need anyone’s approval to lead your life and make the choices that make you happy.… You know, maybe in life you can’t have everything, but here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot.” She acknowledges that egg freezing isn’t foolproof, and there’s a real chance that she won’t end up having a child. But these videos offer a compelling vision of a world where women’s concerns and insights matter and where solutions can be found through civil dialogue rather than knee-jerk go-back-ism.

By joining civic life in significant numbers, women have reworked traditional systems that excluded them from policymaking. But it has taken time to get there due to a childcare catch-22: Because they lacked a childcare infrastructure, women couldn’t be elected in sufficient numbers to create one. Delaying family has allowed more of them to reach positions where they can begin building supportive systems for families in the future. They’ve done this precisely because, contrary to Vance, they do have a deep stake in this country and commitment to realizing its promise.

History suggests that it’s only when women like AOC reach critical mass in policymaking roles, potentially sacrificing some of their personal hopes, that we may finally create the national care infrastructure we’ve always needed and the thriving future we desire.

My name is Maryam Tahmasebi, and I am a professor of psychology and statistics at Los Angeles Pierce College—or, I was, until April 9, when my life, and my family’s lives, changed forever.

On that day, I was teaching a class when my son texted me, saying that my husband hadn’t picked him up from school and wasn’t answering his phone, which is very unlike him. I picked my son up from school, came frantically back home, and called the police, thinking that something horrible must have happened to him. Even so, it never occurred to me that he could have been detained by ICE. We are legal permanent residents with valid green cards. My husband, Eissa Hashemi, is also a professor, and has dedicated his life to mentoring PhD students in the Business Psychology department of The Chicago School. We have both mentored many PhD candidates, among whom are veterans who have served this country for decades. We don’t have any criminal record—not even a traffic ticket. I believed in the “rule of law,” and trusted that if there was anything wrong with our immigration status, the government would notify us through legal channels.

I was beyond shocked to realize that an online smear campaign without any merit or legal standing had convinced the US government to try to revoke our green cards overnight without due process or even telling us. The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son of a woman who was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before Eissa was even born.

I came here because I wanted to build a life for myself and my family that was defined by my own actions, not anyone else’s. But now our lives are being upended for something someone else did nearly 50 years ago.

Imagine that you are an independent woman wading through the waters of sexism and patriarchy every day, and then you are told that not only do your own ideas and academic achievements not matter, but you are somehow now responsible for decisions you never made, and for things that happened before you were ever born. That you don’t have an identity of your own, and that your existence can be negated based on relations. This is bloodline punishment. I was hoping that the United States of America, the country that I loved, would be different.

Eventually, my husband’s phone location showed he was at an ICE center in downtown LA. I talked to him there for a minute. He said he had been told that, while he was under arrest, our son and I were safe. That turned out to have been a lie. The next day, when I took my son to school, my car was surrounded by DHS cars, and my son and I were detained. I had to watch my son, who is in high school and has been a legal resident of California for 12 years, be handcuffed. We were shipped to Texas overnight from Los Angeles in horrible conditions that I won’t elaborate on in this letter. We have remained in Texas ever since.

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My son and I have spent over 120 days in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, away from my husband, who was taken to the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, Texas. There, he faces even more horrible conditions, and he faces them alone. When I requested that my husband be reunited with us in Dilley, a so-called “family detention center” (the very existence of such a term is deeply troubling), I was told that in our specific case, family separation is the policy and the rule.

I have struggled to understand how this can happen to people who have never broken the law, in a system I believed to be based on the rule of law.

We have been put through hell for the past four months, and our physical and mental health have deteriorated in ways that might not be reversible for years. We are only allowed to speak with my husband for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision. My son, who only speaks English and has been in California’s school system since pre-K, is struggling to understand why the only country he considers home is treating him this way.

What has happened to us was designed specifically to break our body and spirit. I am a mother, not a martyr, so I would always choose my son’s health and well-being over any dreams or aspirations I have. But even when we decided to make the difficult decision to ask to be allowed to voluntarily leave the United States—the place we consider our country and our home—the government not only opposed it but suggested that it would appeal any judicial decisions that grant us departure.

In other words, they want to continue our indefinite detention without any end in sight. But for what purpose? I have been asking myself that question over and over. I can’t think of any reason why we are being put through this punitive ordeal. We don’t have money or power to help us, shield us, or buy us favor. We are two working-class educators who had been living a working-class life in a rented apartment, and had never imagined anything like this happening to us.

This is why we need your help. We are in tremendous pain and have been trapped in an unendurable, unending nightmare. I want my son to have a normal life, not spend his days in this awful detention center in Dilley. No child deserves this. No human deserves this. We are asking anyone with a conscience to help us end this nightmare. There are more things I want to say, but this is the shackled version of what I feel safe saying right now. I will end on this: If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone.

Ben Wikler wants his fellow Democrats to win in 2026 as a check and balance to the catastrophic presidency of Donald Trump. But the serial organizer—who has served as the campaign director for the global activist group Avaaz, the Washington director for MoveOn.org, and the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, where he created a tech-savvy, door-knocking, agenda-setting model for winning over swing-state voters—wants so much more than an election victory.

Once the party returns to power, Wikler argues in his new book, This Is the Plan, Democrats need to act with a new sense of purpose to renew and expand democracy. In addition to the immediate work of easing the pain of the many who have suffered during the Trump years, he says, Democrats must systematically address the deep dysfunctions of American electioneering and governing—money in politics, racial and partisan gerrymandering, the right-wing judicial activism of the Supreme Court, the fundamentally unfair Electoral College—with an honest recognition that those dysfunctions gave us Trumpism and could do so again.

This Is the Plan offers a vision for a multiyear project of systemic reform and voter empowerment that focuses on removing the barriers to achieving economic, social, and racial justice and to saving the planet. Ben’s steady determination to identify the real forces that drive inequality and injustice—which I’ve witnessed since my fellow Wisconsinite was a teenager writing letters to the editor and organizing against corporate influence on education—is an antidote to the legitimate impatience and anger felt by Democratic voters over the broken state of contemporary politics. This essay, adapted from his remarkable book, is a blueprint for how we return the power of our democracy to the people. We would do well to consider it.

—John Nichols
 

Our country is spiraling into authoritarianism—but, together, we’re going to fight our way out.

How do I know? We’ve been doing it in Wisconsin, my beloved home. I’ve seen firsthand how thousands of grassroots activists working their hearts out to win elections at every political level, alongside a vast array of allies and partners, can build a movement that unrigs a political system. It’s how the Wisconsin Democratic Party stopped the world’s richest man from buying an election for a state Supreme Court justice. It’s how Democrats nationally swept off-year elections in 2025, and dramatically boosted turnout in special elections since Donald Trump began his second presidential term.

Here’s how we are going to end America’s meltdown and save democracy. But, as you read this plan, it’s essential to keep three fundamental principles in mind.

First: Your superpower is not just your vote, but your power to organize, to persuade, and above all to join or bring together a group of like-minded people to make grassroots engagement a part of your lives, week after week, year after year, election after election. As long as freedom survives—and despite Trump and his allies’ cruelty and ruthlessness, we’ve still got enough of it to keep on organizing—you’re free to use your freedom to fight for freedom’s survival.

Second: Your modus operandi should be to organize and advocate where you are, affecting elections in which you’re a constituent and seeking to affect the decisions of your own elected officials— and, at the same time, lend a long-distance hand to those on the front lines of the fight, in the tipping-point states, districts, and battles across the country where a little change can make a huge difference.

And third: remember that the potential voters whose votes are most pivotal—those who rarely vote, or who switch parties—are often the people who are thinking about politics the least. If you want to persuade them, don’t lecture. Listen to them about what they care about, find out where it intersects with what you care about, and then find a basis for common action.

Make sense? OK. This is the plan.

2026

For democracy to survive, the single most important priority is likely to be found in state governments. That’s because elections are run by states, not by the federal government—despite Trump’s illegal efforts to try and override the Constitution. Thus, your goal this year: to achieve governing trifectas in the states whose Electoral College votes are likeliest to tip the presidency one way or the other in 2028. Reach that goal and we can make it very hard for Trump and his allies to nullify the result of the next presidential election.

Help turn out and persuade voters in the closest state legislative districts in the most likely 2028 battleground states—in a way that can simultaneously help win House seats and statewide contests. Where there’s a high-stakes statewide fight, organize everywhere— not just to swing purple areas but also to lose by less in deep-red areas and to drive up margins and turnout in blue ones.

Even as we lock down state trifectas, we should be aiming to win the US House and US Senate majorities. The more House and Senate seats we win in 2026, the more we can stem the damage of the Trump presidency and begin an era of accountability.

The closest state in 2024 was Wisconsin, which—after a years-long struggle against authoritarianism and gerrymandering, is finally within striking distance of turning into a blue trifecta.

The next closest Trump-won states from 2024 are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona. Four of those states could become blue trifectas in 2026. In Georgia, ensuring that Keisha Lance Bottoms wins the governorship would prevent MAGA gerrymandering or election sabotage before 2028. In North Carolina, the key state-level targets are Anita Earls’s reelection to the state Supreme Court and the prevention of GOP supermajorities in the state legislature. In many of these states, offices key to election administration and jurisprudence—such as attorneys general, secretaries of state, state supreme court justices, and key local offices—will be on the ballot as well.

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Those were the battleground states from the last three presidential elections—2024, 2020, and 2016. So, if it’s close, they’re the likeliest battlegrounds in 2028 as well. The GOP’s path to holding the presidency, in the short term, runs through those states. If you, if we, ensure that people who believe in democracy triumph in those states in the fall, then we’ll know that—if we win the presidential election in 2028—it won’t be overturned.

Not only that, but those states contain two key US Senate races and more than enough close US House races to move the speaker’s gavel to Hakeem Jeffries.

But let’s shoot bigger than that.

Let’s open up every possible path to passing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. That’s a state law, already passed in states representing 222 Electoral College (EC) votes, that comes into effect once it’s been passed in states representing 270 EC votes—enough to determine the winner of a presidential election. Once it comes into effect, all the participating states assign their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Just like that, the idea of “battleground states” and “safe states” in presidential elections will be tossed into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

That means aiming to win a trifecta in New Hampshire too—the state that Trump lost but came closest to winning in 2024 (Harris won by 2.8 percent). And let’s help the multi-partisan pro-democracy alliance in Alaska, which could yield a US House seat, a US Senate seat for Mary Peltola, and—if we win the governorship—a potentially NPVIC-friendly state trifecta in a state where Trump won by 13 percent.

To shoot for a US Senate majority, we’ll have to expand the map still further.

If we’ve defended Michigan and Georgia and flipped North Carolina and Alaska, we just need two more.

Let’s ease Susan Collins into a long-overdue retirement in Maine.

And let’s go for broke in Iowa, where we could win three US House seats (IA-01, IA-02, IA-03), the governorship, and the US Senate race.

In Ohio, let’s lend a hand to Sherrod Brown. And let’s put James Talarico into the US Senate seat in Texas. Don’t sleep on Dan Osborn in Nebraska. As Trump careens further into abyssal approval ratings, yet more opportunities continue to arise.

Want to adopt a House district? Want to travel to it to knock on some doors—but all of the states above sound inconveniently far away? Good news: There are also swing House districts that could benefit from your support—to defend Dems or defeat MAGA Republicans—all over the nation, very much including giant blue states like California and New York.

And there are winnable state legislative districts in every state. Winning more of them is critical to Callais-proof red states, especially in the South, that might try to re-gerrymander after 2026 to eliminate districts currently protected by the Voting Rights Act.

OK. Huge push for the 2026 midterm elections. Check.

And then: Do you stop? No. Can’t stop. Won’t stop. We’re building a permanent campaign.

2027

In 2027, we’ll advocate for our various state elected officials to pass policies that will upgrade the democratic processes in our states and make them dictator-proof. We’ll also push them to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. And we’ll build grassroots support as they pass legislation that makes a direct, positive difference in the lives of regular people.

In some states, start collecting signatures for some ballot initiatives to raise wages, protect the environment and defend democracy. In states like Wisconsin, where the state legislature, not the people, launches the process of amending the state constitution, keep that on your advocacy to-do list as well.

At the same time, you can advocate for the new Democratic majorities in the US House and the US Senate to conduct aggressive oversight and prepare bills and coalitions around historic legislation for the next Democratic trifecta. The phone number for the Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Use it.

If Democrats and independents do win a majority in the US Senate in 2026, they should, immediately in 2027, amend the Senate’s rules to restore the vision of our country’s founders and make their legislative body a majority-rule institution. Bust the filibuster. Get it over with. Bring closure to 60-vote cloture.

Meanwhile, throughout 2027, you’re helping with state and local races in places like Wisconsin, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia. Don’t get rusty. Keep organizing.

2028

Big year.

We don’t know who the Democractic presidential nominee will be or what crises and issues will be dominating the news. Instead of fretting about the primaries and messaging, roll up your sleeves and build the general-election presidential operation in advance. Build state and local Democratic Party organizations. Elect democracy defenders to key offices in local and special elections and engage more and more voters and volunteers over time.

By the time the two parties nominate their candidates in 2028, you will have helped build the organizing and communicating juggernaut that will become your nominee’s campaign apparatus.

In 2028, your goal isn’t just to win the presidential election. It’s also to win as many seats as possible in the US House, US Senate, and state legislatures; to win the state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin (in April) and flip the state Supreme Court in North Carolina (in the fall); and to win all possible state executive offices, as well as local ones.

If it’s a 2016/2020/2024-style nail-biter, you’ll be glad you worked so damn hard. If it’s a 2008-style blowout, you’ll have a chance to win in places that seem impossible from the viewpoint of 2026.

You’re doing all this for two reasons. First, you want to generate as much positive change as possible. And second, you know that the next election, in 2030, is likely to be tough, because of the pattern of midterm backlash against incumbent presidents’ parties.

On election night in 2028, you’ll see the fruits of so many labors turn into electoral triumphs. You’ll cheer as your presidential candidate starts rolling up swing states. You’ll pump a fist in the air as Ron Johnson’s US Senate seat goes blue while Wisconsin Democrats hold on to their state legislative majorities. You’ll experience the rush of having helped change the world.

And you’ll recommit, even as you dance in the streets that night, to keep going. Because you know the fight isn’t over.

2029

Suppose we win in 2028. The first giant question of 2029 comes in January: Do we have a peaceful transfer of power, or not?

This will be the acid test.

The answer to that question depends on everything you, and the giant movement that you’re now part of, has achieved up to this point.

If the Electoral College is tied or subverted such that no candidate gets 270 Electoral College votes, then the job of determining who won the election will go to the House. Under the Constitution, each House delegation will get one vote. So our goal is not just to have a pro-democracy House majority—it’s to have, after the 121st Congress is sworn in at noon on Wednesday, January 3, 2029, pro-democracy majorities in a majority of House delegations. Right now, the GOP controls 30 out of 50 delegations. We’ve got two election cycles to change that. If this scenario happens, you’ll be very glad that you’ve leaned into House races in states like Iowa and Alaska.

Knock on wood: On Saturday, January 20, 2029, the next president and vice president of the United States will take their oaths of office. Not President Vance and Vice President Trump. Two entirely different people with entirely different names who belong to an entirely different party.

The nation, and the world, will finally exhale.

And then, after a killer party and a greasy breakfast, it’s time for the real work. Because 2029 has to be a year of action.

States with pro-democracy trifectas will have a great deal of work to continue from the 2027–28 legislative sessions. But now they’ll be joined by a federal government that can actually pass good-for-America bills into law, signed by a good-for-America, good-for-the-world president, and can then implement them in good faith. Along with whatever emergency bills are necessary in order to address whatever acute disaster Trump has left America as a parting gift, the federal trifecta of 2029 has to pass democracy reform. Right away.

The time will have come to pass the 2029 versions of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—with voting rights protections, a national gerrymandering ban, donor disclosure requirements, and other anti-corruption measures.

But that’s just the start.

US Supreme Court reform: either 18-year term limits (after which justices, who have lifetime appointments, take “senior status” in which they don’t vote on cases), or a court expansion, or both.

Statehood for DC and, if Puerto Ricans so wish, Puerto Rico.

House reform: doubling its size, and adopting multi-member districts with proportional representation, so that everyone, across race and ethnicity and geography and ideology, can have a voice in the People’s House.

And then so much more. Economic policies that level the playing field and reward work instead of entrenching wealth. Laws that build prosperity and ensure that all of us, not just the few, benefit from it. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, and the Protect America’s Workforce Act. Comprehensive immigration reform. Maybe it’s time for a reorganization of the executive branch, to make it more effective and less susceptible to corruption and authoritarianism. Laws to ensure that artificial intelligence enriches us all, not just the few, and doesn’t undermine our livelihoods, our self-determination, or our existence. Laws to protect the rights and freedoms of every American, especially the most vulnerable. Measures to make life affordable, build opportunity, keep us safe, catch us when we fall, help us build the lives and families we choose, protect the earth, and lift up the dignity of all.

It’s not just that the executive and legislative branch will be in new hands. It’s that the laws they pass won’t be struck down by a rogue US Supreme Court.

In 2029, with new 18-year term limits on active service, the next president will be able to appoint a Supreme Court justice as the longest-serving justice, likely Clarence Thomas, moves to senior status, allowing him to spend even more time island hopping on Harlan Crow’s superyacht. We can hope that the court, knowing that its composition will mechanically shift over time, will stop ruling as though it will have a permanent MAGA-supporting majority.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget a total recasting of America’s role in the world so that our foreign policy reflects both our values and our interests, in place of Trump’s approach, in which it reflects only his.

This will be the time for boldness. The year 2029 is shaping up to be one of those rare moments, like the period after the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II, when we have to rethink everything. When, in the wake of Trump, so much is broken, our goal must not be to simply repair what used to exist. Let’s build what we actually want. We’ll need visionary leaders. And we’ll need an engaged public pushing for a future that works for everyone.

Also, there will be elections. Free and fair ones. Wisconsin will have a supreme court race, and local elections, in April. That fall, Virginia and New Jersey will vote to keep Democratic control of their governorships. They, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, and other local officials from coast to coast will face the first contests that tell us whether (or how much) the tub of political momentum is sloshing in the opposite direction under the next Democratic president. Let’s keep organizing to win them all.

2030

In 2010, after Obama’s 2008 landslide, thermostatic public opinion— turbocharged by Citizens United—led to a Tea Party/GOP wave. Which led to a raft of GOP state trifectas, from Wisconsin on out. Which, in turn, led to a plague of gerrymandering and other horrors before the 2012 elections that have sickened our politics ever since.

In 2030, our collective job is to prevent that from happening again.

Let’s just agree now to keep on organizing right through the 2030 elections—while also passing laws in 2029 that will reduce the risk to democratic self-governance if things do go badly. In particular: If we’ve banned gerrymandering in 2029, then a 2030 red wave won’t lead to the GOP’s rigging maps in state after state in 2031.

2031

The Census, which will have been responsibly overseen by the government of the 48th president of the United States, will deliver its results. The likeliest finding: that the population—and, hence, House seats and Electoral College votes—will have shifted south and, to a lesser extent, west.

Analysts predict that the head counts in California and New York, where the most populated areas have become increasingly unaffordable, will have plateaued or shrunk as people with dreams of, say, buying a home have moved to states like Texas (which might gain four House seats and Electoral College votes) and Florida (also poised to add four). Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota each lose one; Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and North Carolina each gain one.

If the Electoral College is still functioning as it does now, Democrats will not only have to keep winning the states where they’ve been doing well—they’ll also have to turn purple states blue and start winning states that are currently long shots if they want to have a chance of holding on to the presidency in 2032.

For that reason, you’ll be very glad by this point that you and so many others have spent the previous five years organizing locally in states that were, as recently as 2026, very red.

Or better yet, you’ll be thrilled that you helped pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in enough states for it to come into effect before the 2032 presidential elections.

2032 and Beyond

In a NPVIC world, the 2032 US presidential election would be the first one ever that is genuinely small-d democratic. Whoever gets the most votes wins. The years of patient long-term local organizing everywhere—not just in swing states, but in every state (all 51 or 52 of them!)—now matter a great deal. Every voter counts the same in choosing the most powerful person in the world, no matter their zip code. And every superpowered organizer can multiply their own impact by turning out their neighbors to vote.

In every state, the congressional and state legislative races will be conducted on post-Census map lines that are drawn fairly, or in multimember districts that choose representatives on a proportional basis.

We can’t now know who has the best shot at winning. But we’ll have secured democracy for posterity. We’ll have rebuilt our republic. We’ll have gone from American meltdown to glorious glow-up.

For most of our history, the United States regularly adjusted its rules. We expanded and contracted the US Supreme Court; we expanded the House, and changed federal election laws; we added states and the methods of electing US senators; we shifted the mechanics of the Electoral College; and we amended the Constitution. For the last half-century, we’ve been stuck. It hasn’t worked very well. The weakness and brittleness of our institutions has led to federal paralysis on the greatest issues of our day.

But enough democracy still survives that, if we join together, we can, in effect, wish for more wishes: We can use the tattered remnants of self-government to stitch together a new fabric for our country, one strong enough to protect us all.

This will take years of work. That work begins now.

On a warm Wednesday morning in early April, I stood with around two dozen masked protesters outside an entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial park on the New York City waterfront. I knew by now to bring earplugs, since the goal of this biweekly demonstration was to make as much noise as possible. Beneath the screech of whistles, the blaring of an air horn, and the banging of pots and pans, activists waved Palestinian flags and handed out flyers to workers exiting the complex. The protesters were there because they had found evidence that companies operating out of the massive property were supplying the Israeli military, which for over two years had been carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

The protests, led by an autonomous group called Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, targeted Easy Aerial, a drone manufacturer, and Crye Precision, which makes tactical gear. Because the Navy Yard sits on land owned by the city of New York, the DBNY picket extends to the complex as a whole, with the organizers arguing that military contractors should not receive tax breaks or be allowed to operate on public-owned property. For over a year, they demanded that the two companies be evicted from the Navy Yard; after reports broke that Easy Aerial’s lease wouldn’t be renewed once it expired in May, they focused their campaign on getting rid of Crye Precision.

These weekly protests ebbed and flowed as groups from around the city answered DBNY’s call to mobilize at the Navy Yard, and they sometimes escalated into more direct confrontations. Earlier on that April morning, a brief scuffle had broken out after a cop slapped a demonstrator blowing an air horn in his face. Toward the end of the demonstration, I watched as a protester in a hooded sweatshirt and green keffiyeh stood atop a picnic table and spoke into a megaphone.

“Politicians and international bodies have not stopped the genocide in Palestine, or of the oppressed masses of the world, and they were never willing to stop it,” the speaker declared, their voice partially muffled by the keffiyeh. “To fight US imperialism, we have to choke its flow of supplies.”

Their sentiment reflected how I’d been feeling for months—as well as many others I knew who cared about Palestine. During Israel’s two-year genocidal campaign in Gaza, protests around the United States focused on stopping the daily bombardment and killing of Palestinian civilians. As the official death toll rose to more than 70,000 (likely a severe undercount), “Ceasefire now!” became the rallying cry of most major actions in cities like New York, alongside the more radical demands from student encampments, which called on their universities to divest from Israel.

But despite the ceasefire that was announced last October, the killings have not stopped. The United States continues to send weapons to Israel, which is still targeting Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, the latter flush with armed settlers. By 2025, the war for American popular opinion, it seemed, had been won: For the first time since polling began, more Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel than a favorable one. Meanwhile, aside from some major victories for pro-Palestine politicians in cities like New York and Washington, DC, this sentiment has not translated to a shift in policy. Logic and historical precedent both seemed to suggest that it was just a matter of time. But as with our planet in the climate crisis, Palestine was running out of time.

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It was during this period of frustration over the United States’ continued material support for Israel, and the perceived ineffectiveness of mass protest, that I first came across Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard in August of last year. Rather than occupying a massive public space, such as Times Square, to express discontent and raise awareness on the issue, the DBNY campaign was doing something different: pushing for targeted actions at the local level to end the flow of weapons to Israel. Such protests have always been a part of pro-Palestine organizing, but in the nine months since the ceasefire was announced, I’ve seen them take on much more prominence, applying pressure to specific people and businesses with financial ties to the Israeli military.

There was something, too, in the fact that this was all taking place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a former military shipyard that after a multi-decade transformation is now home to more than 550 businesses, including a film studio and a craft brewery. The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a nonprofit that administers the property on behalf of the city of New York, has made a concerted effort to draw young people to the area, offering the space as a venue for electronic-music events. The Navy Yard borders traditionally working-class communities as well as gentrified neighborhoods filled with transplants from a generation that is statistically more likely to support Palestine. This is perhaps why the DBNY protests felt different, both to me and the other demonstrators that I saw there. At the Navy Yard, I had the chance to channel my frustration into something that felt concrete and tangible: getting weapons manufacturers out of Brooklyn, the borough where I also lived.

But protests like this were not exceptional. In 2024, a similar effort in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pushed for the eviction of a local office of Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer. In California and New Jersey, activists and dockworkers have united under the Block the Boat movement, which uses blockades and teach-ins to prevent ships carrying Israeli military cargo from docking at international ports. And, of course, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long sought to apply pressure on Israel by targeting the flow of money, goods, and people to and from the country.

Learning about these successful campaigns gave me hope that DBNY was just one prong in a multifaceted movement, one that was just gathering steam rather than fading out. And unlike previous campaigns, DBNY is escalating at a time when Americans everywhere are being introduced to direct action under the second Trump administration. DBNY has revealed that Crye Precision, which makes uniforms worn by the Israeli army, also supplies Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant operations in places like Minnesota. The mass pushback against Operation Metro Surge beginning late last year made it clear that many Americans are willing to engage in direct action and organize at the grassroots level to resist authoritarianism. DBNY can harness that energy by demonstrating that militarism abroad and militarism at home are one and the same.

Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard was formed in September 2024 with the goal of materially disrupting the supply chain of weapons and technology between the United States and Israel. The group decided to narrow its focus to two companies, starting with Easy Aerial, which has publicly advertised that its drones are used by the Israel Defense Forces. Crye Precision, meanwhile, produces camouflage gear for the Israeli military supplier Agilite. Both Easy Aerial and Crye Precision have also supplied the Department of Homeland Security; aside from searching publicly available federal contracts, the DBNY campaign identified ICE and Border Patrol officers wearing Crye Precision uniforms and gear through photos, videos, and news reports.

Campaign organizers told me that early on, they attempted a dialogue with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. In June of last year, activists met with Lindsay Greene, the organization’s president and CEO, and Hank Gutman, its board chair, to urge the BNYDC to evict the two companies, as well as to ban any military contractors from leasing space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the future. At the meeting, according to the organizers, Gutman and Greene said the board could not evict tenants without a legal or financial reason. Producing weapons that kill civilians might be morally wrong, but it is neither illegal nor against the BNYDC’s policy. (Through a spokesperson, the BNYDC also denied that any weapons are manufactured in the Navy Yard, despite evidence to the contrary).

Since then, the BNYDC has demonstrated a clear lack of interest in engaging with the campaign, organizers told me. Although its meetings are supposed to be open to the public, last year the BNYDC quietly removed the public-comment period from its board-meeting agendas and began limiting the number of people who could sit in on meetings to avoid any potential disruption from protesters. The attendees are also siphoned off into a separate room where they can watch the meeting take place over video link, as I did several times in the past year. At no point during the board meetings I witnessed were the protesters outside the building acknowledged.

As their frustration with the BNYDC grew, the protesters decided to escalate their tactics. At their weekly demonstrations, they have held up signs denouncing Greene and Gutman as “genocide profiteers.” In June of last year, four activists were arrested after blocking the entrance to the elevators in the building that housed Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. That same day, a Crye Precision employee was captured on video physically assaulting a protester.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve seen the campaign’s protests draw in various pro-Palestine groups from around the city, from the borough-wide Brooklyn Families for Palestine to the national anti-war organization Code Pink. But the core of the Demilitarize campaign is hyperlocal, consisting of community organizers, Brooklyn Navy Yard workers and tenants, from woodworkers to designers, and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. Organizers have made a sustained effort to connect support for weapons manufacturing at the Navy Yard and lack of investment in the nearby community.

“There really is no manufacturing space anymore in New York. This is why places like the Navy Yard were created,” said Maisha Morales, whose family has lived in the neighborhood since 1931, speaking to the crowd at a protest in September that drew well over 100 people and resulted in eight arrests. “Yet there are still no spaces for people who look like us, but they find a way to give thousands of square feet to companies who profit off of genocide and war.”

It’s been six years since I began attending pro-Palestine demonstrations. Raised in a decidedly apolitical household and trained in the norms and practices of mainstream American journalism, which prioritize distancing oneself from any subjects of potential coverage to maintain “objectivity,” I did so tentatively at first, simply watching from the sidelines as an onlooker rather than an activist or reporter. Eventually, I began to participate more openly, joining in on the chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For a long time, this felt like a radical act in and of itself, and in many ways it still is. But after October 7, it no longer felt like enough. And I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.

“For many decades, Palestine was a fringe issue in the US,” Eman Abdelhadi, an activist and professor at the University of Chicago, told me on a recent phone call. “There wasn’t really a path toward actual cutting of material ties” to Israel, and the movement instead focused on “symbolic wins” and political education. That changed after October 7, 2023, Abdelhadi said. Even as public opinion turned decisively against Israel for the first time in their decades of organizing, it became clear that this would not be enough to stem the flow of weapons to the country, which was still being promoted by many in the Democratic Party despite opposition from their constituents. “There’s a shift within the [pro-Palestine] movement to wanting to make a material impact,” Abdelhadi added, “to move beyond the symbolic and the rhetorical, to actually impose a cost on Israel.”

DBNY organizers told me that their campaign was started as a direct response to what they viewed as “symbolic and performative solidarity,” such as electoral campaigns and protests that, in their view, don’t call for material change. “The Palestine solidarity movement in NYC has largely focused on mobilizations, without any long-term strategy around a larger goal,” the group said in a written statement. “The goals of the DBNY campaign have been very clear, focusing on disrupting the supply chain of imperialism by targeting weapons companies, rather than asking politicians and institutions to end the genocide.”

I’ve also had numerous conversations with friends in the movement who see protests without direct action as funnelling popular anger and organizing energy away from campaigns that could make a material impact, and in many ways I sympathized with their frustration. However, I learned from speaking to experts that previous successful organizing efforts, such as the boycott of apartheid South Africa, incorporated action at all levels.

Rama Kased, an associate professor in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University who was born and raised in Brooklyn, told me that as the repression against pro-Palestine organizing rises, decentralized direct action like the kind undertaken by DBNY will need to be supplemented by electoral work and legal advocacy.

Abdelhadi emphasized that the next step is for campaigns like DBNY to share materials and organizing strategies with other groups around the country. “These campaigns are often more successful when they can maintain pressure locally at the starting point and replicate across different places,” Abdelhadi said. DBNY has talked to groups in Philadelphia, Chicago, and upstate New York, the group told me. I also found parallels between Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Cancel Capital Factory campaign in Austin, Texas, which similarly targets a tech hub with ties to Israeli weapons manufacturing.

DBNY is still calling for a full cultural and economic boycott of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, emphasizing that people should avoid spending money in the complex or hosting events there until its demands are met. Because it’s a decentralized group, there are many ways to participate in DBNY: Some people join the weekly noise demos, which aim to divert people away from shopping or dining at the Navy Yard, while others organize autonomous actions such as sit-ins or blockades. The group is hopeful that its strategy is paying off after Easy Aerial was forced to leave after its lease expired and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation declined to renew it. DBNY has also called on the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric has been supportive of Palestine, to take action (although Mamdani has not publicly acknowledged the group and recently reappointed Greene as the BNYDC’s chief executive). In the words of the DBNY organizers, their campaign is here to stay.

Has it really been 25 years? It was my first week of middle school in New Jersey. We were led out of the building—there were rumors of a bomb threat—and waited for hours until we were sent home. That night, I lay awake wondering if Osama bin Laden was hiding in my yard.

It has been a long quarter-century since 9/11. Almost everyone now recognizes that the US response to Al Qaeda’s attacks was misguided, that the George W. Bush administration’s crackdown did as much damage as the attacks themselves. The positions this magazine took in the weeks, months, and years after September 11, 2001—against torture and military adventurism, and for a reinvestment in domestic programs—are now common sense.

Our first issue to address 9/11 was dated October 1, 2001. It went to press as Manhattan smoldered with fumes and uncertainty. “A great paralyzing white wall of not knowing,” as columnist Patricia J. Williams put it, still lingered in the air. The lead editorial acknowledged the country’s “swooning sense of helpless vulnerability.”

While hawkish ideologues began to talk about “open-ended war” and limiting civil liberties, it was vital, The Nation asserted, to maintain a grip on reality: “It is essential now to stick to hard facts, not fearsome shadows or injured hubris (or the xenophobic hatreds already in the air).” The editorial continued: “The paradox is that if or when we engage in brutal reprisals, they will serve a cathartic function for the vast majority of justifiably outraged Americans.” Yet dropping bombs and overthrowing governments would only stir up further hostility against the United States.

Instead of following our worst impulses as a country, The Nation urged Americans to take a hard look in the mirror. It was time to “examine the true burdens and obligations of acting like an empire awesomely more powerful than any others and answerable to no one.” Surely it would be wiser and more “truly brave” to refuse the easy response of jingoism, which would only lead to the passage of “draconian new laws that undermine civil liberties.” Instead, the attacks should force previously suppressed issues to the center of national debate. That plea went largely unheeded, as the following two and a half decades have shown. “Extremism begets extremism,” then–Washington editor David Corn wrote in that first post-9/11 issue, “and the dark smoke of a dark day will not be easily blown away.”

“The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year, when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague, as we created a media organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.

To recap: For that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside restaurants, and a Walmart worker, all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul.

It’s hard to underestimate the effect Nickel and Dimed’s vacuum-cleaner’s-eye view of what it means to work a minimum-wage job in this country had on so many of us. In my case, I had been partly lulled by the hipster aestheticism of the late 1990s and the myth that ideology itself was at its end (not so fast). For those blinded by America’s late-20th-century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop “unseeing” low-wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taken care of a child already knew but had perhaps not articulated: that there is no such thing as “unskilled” work. As Barbara wrote, “The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk—freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, paid hourly and shabbily—see themselves more clearly, as on a continuum with other working people. Barbara showed us the label “unskilled work,” which divided underpaid hyper-educated freelancers I think of as “black turtleneck workers” and underpaid blue-collar was a false distinction.

In Nickel and Dimed’s wake, I devoted myself to what I thought of as “undercover sociology,” reporting my book Branded from teens’ bedrooms and at marketing conferences. Barbara had that influence because she was a reporter and activist, but also because she was a trickster—she liked to fuck stuff up. With each aperçu, I think of her cackling and muttering, “Take that, Yuppie American reader! Look how impossible it is to live on the wages real people earn!”

As the year 2001 and then the decade progressed, Nickel and Dimed’s thesis became even more resonant. A new recession had started, one caused by the bursting of the dot.com bubble and then by the terrorist attacks six months later, as well as the Enron scandal and other money-man-accounting crises. Wikipedia had just launched and with it a notion of “unskilled expertise.”

In the years after Nickel and Dimed, there were also major movements that were somewhat inspired by it, from Fight for $15 to Occupy Wall Street, a mass movement that started in New York City in response to the corporate bailouts.

Soon after Occupy, I met Barbara, in what was to be the last segment of her life. She had just founded what would become our shared organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and talked to me on the phone, in her crackling voice, about a multimedia project I was working on, The Last Clinic, devoted to the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, which would be the center of the Dobbs decision. She told me about her experience with the underground abortion collective Jane. I was enamored with her from the start: I thought of her as a matriarch of meaning. As with a number of her protégés, mostly women, Barbara also almost immediately put faith in me, constantly dubbing me her “successor.” Needless to say, that gave me faith in myself. Barbara’s brilliance, weirdness, and incorruptibility made her into something of an intellectual curio, an outsider-insider, and thus, for me, easier to love.

As an insider, she was paid a mighty word rate, her book sold 1.5 million copies, and she knew everyone; as an outsider, she far preferred pleasure and freaks to the famous and well-regarded. She was prickly, funny, ribald, in fact, and could be rude—she enjoyed martinis, cigarettes, and sardonic comebacks: when we went to lunch meetings with potential nonprofit funders who would order lattes, she’d enjoy ordering a plain soda, with an anti-elite glint in her eye. She hated sanctimony and reveled in a startling, even comic austerity—in fact, she cast aspersions on women who hired housecleaners. When we started to work together, she wanted us to exist in an anarchist state of shared power, as “co-editors.” (It brought about years of complications, as any management student would have foreseen, but it was worth it.)

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We had gotten into the media business when a-dollar-a-word was the basic pay for an independent reporter. Thirty years later, a-dollar-a-word is a windfall. She knew that she was in the 1 percent of nonfiction writers, most of whom earn $25,000 a year. She also wanted to give back to the reporters who were working in stores or living on the street, and to make sure that not only the rich got to write about poverty. EHRP, the nonprofit she founded and that I ran with her—and then, sadly, without her—became our answer.

Barbara passed away in 2022 and I often wonder what she would make of what has happened since then. She was once the first co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America with Michael Harrington; many decades later, the DSA has given us Zohran Mamdani and today’s DSA-ed crop of left political leaders. What would she make of the group’s astounding political success and the rise of one of her central concerns, “affordability,” in public discourse, inspiring voters as “inequality” somehow could not? What would she think of ICE grabbing off the street the immigrant workers she had championed, the administration’s halting of crucial medical research and the spread of 20th-century diseases like measles as vaxxes are blocked? (A trained biologist, Barbara would surely be particularly appalled.) She would also be keen on AI refuseniks currently refusing to, well, play with the robots or retrain them to do their white-collar jobs. Barbara would, I think, not only report on serving Coca-Colas but also, on being an AI trainer, an Uber driver controlled by the algo, or a content filterer forced to screen violent amateur online footage.

Lastly, she would be pleased to note that Nickel and Dimed continues to sell, a director is planning to make it into a feature film (amazingly, it has already been a musical!). It is also one of the most frequently censored books in the country.

I’ve gathered the formidable contributors that follow, Arlie Hochschild, Deirdre English, Ai-jen Poo, Bill Fletcher, and Ann Larson, all who knew or were greatly influenced by Barbara. In times like these, we should commemorate those like Barbara who fought hard, and well.

—Alissa Quart

Deirdre English

Barbara had always been keenly aware of class: This struck me the first time I met her in the early 1970s as a fellow founding faculty member at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. We co-taught a course in women’s studies and began the seven years of research that resulted in our book, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. That book showed how male-dominated medical mismanagement of women’s physical and mental health had helped authorize stereotypes of gender, class, and race: For example, upper-class women were diagnosed as too weak and “hysterical” for work life outside the home, while working-class and poor women, especially Black women, were deemed so robust as to thrive on hard labor. This “scientific” medicalization of class, race, and gender helped to socially construct identities that were perpetuated as if they were natural.

We remained co-conspirators for life. When I became editor in chief of Mother Jones, I published her work frequently. She interrogated the overseas dumping of banned contraceptives for a National Magazine Award–winning investigative report, and her penetrating book Hearts of Men was a cover story. When she set out to write Nickel and Dimed, she secured me as her listed reference on job applications, and I was all set to confirm her fictitious identity that she was simply a recent divorcee without job experience—but no boss ever bothered to call me to check her references. On the road, she e-mailed me her notes for safe-keeping in case anything happened to her laptop (this was before we all had the alternative of uploading files to data centers, aka “the cloud”) and she called me occasionally to reground in her “previous life.” I claim the honor of having read and discussed the drafts of all of her books over the years. Barbara thrived on questioning everything, thrashing out ideas and pushing them to their logical extremes. Conversations with her were wide-ranging, eye-opening, and often thrilling.

The impact of Nickel and Dimed was epitomized not only by the hands-on labor Barbara performed, or by her no-bullshit voice, but by the systematic class analysis she precisely laid out. It was obvious enough that costs, especially rents, were high while wages were low, as she experienced when, to maintain an adequate caloric intake, she needed a second job. Then she had to move to more expensive lodgings to be closer to that job. This workload exhausted her yet barely elevated her diet of largely beans, chopped meat, and noodles, supplemented with fast food. So the initial findings were laid out.

But Barbara wrote not only of stretched-thin workers who live, then as now, in a “state of emergency” but of the affiliates who manage them, the executives who exploit them and the owners and stockholders who profit from them. She detailed how the practices and costs of disciplining workers with invasive surveillance (so much more pervasive today) weigh against the hopes of workers organizing for higher wages: “It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever greater inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.”

Beside her focus on class, Barbara had a message in Nickel and Dimed about gender, directed especially at members of the labor movement and the left, which still stubbornly stereotyped workers as men in mills, mines, and factories. Yet by the late 1990s, low-wage service jobs were among the fastest-growing types of work. Her choice to take on such jobs, which were done disproportionately by women, was not only a necessity but, as a socialist-feminist, the way she pushed the labor movement to wake up and be more feminist and the feminist movement to be more class- and race-conscious. This multi-issue message was always Barbara’s creed.

One anecdote about Nickel and Dimed that comes to mind occurred after a university seminar with feminist scholars. As we left to get lunch, and Barbara remarked, “They didn’t seem to like me much, I wonder why not?” Oh, I said, it’s because you made them feel guilty that their careers depend on hiring low-wage women workers!” At that, Barbara laughed it off saying, Oh well, if that’s the reason, I’m fine with it!

It’s not that Barbara had it in for professional class women or scholars; she was one herself, after all. She was acutely aware that her own real life in the upper 20 percent also depended on the labor of the innumerable laborers all around us as well as multitudes of overseas workers. Just buying a shirt or a pound of rice makes you enmeshed, if not complicit, in the tragic vicious circle she had elaborated.

Barbara felt that as they became more successful careerists, women should not abandon their erstwhile sisters, or the initial insistence of the Women’s Liberation Movement that its cause is that of all women. Members of what she termed the Professional/Managerial Class should do whatever they could in that regard, paying very well and using their advanced skills to campaign for labor rights, higher wages, and public services such as childcare—as she did. In contrast, the “elite capture” of feminist thought in academia and abstruse jargon troubled her.

Not that she let men off the hook, sailing as they do on a sea of unequal resources, ranging from the unpaid labor of their mothers and wives, and the often lower pay of colleagues, to all the low-wage workers who serve them with the pleasant luxuries of their lives. Barbara’s attitude to them was, get over yourselves and pay up! Twenty-five years have passed, and the cruel truth is that things are even more unequal now for low-paid workers than they were when Barbara wrote her vivid call to action. Under Trump, progress has reversed. That’s no reason to quit socialist-feminism. I think she would say to all of us: Fight harder.

Ai-jen Poo

In 2001, as a young organizer, I spent my days listening to nannies in the playgrounds of Manhattan. The attention and nurturing they poured into the children in their care, juxtaposed with their conditions—not having clear job expectations or consistent hours, not having job security or access to benefits of any kind, earning wages so low that the ends rarely met—felt both enraging and perplexing. Until Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed and brought the epidemic of low-wage work in America into the light.

Seeing the world of work through her sharp eyes helped us all see the service jobs at the bottom of our economy as a crucial arena for change, buoying nascent organizing efforts among workers like domestic workers. Experiencing the gap between hard-earned wages and the cost of meeting our basic human needs like food, housing, and transportation through her journey, we all felt the outrage; she established a pattern that no one should stand for, certainly not the workers themselves.

Her stint as a housekeeper gave her honorary status among domestic workers in New York. We adopted her into our family of fiery women, and she bore witness to our seven-year campaign to change the New Deal–era exclusions of domestic workers from New York’s labor laws. She marched with us in Albany, stood vigil with us in front of the governor’s office, and joined me in the parks as I rallied support among workers for the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in the nation. Sixteen years after NY’s bill was won, 12 additional states have passed a Bill of Rights, Washington State as recently as this year. Progress has been made, but much bigger threats loom as we enter the age of AI. Many important lessons from Nickel and Dimed are more salient than ever: There is much more to most jobs than the rest of us think. There’s nothing like seeing the world through the eyes of workers to show us the truth of this economy. And there is no replacement for the human genius of great storytelling. For these truths, I will forever be grateful to Barbara Ehrenreich.

Arlie Hochschild

In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell entered the life of the homeless tramp in grim one-day-stay city shelters in the 1930s, joining a society of males doomed as unemployed outsiders. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich goes one further. She takes us with her into the world of hotel maids, waitresses, Walmart sales associates, all of whom are employed outsiders. And however many jobs they work, she notes, they are doing the extra job of managing their poverty. She counts her tips as a Florida waitress, thumbs through her thin wallet for a security deposit on a rented room, learns to make hotel beds with triple-sheet setups and wrinkle-free finish and she gags at ammonia-based window sprays and pungent toilet-bowl cleaners. Barbara conveys their sinking feeling that there is no way out of their dreary lives as outsiders within.

The same holds for the women described in a book Barbara and I co-edited, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, which describes women who leave their own children behind in the Philippines or Mexico in order to care for the children of others in the United States. In a sense they learned to live “outside” of their own motherhood, even as sex workers learned to live outside of their sexuality. Barbara also applied her outsider-within eye to her own experience as a survivor of breast cancer, as she confronted what felt to her like a jarring culture of bright pink ribbons, teddy bears, and official optimism. In all her ideas and feelings, Barbara moved with ease past the passport controls that specialist academics can put up around ideas she cared about—ranging from the cave artists of Lascaux to Mardi Gras celebrants in New Orleans to the white-coated male medical authorities whom she and Deirdre English describe as taking over the industry of advising women. Through her wild array of curiosities and joys and journeys through time and place, Barbara gives us the extraordinary gift of her special eye of the outsider-within. It is part of her legacy which will ever remain forever a world treasure.

Ann Larson

When I first read Nickel and Dimed in the early 2000s, I remember thinking that I didn’t know it was possible to write so beautifully and with such humor about low-wage work and poverty. I assigned the book in my writing classes at colleges where I was employed as an adjunct. Earning a fraction of the wages of regular faculty while racking up student debt as a graduate student, I was nervous about my future. But the world of customer service jobs was still distant enough that I could teach the book as a scholarly work. Students were enthralled at Ehrenreich’s ability to mix research with compassionate, on-the-ground reporting. And it all came together thanks to her inimitable narrative voice.

Years later, I heard that voice in my head while working as a supermarket cashier. Like many of the workers Ehrenreich encountered in the low-wage jobs she wrote about, my colleagues struggled to keep food on the table. Virtually no one could afford health insurance or a vacation. Employees suffered from repetitive stress disorders. We clocked in and out with our fingerprints, connecting our bodies to the store’s timekeeping mechanism. Being off the clock felt less like free time than like a state of waiting. There was work and then there was waiting to go back to work.

One day, a line from Nickel and Dimed popped into my head. “What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour,” Ehrenreich wrote, “is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” No longer hearing those words as a teacher but as a worker, they spoke to me more forcefully than ever. They perfectly described the existential struggle of punching a clock in a supermarket. I started thinking about writing about my job.

With the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization founded by Ehrenreich, I published an article about cashiering. The piece was so well received that I decided to write a book. Cleanup on Aisle Five, also supported by EHRP, which came out this summer. It wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t shown the way.

Bill Fletcher Jr.

I first met Barbara in April of 1988 in New York City. A mutual friend of ours introduced us when I happened to be in New York for a wedding. Barbara was already an icon on the left, and I think that I stammered when speaking with her, in part because I had the sense that she was sizing me up. We were talking about how to unite the left—an issue that became a centerpiece of the discussions she and I had until we last saw each other.

There was, however, another piece, one related to uniting the left but also having its own identity. Of course, I am referencing Barbara’s deep commitment to the working class and to its pursuit of justice. Nickel and Dimed is both a testament to Barbara’s commitment to the working class and illustrative of an outstanding exposé of the polarization of wealth that has increased under neoliberal globalization making it more and more difficult for working people to survive.

Barbara’s commitment to workers took many forms. This included supporting unionized workers in strikes, as well as workers who were attempting to secure unionization. Yet one of the most interesting and inventive initiatives she undertook was an effort to organize professional workers. As a founder of the United Professionals, Barbara sought to organize so-called white-collar workers who are, all too often, overlooked by the media as well as traditional labor unions. Some efforts were undertaken, such as the alliance between the Service Employees International Union and 9-to-5 (the organization of women office workers) which included the creation of a local of SEIU—SEIU Local 925—to undertake that work. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees certainly organized many white-collar workers in the public sector. That said, these efforts did not address the core of what Barbara set out to address through United Professionals. Her vision was of a membership organization that could organize and advocate for white-collar professionals as workers regardless of union eligibility. It is indicative of the myopia of organized labor that her effort received little of their support and, ultimately, was forced to close up. That said, the failure of United Professionals never stopped Barbara in her quest to support the struggle of workers for social and economic justice. It is that which we should remember, especially as we celebrate the anniversary of her great book, Nickel and Dimed.

Yes!

In March, I stood on a porch in northern Idaho and spoke with Nancy, a labor nurse who has delivered hundreds of babies over the years. She signed the petition I was carrying, for the Reproductive Freedom & Privacy Act, because she knows exactly how many things can and do go wrong during a pregnancy. So did Jim in Canyon County, who told me that he was a lifelong conservative who believed Idaho’s abortion ban had gone too far. So did Corey, a military veteran who declared that the politicians needed to mind their own damn business—and whose wife had to be flown to Utah to receive essential care.

By the time the signature drive ended, volunteers with our coalition, Idahoans United for Women & Families, had gathered over 110,000 signatures in every corner of the state, from Boise and Coeur d’Alene to towns most people outside Idaho have never heard of.

I start with our petition because the question posed in this debate can make the topic sound like an abstract line-drawing exercise. It isn’t. In Idaho, we’re not choosing between an ideal policy and a compromised one. We’re choosing between the total ban we have right now, which contains “exceptions” so deliberately narrow as to be unusable, and a standard that protected access to essential care for nearly 50 years.

That distinction matters, and I think it’s gotten lost as people around the country debate the merits of our petition. Our initiative restores the framework that Idaho and much of the country lived under before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion: legal access to abortion before viability (the point in a pregnancy when the fetus may be capable of surviving outside the uterus, typically between 22 and 24 weeks), and after viability when it’s necessary to protect the patient’s life or health or in cases of a fatal fetal diagnosis. (Notably, Idaho is one of only five states with no health exception.)

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This is not a new restriction that we invented to win over skeptical voters. It’s the same line set by the Supreme Court that many of us have lived with for our entire lives. We are not asking Idaho to accept a limit; we are asking it to take back a line that a majority of Idahoans still support.

I understand that some advocates want ballot language with no gestational reference point at all, full stop, and they are critical of Idaho’s policy because it includes post-viability limits. But I must strongly disagree.

At the risk of becoming even more of a pariah in national abortion-rights circles, I’d ask these advocates to consider the nuances of voters’ complex personal beliefs around abortion. A majority of Americans, and Idahoans, understandably balk at the notion of no restrictions because of the bad-faith work of anti-abortion activists, who will say and do anything to misrepresent what post-viability access so often actually means: a wanted pregnancy that turned fatal for the fetus or catastrophic for the pregnant woman in the final months.

Nothing in our initiative—or in any serious reproductive-rights initiative on any ballot—permits what anti-abortion activists claim it does. The idea of unrestricted abortion “up to the moment of birth” is not a real policy anywhere in the United States. It is a bad-faith phrase created to be repeated, not examined, and I’d rather focus on what the policy does than on rebutting a ghoulish caricature of it.

Since Dobbs, we’ve ended up with a patchwork of healthcare access, a jumble of unworkable bans, and women from states like Idaho (where we’ve lost 43 percent of our obstetricians since the 2022 ban) enduring hardship and heartache as it becomes increasingly clear that no one is coming to save us.

This is the system we’re organizing within, and I’d argue that’s exactly why the viability line is the right choice for a citizens’ initiative in a state like Idaho—not as a ceiling on our ambitions, but as the reflection of a broad, reasonable coalition united by urgent need.

Our campaign includes physicians and nurses, Catholics and Mormons, college students and retirees, ranchers and suburbanites, young parents and great-grandparents, Republicans and Democrats and independents who agree on very little else. What holds this coalition together isn’t a shared position on the best, most perfect reproductive-healthcare policy. Instead, it’s a shared belief that politicians are always the wrong people to be making these decisions.

That belief is not a lesser version of reproductive freedom. It’s the version that is building consensus among voters, and it’s the standard in 21 states, from red to blue to purple ones. I don’t know what the future of the national movement to restore reproductive rights to every American looks like, and that’s not my job; my responsibility is to the women, doctors, and families suffering needlessly in Idaho. Our future rests in campaigns like this one—rooted in local trust, driven by life-or-death stakes, and honest about what we’re asking for and why.

Melanie Folwell

No!

Ballot initiatives meant to protect reproductive rights should not include restrictions on abortion in the third trimester or at potential fetal “viability.” Either people have the right to make decisions about their lives and bodies without government interference, or they don’t. Whether we call this form of restriction a “limit” or a “ban,” it authorizes government interference in people’s medical decisions. The consequences are delayed or denied medical care, criminalization, and diminished rights for pregnant people.

For all these reasons and more, leading medical organizations and public-health experts reject legal restrictions on abortion, including in the third trimester. Medical professionals know that denying someone timely abortion care at any point in their pregnancy jeopardizes their health and safety, and the exceptions written into any law are insufficient.

The reality is that abortions later in pregnancy reflect diverse and often overlapping circumstances: serious fetal diagnoses, threats to the pregnant person’s health, a later recognition of pregnancy, abusive relationships that make it difficult or unsafe to end a pregnancy early on, interactions with crisis-pregnancy centers, and financial or logistical barriers that delay access to timely care.

Critically, laws that limit rights also adopt the premise of abortion bans: that at some point in a pregnancy, the government should overrule the pregnant person’s decisions about their own body. That premise fundamentally reshapes the relationship between pregnant people and the state.

If the government can claim authority over a pregnancy at some point, that becomes the point when the pregnant person’s rights are diminished. Behaviors during pregnancy become paths to punishment: The same legal foundation is used to justify surveillance, investigate miscarriages, and prosecute pregnancy outcomes.

That is why debates over third-trimester abortion cannot be separated from debates over the criminalization of pregnancy. At a time when such criminalization is accelerating, efforts to preserve abortion limits leave intact the legal foundation that harms pregnant people. Protections with gestational limits simply fail to meet the current moment.

For decades, the abortion-rights movement has accepted compromises intended to make abortion more politically palatable to moderates. We celebrated Roe v. Wade even though it explicitly allowed states to enact restrictions that denied care and allowed criminalization. We perpetuated an anti-abortion stigma when we reassured the public that later abortions were tragic but rare. We emphasized exceptions instead of bodily autonomy.

Those compromises only served to normalize the idea that the government should have the authority to override a pregnant person’s decisions. Activists must stop conceding that premise.

Abortion bans are never acceptable. But we also don’t have to settle for them. Ballot initiatives both with and without limits have succeeded since Roe was overturned. This suggests that voters who support abortion rights will support meaningful protections when given the chance.

Defenders of limits often argue that they are “meeting people where they are,” shifting blame onto the public, as if people are clamoring for limited protections. Instead, public-opinion research shows that most people reject government interference and support abortion access. (And new research suggests that the number of people who support abortion in all circumstances is growing.) Their biggest fear is that excluding a viability limit will doom a ballot initiative, jeopardizing access to abortion earlier in pregnancy. But that is a false choice. None of this diminishes the need for strong legal protections for early-abortion care. It does, however, challenge the assumption that the only way to protect abortion access is to abandon later-abortion patients.

I understand the appeal of political compromise, because I once believed in it myself. But then I needed abortion care in the third trimester and discovered that my then–home state of New York effectively banned abortion after 24 weeks. Already in the throes of a crisis, my husband and I had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, travel across the country, and navigate one of the most difficult experiences of our lives far from home. Ultimately, we were lucky. But we learned the hard way that there are always people left behind on the other side of a political compromise.

Ballot initiatives present an extraordinary opportunity to define the future of reproductive rights. We should not squander it on entrenching the same legal framework that has long justified abortion bans and the criminalization of pregnancy.

This moment demands solidarity across state lines and a clear commitment to one fundamental truth: Pregnancy must never erase a person’s rights, and the decision whether, when, and how to continue a pregnancy belongs to the person living it—not to the government.

Erika A. Christensen

Hubert Harrison was a Caribbean-born educator and activist who was a prominent advocate for labor rights, free speech, radical internationalism, and free love in the Jim Crow era. He inspired and contributed to political organizations and cultural movements as diverse as the Socialist Party, the Marcus Garvey movement, and the so-called “Harlem Renaissance.” Harrison also wrote a number of pieces for The Nation in the 1920s as the magazine’s first regular Black book reviewer.

Now an acclaimed new book by Brian Kwoba, an associate professor of history and director of the African and African American Studies program at the University of Memphis, examines the life and thought of this unjustly neglected figure. Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism has won the 2026 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the 2026 Phillis Wheatley Book Award from the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage. The Nation spoke with Kwoba about Harrison’s legacy and its significance for political transformation today.

—Peter Cole

Peter Cole: Hubert Harrison was an incredible figure, but few people know about him outside of Black-studies departments. So tell us who he was and why he mattered.

Brian Kwoba: In September 1912, a century before Occupy Wall Street, a Black orator’s booming baritone occupied the attention of a large crowd in front of the New York Stock Exchange building on Wall Street. It was the voice of Hubert Harrison; he was making the case for socialism. The New York Times described him as “an eloquent and forceful negro speaker” who had “shattered all records for distance” in his address on behalf of working people and against the robber-baron oligarchs of the Gilded Age.

After blazing a trail for Black activists in the Socialist Party, Harrison called for an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Colored International alliance in the face of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most spectacularly, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey, who headed the largest international organization of Black people in modern history.

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PC: How, when, and where did Harrison become
radicalized?

BK: Harrison was born on the island of St. Croix in 1883 and moved to New York City in 1900 as a teenager. There he saw firsthand vast wealth inequality and heard constant reports on the national epidemic of white racist lynchings of African Americans. Like so many other Caribbean migrants who had come to the United States, Harrison was shocked by the intensity of the racial violence he found here.

PC: What was Harrison’s relationship with the Industrial Workers of the World, the wider labor movement, and the Socialist Party?

BK: Harrison held a number of the odd jobs available to a young Black immigrant in early-20th-century Manhattan. Eventually he secured a job as a postal worker and joined the postal workers’ union. But after he wrote op-ed pieces critical of Booker T. Washington’s conservatism, Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine” got him fired. Far from discouraging him, the retaliatory firing led Harrison to join the Socialist Party as a full-time paid organizer.

Harrison campaigned several times for Eugene Debs for president. He also wrote a series on “The Negro and Socialism” in the party’s International Socialist Review and articles in The New York Call analyzing race and class in the United States as seen through a historical-materialist lens. He then launched the Colored Socialist Club in Harlem, the party’s first official Black-led formation, to recruit Black workers and organizers. Unfortunately, the party failed to heed his call for special attention to the serious oppression of Black workers, who, he argued, formed the most proletarian element in the country.

This unsavory experience with what he called the “Southernism” (i.e., anti-Black racism) of the Socialists led him to support the more radical Industrial Workers of the World, which welcomed Black workers and Black labor leaders like Ben Fletcher into its ranks. Harrison was the only Black speaker to address strike rallies and union meetings alongside IWW leaders like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and “Big Bill” Haywood during the Paterson Silk Strike of over 20,000 workers in 1913.

PC: Harrison became an influence on Marcus Garvey, who founded and led the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Tell us about that.

BK: When Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, he aimed to build a Tuskegee-style industrial school in Jamaica. In 1917, shortly after Garvey got to Harlem, he joined Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro Americans. The Liberty League transformed Garvey by imbuing him with a “race-first” politics, a mass-movement (rather than school-building) orientation, and a model for including African Americans and African Caribbeans in a single organization. Eventually Garvey left the league, but he adopted key elements of Harrison’s model to expand the Universal Negro Improvement Association into the largest international organization of Black people in modern history. In other words, Marcus Garvey’s name would never have become attached to the global Black-nationalist movement without the decisive influence of Hubert Harrison.

At the same time, Harrison saw firsthand how Garvey’s monarchical, ultranationalist, imperial, and pro-capitalist fixations helped boost Garvey’s ego and mythical status but formed barriers to the project of liberating the Black working class from racial capitalism. If Harrison learned in the Socialist Party that class consciousness will never achieve its goal without a serious grounding in Black liberation, he learned from the Garvey movement that pan-African liberation will never achieve its goal without a deep grounding in class consciousness.

PC: Why did Harrison get so thoroughly erased from popular memory?

BK: This question is the elephant in the room. Harrison proved too hot to handle and too cold to hold, thanks to his incisive criticisms of all the forces and figures that might otherwise have kept his memory alive. Take, for example, the “Harlem Renaissance” narrative: Harrison argued that African Americans had a rich literary heritage from the 19th century onward and thus rejected the notion that a “renaissance” was suddenly underway in the 1920s. He maintained that after the wanton destruction of the First World War, the white cultural-entertainment industry had now turned for inspiration and rejuvenation to the artistic output of the postwar “New Negro” in Harlem. The industry sold handpicked examples of nonthreatening Black artists to white audiences as a “Negro renaissance.”

This idea, and its enshrinement as the hegemonic narrative about Harlem history in the early 20th century, deliberately excluded the many creative people—both within and beyond Harlem—who represented more visionary thinking, like that of the free-loving blues women, Garveyists, Black Marxists, and Harrison himself.

PC: You write that there are things about Harrison’s legacy that are not fully appreciated. Can you tell us what those are?

BK: The most controversial and most generative of them concerns Harrison’s sexual politics, which were not only ahead of his time but apparently ahead of ours, too. Harrison developed a Black free-love politics at a time when such a concept was unthinkably risky and revolutionary.

Harrison’s was a time of strict sexual repression on the part of both church and state through the Comstock laws. White mobs lynched Black men often for the alleged sexual threat they posed to white women. In this sex-negative context, Harrison was one of the first figures in African American history to publicly call for legalizing contraception and offering publicly available courses on sex education; he also openly denounced the church and state repression of sexuality and defended a conception of love based on variety and freedom.

By connecting capitalism, white supremacy, the church, European colonialism, and women’s oppression to compulsory monogamy, Harrison articulated—in the 1910s!—a Black free-love politics that would begin to bloom quite spectacularly in the sexual experimentation that emerged within and alongside the artistic and cultural awakening of the Harlem of the 1920s.

In short, my book does more than simply resurrect a long-lost beacon of possibility from the Black radical tradition. Harrison’s “forbidden genius” offers a gem-filled kaleidoscope of visionary politics for radical transformation in the 21st century. So it’s high time that we reclaim it.

Imagine that you’ve woken up one morning as a protein-“maxxing” influencer—an online personality focused on maximizing your health and body aesthetics by dialing up your protein intake. Your daily video stream might start with a protein electrolyte water followed by some weightlifting. For breakfast, you might eat several eggs with squash and avocado (to make sure you’re also maxxing healthy fat and beta-carotene), or you might keep it simple with a pound of fried ground beef. Lunch might be a human-brain-size glob of chopped raw tuna, a big juicy steak, or a Japanese fried-rice-and-tempeh dish sponsored by your vegan coaching company. At some point, you will likely consume a protein shake, a perfect opportunity to promote your self-branded protein powder. Dinner might be meat again, or perhaps a chicken quesadilla split into multiple protein-bearing sections. Or, stripping off the thin veneer of normalcy that separates man from goblin, you could feast on raw organ meats just like Liver King, a fitness influencer who claims to emulate the “ancestral lifestyle” of our Paleolithic forebears.

Even if you aren’t plugged into the online proteinverse, you have certainly observed the nutrient’s takeover of your local grocery store. You’ve seen the bars and shakes, the supplements and powders. You’ve ogled the protein water and perhaps even noticed that your favorite brand of heavy cream boasts “uttermost protein.” Pizza crust, Cup Noodles, even cocktails (witness the Espresso Proteini)—no food or drink, it seems, is safe from Big Protein, a multibillion-dollar enterprise since at least 2020. By now, protein is just one more metric to maxx in our never-ending pursuit of the optimal self.

What low fat was to the 1980s and ’90s, and low carb was to the 2000s, high protein is to our current era. As media outlets analyze America’s love affair with this macronutrient, noted protein-enjoyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is helping to revise government nutrition policy. With its top-heavy look, RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid recalls the V-shaped male torso idealized by the online self-improvement community of “looksmaxxers.” The discourse, like the processed-food and supplement industries, has itself become protein-rich—and, in the case of the food pyramid, helps signal the Trump administration’s alignment with the masculinist right.

More than an Internet fad, more even than the food industry’s latest effort to wrest profit from an increasingly fickle and economically stressed public, proteinmaxxing is part of the deep-rooted social pathology of nutritionism: the idea that a whole food is no more and no less than the sum of its parts. This reductive approach to eating marks proteinmaxxing as part of what might be called the Great Unbundling, which atomizes our bodies and minds as surely as bag-check fees have been separated out from base airfares. In the Great Unbundling, we experience the logical end point of a culture that regards an overwhelming array of choices as capitalism’s greatest gift. Whether you’re ordering takeout or choosing a healthcare plan, the thinking goes, you’ll be happiest if you can select from multiple options, tailor-making your own bliss.

On the food front, the Great Unbundling has convinced Americans that healthy diets are made up of discrete nutrients that can be chemically disaggregated from their source foods and ingested in optimal doses. Food science has made it possible to isolate, say, an apple’s natural antioxidants and process them into any number of “apple-inspired” derivatives. The problem is that the resulting App’lGlop™ may not be as nourishing as an apple—or it may be so addictive that you can’t stop yourself from consuming 47 pouches, at 7,000 percent of your recommended dietary allowance of sugar. These defects are obscured by marketing and advertising, enabled by the government’s laissez-faire attitude toward the food industry’s health claims.

This regulatory environment pushes consumers into what the 1990s-era conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper called “doing your own research,” or scouring the Internet for clues about which supplement or superfood may be right for them. The gamified logic that has transformed us into a nation of food-science Indiana Joneses also animates our drive for self-optimization. We constantly have to convince ourselves that we’re having a peak experience rather than an impoverished one: Hey, you’re not slowly killing yourself by subsisting exclusively on frozen pizza—you’re getting 32 grams of protein!

In the end, what gets unbundled along with our purchases is our self-perception. We begin to understand ourselves not as an integrated whole but as a collection of swappable parts that can be tuned up ad infinitum. Yet no matter how much time, money, or protein powder we invest in, the human condition guarantees that perfection will remain out of reach.

America has long been a nation of dietary obsessives, our food habits shaped less by our own tastes than by others’ religious beliefs or profit motives. Long before megacorporations like Sysco were reducing restaurant menus to standardized blandness, Americans had learned to elevate convenience and uniformity over enjoyment, freshness, and regional specificity. In the 19th century, the domestic-science movement led a broad shift away from homemade foods based on family tradition toward processed ones. As the food historian Laura Shapiro has written, domestic scientists—drawn from an emerging class of mostly white, East Coast professionals—believed that “if they could reform American eating habits, they could reform Americans” themselves. The nation’s fate, it seemed, hung on the willingness of home cooks, whether ladies of the house or hired hands, to step into the bright, sanitized world of measuring spoons and packaged yeast. Only after the housewife was cleansed of irrational attachments—to her hard-won intuitions, to her country or ethnicity of origin, to her very senses—could she adequately support her family’s pursuit of the American dream.

Enter the cooking schools, which aimed to supplant guesswork with measurement and to cure cognitive overload with planning. Smothering all variations in season, region, and taste beneath a prim, starched, Bostonian sameness, cooking-school instructors helped establish a food culture that proved durable precisely because it was boring. The women who championed this new type of cooking, Shapiro writes, “were proud of their lifeless palates,” which they considered essential to creating a healthful national cuisine. The American food of the future might not taste great, but it would fuel healthy, morally upright workers. In contrast to these lofty goals, Shapiro writes, “the flavors of food were of slight, somewhat anthropological interest.”

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The idea of food as a shortcut to Protestant virtue is still with us today. It lives on in the joyless slop served in American hospitals and nursing homes; in Nutraloaf, the homogenized nightmare blob used to punish US prison inmates; and in products like Huel and Soylent, the “nutritionally complete,” “science-backed” bachelor chow beloved by tech bros. This form of pragmatism-maxxing has also enabled the protein bar—the gentleman’s Nutraloaf—to leap from some venture capitalist’s carceral imagination to a bodega near you.

Once food is understood primarily as fuel, and those it is fueling as engines of national prosperity, the path toward dehumanization has been laid. Today, all that remains of the cooking-school teacher’s earnestness, her Quakerish simplicity, is a commitment to hard work and deprivation. Fold in a bottomless appetite for quarterly earnings and you have the perfect food-industry executive. He and a diffuse network of online health-and-wellness influencers—including proteinmaxxers—work symbiotically to convince the American worker-consumer that food is just one more metric to optimize. Just as some 19th-century housewives were enthralled by cooking-school notions of health and hygiene, so are their descendants trapped in the ideal of productivity. Eager to perform efficiency (and thus, we hope, maintain our family’s health-insurance coverage), we will wolf down a sad desk lunch instead of taking a break. All the better if, loaded with protein, this meal helps us soldier on until we can prepare for the next day.

But should we, in fact, be proteinmaxxing? Signs point to no. The Trump administration may be telling us to “prioritize protein foods at every meal,” but most Americans are eating plenty of protein. In fact, we are probably eating too much—around one gram per kilogram of body weight on average, with two-thirds of it coming from meat. Instead, we could all probably benefit from more fiber. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends 25 grams a day for women and 38 for men, but Americans typically eat only about 10 to 15 grams—far short of the ideal daily dose. Insufficient fiber can lead to constipation, which a recent study linked to major depression. With such low fiber intake, is it any wonder that Americans are as miserable as ever?

The food we consume every day befits our status as pawns in the Great Unbundling. Attractively packaged and flawlessly marketed to the micro-demographic we identify with, our meals are more likely to be heavily processed than fresh-cooked from whole foods. Their ingredients are often shipped from far away rather than produced locally. They may be so sweet or salty, so loaded with satiety-defying ingredients, that our brains forget how little nourishment we’re actually getting. And since this type of food lends itself to solo eating, it often doesn’t provide the social connection that humans are hard-wired to crave.

Lawmakers have not only failed to keep up with the industry guile that makes these foods so ubiquitous in the American diet, but in many cases they have actually aided and abetted it. Since 1906, US law has held food manufacturers to specific labeling requirements for imitation goods, such as alternative proteins. In 1938, it became illegal to sell an imitation unless “its label bears, in type of uniform size and prominence, the word ‘imitation’ and, immediately thereafter, the name of the food imitated.” This is how we got, say, Trader Joe’s Surimi Imitation Crabmeat, or “krab.”

What the 1938 law did not do, however, was to define imitation. Over the years, industry scientists created products that mimicked the taste and texture of foods like hamburgers and ice cream while containing few of their actual ingredients. In 1973, the Food and Drug Administration sought to dispel confusion by distinguishing “imitations” from “substitutes.” The former were defined as nutritionally inferior and required special labeling. Substitutes, on the other hand, were deemed nutritionally equivalent to the products they imitated and could be sold without further ado. “Subsequently,” one analysis of the 1973 law notes, “the range and variety of substitute products on the market significantly increased.”

For food manufacturers, permission to flood the zone with appealingly labeled knockoff foods—from lemonless lemonade to high-protein meatless “crumbles”—was a major victory. Consumers, meanwhile, became increasingly perplexed, not to mention diseased. In 1968, the Senate convened a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to help mitigate hunger and malnutrition. Soon, however, the committee began trying to understand why Americans were suffering from such high rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Its conclusion—that, far from suffering from malnutrition, “at least 30 million Americans” were actually overeating—was reflected in a 1977 report titled Dietary Goals for the United States. The first edition of Dietary Goals recommended that Americans “reduce consumption of meat,” among other high-calorie foods. Under pressure from the food industry, however, the committee issued a second edition that replaced the “eat less” messaging with ambivalent, unbundled guidance like “decrease consumption of animal fats.”

This seemingly innocuous terminological shift was a boon for the food industry. If, in 1973, manufacturers had won the right to market imitations without labeling them as such, now they could formulate products featuring more or less of whatever nutrients the government favored, then advertise them as health foods. One result was the low-fat-diet craze, which dominated the nutrition landscape from approximately 1980 through the mid-2010s. Newly empowered to make health claims, the food industry began churning out low- or no-fat products packed with sugar, vegetable oils, and fillers. An unintended consequence was the “SnackWell effect,” wherein a person feels so virtuous for having chosen a low-fat food that they gorge themselves on it. But even as many of these products were touted as “reduced-guilt” options, the rates of obesity and other chronic illnesses rose.

When companies began churning out their low-fat creations in the late 1970s, they were, in theory, empowering people to choose how much fat to consume—but they were also contributing to the Great Unbundling. To make their offerings palatable, the industry had to observe a kind of nutritional conservation of energy, swapping in one basic substance (sugar—i.e., carbohydrates) for another (fats). Whole foods were increasingly disintegrated into their constituent chemicals—macronutrients, originally discovered in the early 19th century.

In 1827, the British chemist William Prout concluded that all foods are composed of “the saccharine, the oily, and the albuminous”—that is, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. By the middle of the century, Justus von Liebig, a German chemist known as the “father of nutrition science,” had settled on protein as the “master nutrient.” So strong was Liebig’s belief in protein’s miraculous powers that in 1847 he developed Extractum carnis Liebig, a beef extract for those too poor to buy actual beef. “To a considerable extent,” the author Michael Pollan writes, “we still have a food system organized around the promotion of protein as the master nutrient.”

For critics of industrial food production like Pollan or Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, nutritionist thinking has done more harm than good. “Because public discussion of nutrition issues tends to focus on single nutrients,” Nestle writes in Food Politics, her landmark study of the US food industry, common-sense dietary recommendations become “hopelessly obscured.” According to Pollan, the emphasis on nutrients over whole foods takes on a “quasireligious” character, with government officials and scientific experts acting as priests shepherding us toward “dietary salvation.” Every fad diet emerges from what Pollan describes as a dualistic ideology with an “evil nutrient for adherents to excoriate” and “a savior nutrient” they can adore. Given that there are only so many good nutrients, it’s no surprise that protein is now king. “It’s the only thing that’s left,” Nestle told me. “There are only four sources of calories: protein, fat, carbohydrate, and alcohol. Fat is out. Carbohydrate is out. And you can’t tell people to eat more alcohol.”

Proteinmaxxing influencers flourish in this environment of little to no regulation. At the root of our susceptibility to diet fads is neither laziness nor gullibility but rather an anxious desire to deconstruct the black box of expert guidance—which, though scientific in form, is often far from objective in content. Food companies invest significant resources not only in lobbying the government but also in wooing experts by sponsoring their research or endowing professorships. “Co-opting experts—especially academic experts—is an explicit corporate strategy,” Nestle writes. If experts are known to be for sale, is it any wonder that their recommendations are suspect? Those who seek alternative perspectives are attempting to do for health advice what the Protestant Reformation did for Catholic liturgy: translate opaque dead-language texts into an actionable vernacular. Yet this openness to influence makes us vulnerable to online wellness grifters, who have gained power since the Covid-19 pandemic and are now telegraphing their low-fact messaging from the government itself.

Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and a noted authority in optimization research, finds the popular fixation on maxxing “offensive.” Many contemporary nutrition and fitness practices, from injecting peptides to consuming Joe Rogan–endorsed supplements, are stealing scientific valor. Rather than drawing on empirical observation or study, they rely on vibes. Any “findings” that health influencers report are anecdotal, even apocryphal—and yet, from Rogan on down, they speak with dead-eyed certainty.

A perfect example of optimization logic run amok is the looksmaxxer Clavicular. Born Braden Eric Peters, the twentysomething influencer burst onto the scene in 2025 with videos promoting dubious beauty tips like “bonesmashing” and taking meth to stay lean. His main gift to humanity has been to popularize terms previously confined to incel subcultures, like “frame-mogging” (making another guy look bad by being taller or buffer than him), “foids” (women), or “jestermaxxing” (compulsively striving to impress the foids with attention-seeking behavior). Clavicular’s patter also consists of scientific-sounding acronyms that, on closer inspection, qualify as symptoms of what he would call “brainrotmaxxing”: “PSL” (derived from the names of the Internet forums PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism); “SMV” (sexual market value); “LTN” (low-tier normie). These terms suggest a scientific seriousness that belies their origins in the Internet’s foulest abattoirs.

Trying to optimize qualitative variables like “sexual market value” or multitasking with more than one metric at a time catapults would-be maxxers away from logic and reason and into the realm of fantasy. The problem with any form of maxxing, then, is that it’s both too vague and too specific, puffed up with unearned quantitative authority. According to Recht, the outcome is a “corrosive mentality” that “erases a lot of what makes life worth living.” And, indeed, Clavicular and his ilk do not seem especially happy (though they might counter that happiness is not the point—“ascension” is).

Whether you’re fine-tuning your appearance or your diet, maxxing can lead not merely to ill health but to the darkest possibilities of the human experience. “Scientific rigor often takes you to skull-measuring,” Recht says. “We think that the quantified is objective,” but “just because you’re counting doesn’t make you a scientist.” Even the mathematically inclined, as Recht details on his Substack blog arg min, can miss the mark when they try to optimize human behaviors like eating. In 1945, the economist George Stigler published a paper describing the optimal diet. Using information about dozens of foods, he crafted a regimen that could be followed at minimal cost—just 11 cents a day in 1939 money—while satisfying the USDA’s nutritional guidelines for calories, protein, calcium, iron, and vitamins. The only problem was that, as Recht points out, “Stigler’s diet was horrifying,” consisting of about “one pound of flour, two ounces of evaporated milk, five ounces of cabbage, one ounce of spinach, and a pound of dried navy beans” per day. “No one who wasn’t being tortured would eat this,” he writes. Eating, like making art or falling in love, involves numerous subjective, unquantifiable factors. And “if you can’t quantify it,” Recht concludes, “you can’t optimize it.”

This objection is unlikely to deter committed proteinmaxxers, whose behavior is rooted in the most unassailable metric of all: personal belief. What RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again crowd are proposing, Nestle told me, “is for you to develop your own personal ideology around food,” an ambition facilitated by the disinformation vector that is social media. Supplement companies, food manufacturers, and now our own government are happy to stoke even the most irrational beliefs if they move product. “And the people at [the Department of] Health and Human Services, every single one of them,” Nestle added, “are selling wellness products…. At best, they sincerely believe that these things will help.”

This belief-based approach to health is anchored in an ideology of individualism, as are some of the most famous critiques of our food system. When Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that “many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world,” he missed the issue’s systemic underpinnings. Like Whole Foods founder John Mackey, who once compared the Affordable Care Act to fascism, Pollan suggests that people who eat poorly are doing so by choice. Shopping for quality over convenience “takes more money and effort,” he admits, “but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure” as “a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.” The idea seems to be that if we all just “vote with our fork,” the food industry will discontinue practices that spark joy in its shareholders and instead make it financially tenable for Public School Timmy to eat a lunch that couldn’t be confused with prison food. Mackey took a similarly hectoring tone in a 2020 interview with The New York Times: “People have got to become wiser about their food choices. And if people want different foods, the market will provide it.”

The government is now actively testing this hypothesis with guidelines that assume Americans choose their diets in a vacuum. Neither Republicans nor mainstream Democrats have the stomach to regulate the food industry, which is responsible for the torrent of ultra-processed foods and questionable supplements glutting our diets. Instead, the emphasis is on education and personal responsibility: As long as it tells people to “prioritize protein foods at every meal,” the state believes that it has done its job. Yet as Nestle points out, “There is a substantial literature in public health that shows that education doesn’t change behavior.”

A government that was serious about mitigating our poor eating habits would have to upend nearly every aspect of American life. To have the time and money to eat better, Americans would need free healthcare, childcare, and eldercare, not to mention higher wages, longer parental leaves, shorter and more predictable working hours, stronger worker protections, and better infrastructure. On the supplier side, taxes, subsidies, labeling restrictions, and the regulation of marketing tactics would help stop so many ultra-processed foods from being created and sold. As long as food manufacturers are allowed to position ultra-processed foods at eye level on supermarket shelves; to exploit supplement-labeling loopholes to make unproven health claims and to label foods deceptively; to use cartoons to advertise to children; and to sponsor academic research, things are unlikely to change—no matter how many foodies in Marin County and Greenwich Village vote with their forks or how many steaks RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid depicts.

Seen through this lens, proteinmaxxing reveals its true form. Accelerationist and blackpilled, irony-poisoned and apocalyptic, it is part of a movement that prioritizes appearance over function. It’s a form of nihilism: The world is over, nothing matters, so you might as well maxx out your muscles and your credit card. And if you can hustle a few dollars out of your followers while you’re at it, even better.

Nestle, who has seen dozens of trendy diets come and go over the years, understands proteinmaxxing as a bid for self-determination. “There’s more and more feeling among people about lack of control,” she says, and food—even faddish or unnourishing food—offers an accessible way to reclaim it. At the end of the day, “people need to feel better,” she says. “They have to have something in their lives that feels good. Because everything outside is so horrible.”

Voting is a defining right of citizenship in a democracy. That’s why the United States can only be described as one after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned the Jim Crow–era laws that systematically robbed Black Americans of the right to vote. But in April, the Supreme Court voted to gut what little remains of that legislation. The court’s conservative supermajority ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that race-conscious congressional maps violate the Constitution but partisan ones do not. In a country where race so often predicts party, racist mapmakers can plead partisan intentions, and the court has put the burden of proof on their critics. The effect is that racist gerrymandering is nearly impossible to challenge. This outcome seems to have finally forced Democrats to recognize that attacks on Black citizenship are attacks on democracy itself.

Too bad that recognition comes so terribly, tragically late. Louisiana v. Callais was an utterly predictable milestone in the right’s ongoing legal and cultural counterrevolution against Black civil rights and Black citizenship itself. And it was Democrats’ passivity and even deference in the face of that counterrevolution that helped enable its success.

Since public outrage over the killing of George Floyd briefly forced Americans to reckon with our legacy of racial injustice, the right has been overt in its frontal attack on the struggle for Black equality. Most often, we heard about the right’s attacks on speech—on slogans like “Black Lives Matter,” which the right derided as racially exclusionary, or on crucial concepts, often developed by scholars, like critical race theory, intersectionality, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But the backlash quickly turned from the rhetorical to the material: Within one year of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, more than 100 bills to limit the rights of protesters were introduced nationwide, and at least three states passed “hit and kill” laws to shield people who struck protesters with their vehicles from criminal or civil liability. Nearly 900 proposals to limit how educators teach race and sex were filed at the local, state, and federal level, with 21 states codifying restrictions on classroom instruction about slavery and racism. The right’s attacks on DEI programs would help justify everything from 600,000 Black women losing their jobs within Trump’s first year back in office, to purges of Black historical artifacts from museums, to the cancellation of long-overdue sanitation improvements in the Black Belt. Eventually, Republicans reduced this entire assault to a war on wokeness, a word they redefined and weaponized to mean anything related to race.

Each attack further normalized the idea that Black claims to equal citizenship are illegitimate. “They start out by demonizing our language,” Stacey Abrams, the voting-rights activist, attorney, and former Georgia lawmaker, said recently on her podcast, Assembly Required. “It then moves to litigation to dismantle the rights we have. And then, eventually, to legislation to ensure we can never build them back.”

Instead of rebutting these attacks, Democrats blamed the very language that the right was demeaning—and rushed to disavow it themselves. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders argued that the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election because they presented themselves as “a party of identity politics.” Virginia Senator Mark Warner claimed that the party’s “over-the-top wokeism” resulted in “a valid attack.” Washington Representative Adam Smith sought counsel not from the scholars and community organizers whose ideas had been openly—and proudly—distorted by the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, but from Rufo himself. In early 2025, the center-left think tank Third Way convened a group of moderate Democrats in order to, as Third Way’s summary of the gathering described it, “chart the Democratic comeback.” The bulk of their grievances, Politico reported, “centered on the kind of identity politics that they believed lost them races up and down the ballot.” The group’s top recommendation was for the party to “move away from identity politics.” A follow-up list of over 40 terms to avoid included intersectionality and critical theory, lest Democrats be seen as “enforcers of wokeness.”

This was tantamount to cosigning the moral panic spread by Republicans. It reinforced the lie that the problem was the language of racial justice instead of the injustices the language was trying to name. “This is perhaps a reflection of one thing that the right did understand about us,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term intersectionality and worked with other scholars to develop critical race theory, suggested to me: “that our commitments to these so-called values, and our literacy with the ideas that are an expression of those values, was tepid at best.”

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Then conservatives used what Crenshaw calls the “Trojan horse of wokeness” to mainstream ideas that had previously been considered extreme. The right increasingly called for circumscribed citizenship, from propagating the idea of “heritage Americans” to attempting to overturn birthright citizenship. “I would often say, ‘If you think [that conservatives are] moving into this space only to eliminate the things you don’t really know or feel ambivalent about—structural racism, critical race theory, the 1619 Project—you are so sadly mistaken,’” Crenshaw told me. “‘Because it is going to transcend, it’s going to metastasize, and it’s eventually going to take out a bigger chunk of what you may value as part of our collective history.’”

Someday, historians will retrace the steps leading to this authoritarian moment, and they will undoubtedly point to Republicans’ steady march toward extremism. But I hope they will also note that Democrats helped clear the path by treating each right-wing attack on Black citizenship as a fight too politically risky to wage, until we ended up with this frontal assault—first on the words, then on the laws, and now on democracy itself.

In July, Chicago’s air was so thick with smoke you could smell it and taste it and feel it in your throat. Health officials were telling us to stay inside as much as possible. People wandered around big-box stores looking for air purifiers. Parents shared tips on how best to protect their kids. The haze made the edges of buildings look less sharp and made your thoughts less sharp, too, as headaches and lightheadedness set in. There were also reports of increased hospital visits by people with conditions like asthma.

The situation in Chicago was caused by smoke from Canadian wildfires, which, science has made clear, are bigger and more catastrophic than ever because of human-made climate change. The fires spread destruction through Canada, with First Nations people bearing the worst, and along with wildfires in northern Minnesota, sent hazardous smoke into the United States from Minneapolis to New York. If summer is the season of splash pads and beaches and watermelon slices, it is also, increasingly, a time of mustard-tinted air, hiding in your home if you have one, and refreshing your air-quality-tracking app.

As the frequency of these apocalyptic scenes increases, regular people are scrambling—to get through their workday, to protect their loved ones, to figure out how to breathe cleaner air. Yet there is an astonishing lack of urgency among those actually in a position to do something about the climate crisis.

The message from our political and media class is unmistakable: Climate destruction, while perhaps not desirable, is the new normal, an inevitability. This message is obviously unacceptable, but the explanation for its growing prevalence cannot be reduced to platitudes about mass complacency or human adaptability. It is imposed by an elite that is institutionally unwilling to grapple with the stakes of what is happening.

A large majority of people on this planet are concerned about climate change. A 2024 study in Nature Climate Change found that, globally, 89 percent of people want their governments to do more to fight the climate crisis. And according to a 2026 study in Health Affairs Scholar, 65 percent of adults in the United States are concerned that climate change will harm their personal health.

These findings are borne out by anecdotal evidence. On July 17, Fabian Martin, a Chicago delivery worker, told me he had spent the previous day outside during the worst of the smoke. “The smoke is so dirty,” he said. “Imagine my lungs.” A friend texted me on the same day: “This is so apocalyptic. Makes me afraid for the future.”

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Yet just as public concern is climbing, media coverage of climate change is plummeting. John Kotcher, the director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, said in February that “we have reached the lowest point in how often people hear about” climate change since 2015. The media critic Adam Johnson (full disclosure: He’s also my husband) found that there was no mention of the role of climate change in nearly two dozen nightly-news segments about the smoke and other extreme weather events on ABC, CBS, and NBC from July 13 to 19.

On the political level, the Republican Party remains outright denialist, while Democrats as a whole are talking about climate change less. A slew of Democratic Party–aligned think tanks, meanwhile, is encouraging politicians to adopt an even lighter touch. The billionaire-backed Searchlight Institute, for instance, recommended precisely that in a 2025 memo, “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. The catastrophe of climate change is not inevitable. It is a human creation, and the people most responsible for driving it have names. They sit in corporate boardrooms and congressional offices. They remain sluggish and cavalier as their constituents choke on toxic air. Yet the scientific consensus is that the crisis can be mitigated if we stop extracting fossil fuels from the ground.

Achieving such a monumental change will certainly be difficult. It will require an economy-wide mobilization, a reconfiguring of how our society is organized, and, no doubt, a confrontation with capitalism. But nothing can compare to the hardship of what is to come if such action is not taken: Entire countries will be uninhabitable, and millions of people will die, with poor countries that did the least to cause the crisis hit hardest first (though, as we are seeing, people in “rich” countries will suffer greatly too).

More and more people are coming to understand this existential threat on a visceral level. It has entered our lives, and our lungs. The dread of heat and smoke and storms is becoming a normal part of summer. But normalcy should not be mistaken for acceptance. Our grim new routine, rather, is a screaming alarm that if we don’t stop the scourge of fossil-fuel extraction now, we will look back one day and remember this summer, when dangerous smoke enveloped millions, as the good times.

In June, the Trump administration announced plans to effectively transfer two core functions of the Department of Education to other agencies, putting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of special-education services and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in charge of the DOE’s civil-rights arm. Advocates had anticipated the moves after Trump signed a 2025 executive order calling for the elimination of the DOE, a goal of Project 2025, but that didn’t make the news any less disturbing, particularly in light of Kennedy’s previous comments about autistic people. At a news conference in April 2025, the health secretary declared autism an “epidemic,” stating that autistic people will “never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” Doubling down on his fearmongering rhetoric, he promised to find an environmental cause for the rise in autism diagnoses—although years of research have already concluded that there are multiple causes for the increase. Kennedy’s HHS counts among its contractors David Geier, an anti-vaccine activist who was brought on to investigate a link between vaccines and autism—a theory that has been disproven. Geier is known for having created, with his father, a hormone-blocking regimen that would allegedly cure autism, a treatment that has been debunked as junk science.

Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon has asked Kennedy to administer the DOE’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), which supports programs for people with disabilities of all ages. “This is someone who has an idea that disabilities are so disastrous, life-ending, that someone with a disability like autism may as well be written off completely. That’s not really someone we want in charge of special education,” Zoe Gross, of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, told The Nation.

McMahon has also handed over civil-rights investigations within the DOE agency responsible for protecting students from discrimination based on their disability, race, national origin, sex, or age to Blanche’s Justice Department, which two days later issued a memo that has advocates concerned about a return to the mass institutionalization of people who rely on home- and community-based care, particularly in light of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over the next 10 years. Gross also noted that the Department of Justice’s civil-rights division under the helm of Harmeet K. Dhillon has cut back on the number of cases it is pursuing related to enforcement of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

McMahon claims that the DOE needs these changes “to break down the bureaucratic barriers and strengthen the coordination of resources to improve programs.” But according to Stephanie Smith Lee, a codirector of policy and advocacy at the National Down Syndrome Congress, moving not just these two offices, but all of the offices that are being transferred to other agencies, “is going to make it so much more difficult for states when they try to get guidance, when they try to figure out how to get their money” to fund different services.

Lee, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs (a unit within OSERS) under President George W. Bush, added that the DOE layoffs that occurred in the first three months of Trump’s second term also aggravate this situation. “Keeping these offices in the Department of Education with the remaining staff—who understand special education, rehabilitative services, the discrimination cases, and can more easily talk to each other—makes a lot more sense.”

A broad coalition of some 700 local, state, and national organizations is urging Congress to stop Trump’s cronies and preserve the DOE, as are a number of former DOE officials who together oversaw nearly 40 years of special education under Republican and Democratic administrations. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who serves on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is leading an effort that would block RFK Jr. from overseeing special-education programs. The senator recently spoke out against Trump’s attempts to liquidate the DOE, saying, “He’s treated the Department of Education as if it’s a going-out-of-business sale of a discount furniture outlet.” Some House Democrats, led by Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), have also called for McMahon’s impeachment.

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Advocates say that whether or not these efforts succeed, it’s crucial to remember that the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act is still the law of the land. “Students with disabilities still have the right to a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment,” Lee said. “If [the change announced by McMahon] goes forward, it could be reversed after the November election if the Democrats take control of the House and the Senate.” But either way, she added, “I don’t think we can ever give up on doing the best we can for these students.”

In March 2020, Courtney and Spencer Morey moved to Aledo, Texas, a rapidly expanding suburb of Fort Worth, because of the stellar reputation of its schools. But about three years later, when their daughter Annie, who has Down syndrome, was supposed to start preschool, she was denied the education that is guaranteed to her by law under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), even though no one from the school had ever met her.

I met the Moreys on an unusually warm afternoon last spring. Dressed in white shorts, a sleeveless red sweater, and modest jewelry, Courtney waved me into her well-air-conditioned SUV, and she and I drove to pick up Annie from KinderFrogs, an early-intervention program for children with disabilities on the campus of nearby Texas Christian University. Annie has attended KinderFrogs ever since the district’s requirements for an assessment of her special-education needs—including an IQ test—prevented her from enrolling in its preschool program.

Like Courtney, I have a daughter with Down syndrome, and during the drive, we chatted about our children. Courtney shared the details of Annie’s recent dance recital, and I told her about my daughter’s upcoming eighth-grade trip to Washington, DC.

When we reached the Texas Christian University campus, Courtney pulled up to KinderFrogs’ beige stone building, where children sat cross-legged outside on a shaded patio as teachers helped them gather their oversize backpacks. We parked along the curb, joining a parade of parents in SUVs. Courtney hopped out of the car to scoop up Annie, who settled into the back seat and shouted a music request (“Play Frozen!”) before we set off for an ice-cream parlor with outdoor seating and dairy-free options.

As we settled in at a picnic table, Annie ate a few bites of her lemon-blueberry scoop, leaving the rest to melt in the Texas sun. She started to walk around and explore the nearby benches and trees. Her mother and I both jumped up when Annie began to wander too close to the parking lot. In the brief time that I had spent with her, Annie seemed like a vivacious 5-year-old, more interested in testing boundaries than in sitting still.

As Courtney tried to coax a few more bites of ice cream into Annie’s mouth before it turned to soup, she told me that Annie was born with a heart defect that required complicated surgery when she was 4 months old. She went into cardiac arrest during the surgery and was without oxygen for 52 minutes. Afterward, she spent nine days on the highest form of life support. “The doctors didn’t expect her to live,” Courtney told me, fear still catching in her throat. The memory of those traumatic early weeks of Annie’s life are why the family has brought a case against the Aledo Independent School District. “Annie didn’t fight so hard to live so some school district could limit her potential,” Courtney explained.

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Although they had moved to Aledo because of the good reputation of its schools, Courtney and Spencer were later warned about the district’s approach to special education. “We started to hear from other parents who had gone before us,” Courtney said. Most of them were unsuccessful at getting their children with disabilities into mainstream classrooms. “Inclusion was what we wanted for Annie,” Courtney said, meaning that they wanted their daughter to learn in a general-education setting rather than a segregated, special-education classroom. But the Moreys knew that first they would need to work with teachers and school administrators to write an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, for Annie. The IEP would be based on an evaluation of Annie’s development and provide a plan for the support and accommodation that she would need in order to learn alongside the other students in a mainstream classroom.

In September 2023, Courtney called the Aledo Independent School District to request an evaluation for special-education services. Courtney discussed the required cognitive and developmental assessments with the district’s diagnostician, who explained that the tests would evaluate Annie by comparing her development to what is typical for her age. “My fear is Annie being labeled,” Courtney told the diagnostician over the phone. “I don’t want her, I guess, put in a box before we really know Annie.” Courtney was fine with any evaluations that were based on play and observation, but she was concerned about what might be assumed about her daughter’s potential based on an IQ score. “I just knew if they gave her an IQ test, it wouldn’t really reflect who Annie is,” Courtney told me.

The diagnostician seemed to agree, saying, “It’s really hard with little bitties.” Courtney felt relieved, but about a week later, the diagnostician e-mailed her the paperwork to sign, and two widely used IQ tests for children—the WPPSI and the ECAD—were still listed. Courtney called the diagnostician back and told her that this wasn’t what they had discussed. She returned the paperwork to the diagnostician with the IQ tests crossed off and explained that she consented to the rest of the form, just not the IQ tests. A few days later, the district’s assistant superintendent e-mailed the Moreys an official notice stating that they had effectively denied consent to evaluate Annie for special education and therefore their daughter would not receive services under the IDEA. At this point, the Moreys felt they faced two options: They could hire a lawyer and file for a due-process hearing, or they could provide their unconditional consent for the district to evaluate Annie however it wanted.

Right after Thanksgiving, the Moreys filed a due-process claim with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) asking it to determine whether parents must consent to every aspect of a district’s evaluation to allow a student to qualify for special-education services. No one at the Aledo Independent School District ever explained to Annie’s parents why an IQ test was necessary to determine that she was eligible for special education. But the TEA ruled in favor of the school district and stated that the Moreys had not provided enough evidence that IQ tests were inappropriate for a 3-year-old. The Moreys appealed the decision with the help of a pro bono lawyer, and the case—Annie M. v. Aledo ISD—is currently being considered by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Annie’s case is being decided at a particularly perilous time for special education. Last October, the Trump administration took the government shutdown as an opportunity to fire nearly every remaining staff member at the Office of Special Education Programs, which monitors state regulations, administers grants to researchers, and provides support to parents. The firings are being litigated, but the office has already canceled millions of dollars in grants to train teachers in special education and to fund programs that aid parents in supporting their children through the special-education process. And on June 16, 2026, the US Department of Education announced an interagency agreement to transfer the administration of much of the IDEA to the Department of Health and Human Services—a move that advocates have warned would address the needs of students with disabilities as a medical rather than an educational concern, thereby treating disability as a diagnosis to be cured rather than as a natural part of the human experience.

Under the guise of eliminating paperwork, the administration has also proposed requiring states to report less data, which would make it more difficult to hold school districts to account. States would no longer have to report the percentage of school districts that have a disproportionate representation of racial and ethnic groups in special education. They would also not be required to report on the timeliness of their evaluation and implementation of services or whether young children are receiving early-intervention services before kindergarten. Students like Annie Morey who are shut out of special education would go uncounted as well.

“The Trump administration’s actions amount to an attack on civil rights, an attack on students with disabilities, and an attack therefore on parents,” said Denise Marshall, the CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national organization that advocates for students with disabilities. “A lot of it is done through gaslighting. They are trying to convince families that they are honoring the rights of parents and people with disabilities. But when you put those messages beside their actions, they don’t line up.”

Moving the IDEA’s oversight to Health and Human Services technically requires Congress to change the law. But if President Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon succeed in dismantling the Department of Education—in other words, if Congress fails to intervene—the burden of holding school districts to account will fall increasingly on the shoulders of parents like the Moreys, who will be forced to make substantial financial and personal sacrifices to try to get their kids the education that the law guarantees. Parents who are unable to make those sacrifices—because they do not have the financial resources or time to fight for the education their children deserve, or the means to put their children in private schools—may see their children slip even further behind their peers.

Since their ordeal began, the Moreys have spent about $20,000 on legal representation. And the family’s education expenses have jumped significantly: Not long after the district denied services to Annie, Spencer and Courtney pulled their oldest child, Wells, from the Aledo ISD and enrolled him in a private school. They now pay a total of $18,000 a year for their two school-age children.

The Moreys are aware that their family is in a privileged financial position. One reason they have chosen to fight the school district is that they believe Annie’s case might be able to change things for families without the same financial resources. Still, the appeals process has taken a toll on the family, especially on Courtney, who has been the lead advocate for Annie.

I drove to the Moreys’ home in Aledo for dinner the evening after we picked up Annie from preschool. On the highway from Fort Worth, I sped past rusty entrances to cattle ranches, the wrought-iron fences of gated communities, and signs announcing new subdivisions with homes averaging around $540,000 that offer “Everything under the sun.” Spencer greeted me in the driveway in khaki shorts and flip-flops. Over aluminum trays of barbecued meat and beans from a nearby restaurant, he admitted, “For three years, it’s been this draining conflict. I’ve watched how much energy it has taken from her.” In addition to pursuing the legal case, Courtney started the Annie Louise Foundation with another mother to help other parents who have young children with complex medical needs. But the Moreys’ decision to confront the district hasn’t always sat well with their neighbors.

Courtney has spoken out against the Aledo ISD at school-board meetings and on social media, making it clear she believes that the district is discriminating against her daughter and other children with disabilities. “Depending on who you are, we are either the most loved or the most hated family in Aledo,” Courtney joked as she tried to soothe Annie, who found the barbecue too spicy. One acquaintance texted her after a school-board meeting to tell her to be quiet, otherwise their property values would go down.

It might seem like the Moreys stubbornly refused to agree to some harmless evaluation for Annie, but IQ tests have historically been used to justify the low expectations for and segregation of students with intellectual disabilities. In 1910, the psychologist and eugenicist Henry Goddard declared the need for special-education classrooms to prevent the “feeble-minded” from contaminating regular classrooms and wasting the time of teachers and more promising pupils. Goddard believed that students ought to be grouped in separate classrooms according to their IQ. “Society is facing a tremendous problem in this high-grade feeble-minded child,” he warned.

For decades, IQ tests have offered an efficient and convincing way to determine where students belong. They consist of a series of subtests, like fitting shapes into corresponding cutouts on a form board and stringing a set of beads into a prescribed sequential pattern. Such tests provide indications of abstract skills like working memory, pattern recognition, and processing speed—all attributes that make people efficient and productive workers in the corporate world.

More recently, psychologists have begun to acknowledge the roots of IQ tests in eugenics, and evaluations for special education have moved away from depending exclusively on quantitative assessment. As Robert Schalock, a psychologist and former president of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, once told me, the IQ test “doesn’t have a lot to do with preparing a meal.” Now psychologists and diagnosticians like Schalock rely more on lived experience: how people interact socially and accomplish basic tasks to get their needs met.

In the IDEA, IQ testing is mentioned only once. The law emphasizes that evaluation should focus on identifying the individual needs of a student and not simply rely on an IQ score. Despite the IDEA’s guidance, many schools in the United States still use IQ tests to justify placing students with disabilities in segregated classrooms. The Aledo ISD maintains that if it had done what the Moreys wanted, it would have failed to complete the legally required full individual evaluation.

But the Moreys’ case isn’t really about the basis of IQ tests in eugenics or whether they’re an appropriate measure of the potential of a 3-year-old. The case presented to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals addresses whether the Aledo ISD refused to allow the Moreys to participate meaningfully in the evaluation process. On March 30, during the oral hearing in front of the court, the Moreys’ lawyer, Sarah Warburg-Koechlin—a senior associate with the firm King and Spalding who also has a child with Down syndrome—argued that they gave consent for Annie to be tested for qualification for special-education services, just not for the IQ tests that the district demands. Further, nowhere in the IDEA is consent defined. The school district’s position, according to court documents—that since Annie has not yet been determined to be eligible for services, parental input is not required at this point—prioritizes its own authority over the parental involvement that the IDEA seeks to encourage. But is it really consent if the parents are forced to agree to an IQ test or lose services for their child?

Until the federal government acted, children with disabilities rarely had access to formal education. When the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975, only one in five children with disabilities were educated in America’s schools. Some states had laws that explicitly denied a public education to children whom schools deemed “uneducable,” often using IQ tests to do so. Many of those children spent their lives in institutions. Others were home-schooled or received very little formal education. Because there was no legal mandate to educate students with disabilities, parents went door-to-door searching for schools that might magnanimously enroll their child.

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act improved the lives of generations of students, largely thanks to its mandate that children ages 3 to 21 with any form of disability receive a free public education and be taught alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” Today, 8 million public-school students are served by the legislation, which was renamed the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act in 1990.

The IDEA states that parents should have “meaningful opportunities to participate in the education of their children at school and at home.” But as Annie’s case demonstrates, school districts are not always inclined to seek or follow the parents’ input.

Once students are deemed eligible for special-education services, schools are required to invite their parents to an IEP meeting at least once a year to decide on which services—such as speech or occupational therapy—the students should receive as well as where and how often they will. When I was conducting research for my book A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning With the IQ Test, I talked with dozens of parents around the country who told me how the goals and expectations described in an IEP are kept frustratingly low. For example, an IEP is supposed to modify the way grade-level instruction is given and provide accommodations so that students with disabilities can access the general-education curriculum. In 2004, in fact, Congress amended the IDEA to acknowledge that 30 years of research and experience have demonstrated that the education of students with disabilities is most effective when schools have high expectations and ensure access to the curriculum. But schools do not consistently operate in this spirit. In 2022, only about two-thirds of students with disabilities spent 80 percent or more of the school day in a general-education setting. Some students’ time outside the classroom might involve 45 minutes per week with a speech therapist or an hour each afternoon with a behavioral specialist. But for students who need more support, the statistics are far worse. Only about 20 percent of students with intellectual disabilities learn in general-education settings for more than 80 percent of the school day, a statistic that has remained stagnant for decades. Most spend their day in segregated special-education classrooms. This could be for a number of reasons—including budget constraints, lack of staffing, complex student needs, or entrenched bias about where students with disabilities belong—depending on the school district and the state.

However, these placements can have far-reaching consequences. Most concerning, students in segregated classes in some states rarely have the opportunity to earn a high-school diploma. They might leave with a certificate of completion, but many are unprepared for employment, higher education, or meaningful involvement in their communities. In other words, they are being set up to maintain the low expectations for people with disabilities that our society has internalized for more than 100 years. Some parents believe that this cycle—a lack of opportunity that shapes low expectations and justifies segregation—will never change unless school districts are more strongly incentivized to comply with the IDEA.

I met Carol Caron for breakfast in one of the outdoor malls that line the Aledo highway after my day with the Moreys. She wore a flowing green cotton dress with a bold pattern, her graying hair pulled back with a clip. Like the Moreys, Carol and her family chose to settle in Aledo because of its reputation for high-achieving academics. Carol’s daughter, Ellie, who also has Down syndrome, had been included in a mainstream classroom at her previous school in Kansas City. Before the Carons moved back to Texas, Aledo administrators assured Carol that the district practiced inclusion and educated students like Ellie alongside their peers. “They talk about inclusion and high expectations for all students,” Carol told me in her no-nonsense Texas accent. “What families experience in practice is often very different.”

When she registered Ellie at her new school, Carol assumed that her daughter would be placed in a general-education classroom. But she slowly began to realize that what the district called “inclusion” often felt superficial. Ellie was physically present with her peers for portions of the school day, but she was frequently excluded from the academic instruction taking place around her. She did not consistently receive modified grade-level work or meaningful access to the curriculum. Most of her academic instruction took place in a separate classroom and was not aligned with what her grade-level peers were learning.

Carol brought binders of information and research to the IEP meetings to convince the Aledo ISD officials of the academic and social benefits of inclusion. But the district ultimately decided that Ellie should learn in a “functional academic” classroom, or a more restricted environment that focuses on skills, like hand-washing and toileting, that she had long since mastered.

When Ellie was in second grade, the district removed her from the diploma track and insisted that she be taught with an alternative curriculum. As a result, Ellie would not be given the opportunity to work toward a traditional high-school diploma.

Carol filed a complaint with the Texas Education Agency alleging that the school’s decision did not accurately reflect Ellie’s true academic potential. The TEA validated Carol’s complaint and required the Aledo ISD to review its process for qualifying students for the alternative test. But even after the TEA concluded that Ellie did not qualify for the alternative state assessment, the district continued to deny her meaningful access to the general classroom. The agency also found violations affecting 13 additional students in the district in a separate complaint.

In a written statement, the district asserts that “it is a privilege to serve our Bearcats who have special needs and to work in partnership with their parents to ensure that the services they receive are specifically tailored to their needs and are appropriate under the law.” The district added that it “values and supports parents’ advocating for their children,” including through a lawsuit.

Despite her efforts, Carol began to understand what Ellie’s future would look like if she kept her daughter in the Aledo ISD. She chose to focus instead on securing the instruction and opportunities she believed that Ellie deserved by enrolling her in a private school for kids with intellectual and developmental disabilities. But as with the Moreys, there is a downside to this solution. Private schools are not required to follow IEPs or any other policies of special education mandated by the IDEA. There is little recourse—such as due-process hearings—for parents if they believe that a school’s practices or policies are discriminatory. And Carol’s choice sacrifices a consequential goal of the IDEA: Ellie is still not learning alongside her nondisabled peers. But according to Carol, Ellie is making up for lost time academically. Her reading skills have advanced steadily, and she has learned basic math concepts that were not emphasized in her former classroom. “The growth was not the result of a sudden change in Ellie’s abilities,” Carol told me. “It was the result of finally being given the opportunity to learn.” The progress reinforced what Carol had believed all along: that her daughter’s potential could not be determined by a label, a test score, or a school district’s assumptions about what students with intellectual disabilities are capable of achieving.

Nationwide, the volume of IDEA-based dispute resolutions, including written complaints, mediations, and due-process hearings, has increased significantly in the past decade. A database maintained by the Center for Appropriate Dispute Resolution in Special Education (CADRE) indicates a 71.6 percent increase in cases from the 2012–13 to the 2022–23 school years. According to the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, the overall increase in disputes might be a result of an increase in awareness among families of their rights under the IDEA, or an increase in academic expectations for all students, or cost-cutting initiatives by school districts. Despite the increase, due-
process hearings are still relatively rare. In 2025, 38 due-process claims raising IDEA violations were presented to hearing officers in Texas. Seventy-three percent of those claims were denied.

Roy Atwood is a Dallas attorney who represented the Moreys and the Carons in their due-process complaints against the Aledo ISD. He consistently hears from families who are considering taking legal action against their schools because of alleged IDEA violations. Atwood, who has an adult son with Down syndrome, has helped many families resolve disputes with school districts out of court.

Hearing officers give the benefit of the doubt to the school district, and the burden is on those filing the complaint to prove their case. Atwood explained that parents are often viewed by the adjudication system as wanting something special for their child, making unreasonable demands on a school district. “To hearing officers, due-process complaints often come across as whining,” Atwood said.

But the Moreys’ case was different. It was, in Atwood’s words, “a rifle shot, not a shotgun blast,” meaning that it was a straightforward, one-issue case rather than a list of grievances. Atwood also took Annie’s age into consideration. Litigation against school districts takes years to resolve, and by that time a student can be close to aging out of the public-school system. Because Annie was only 3, she could have benefited if the hearing officer had found in her favor.

But Aledo dug its heels in. The district’s intransigence might be due in part to the pressures of managing resources and finances for a rapidly developing suburban district and maintaining its reputation as being worth the price that parents pay in terms of property taxes and home values. The Aledo ISD noted in its statement to The Nation that it gave a large salary increase (6 to 12.5 percent) to all teachers, but especially its special-education staff, in 2025–26 to recruit and retain “the best special education teachers and staff to serve our students.” But the more our public schools value markers of achievement—test scores, AP classes, and college-admission rates—above all else, the more students like Annie and Ellie will be segregated and ignored. The predicament of parents like the Moreys and the Carons in 2026 bears a striking similarity to what many parents faced before the IDEA became law.

In his ruling in the Moreys’ due-process appeal in district court, the judge mentioned a case much like theirs, in which one of his colleagues affirmed that “raising a child with Down Syndrome is unquestionably a tremendous burden,” and then commended the Moreys “for their compassionate practical involvement.” Yet the Moreys have never asked for pity; they’ve never seen a reason to. But if Trump succeeds in fully dismantling the Department of Education and federal oversight of the IDEA, it is possible that the future of special education will take the form of the discrimination of the past.

When Lena Dunham first met her future husband, she told him two things: “I was sick, and people did not like me. If he could be comfortable with those two immutable truths, then we could be together.”

These are two of the central themes that the writer, actor, and director explores in her new memoir, Famesick. An account of making the hit HBO series Girls, the book also considers the time that Dunham spent in rehab and hospitals shortly after wrapping the show’s final season. Notoriety and illness are the through lines in Dunham’s life, and in Famesick they are the perils that often accompanied her rewards. “Getting sick is not that different than getting more famous,” she writes. “It has a maddening circularity, and it’s also very hard to explain, even to the people closest to you. When you’re sick, one medication causes side effects that must be treated by another, more drastic drug.”

Lena Dunham is the Nora Ephron of the millennial generation: vulnerable, brash, and brassy. She’s a grand romantic living in a world of post-sincerity. Her first film, Tiny Furniture, mined the foibles and travails of being a young girl in search of love and experience. Her era-defining Girls expanded on the frustrations of millennial women trying to find love in a world of deadbeat men and to find stable work in an economy that was increasingly rigged against them. A grungier, trashier, bawdier version of Ephron’s rom-coms, Girls captured life in a New York City with more financial and economic and emotional pressures.

Famesick is Dunham’s latest effort to mine her early adult experiences for knowledge and humor, to look bracingly at her friendships, her loves, and her work and see what life lessons can be gleaned from them. If Dunham’s gift has always been to tenderly expose the underbelly of loneliness, of growing up and growing apart, Famesick is about what happens when you get older—when you stop being the youthful provocateur and become instead the grande dame for a generation struggling with midlife crises.

Each chapter of Famesick is named for an episode of Girls. The first, “I Get Ideas,” tells the story of Dunham’s early attempts at filmmaking shortly before she landed the HBO deal. After feverishly writing the script for Tiny Furniture, we are told, Dunham slammed it down in front of her mother, Laurie Simmons, a sculptor who’s an accomplished artist in her own right, and claimed it was a gift: something for the two of them to do together. The film proved to be a blurring of the lines between family members and colleagues, friends and coworkers, fiction and reality. Examining the painful dynamics of a young woman’s attempts to distinguish herself from parents with strong personalities, Tiny Furniture ended up featuring Dunham’s brother as well as a retinue of actors who were also her friends in real life, such as Jemima Kirke.

Praised for its razor-sharp wit and raw desperation, Tiny Furniture helped launch Dunham’s career. Soon she was meeting various producers in Hollywood to sell a TV series. Paired with the producer Jenni Konner, who quickly became her best friend, and the charismatic director Judd Apatow, Dunham found her transition from indie filmmaking to show-running an HBO series to be surprisingly smooth, at least at first: “I remember the boundless creativity that television seemed to allow…. If you wrote an abstract painting or a Bundt cake or a sports car into an episode, it would appear, like everything Harold drew with his magical purple crayon.”

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When it premiered in 2012, Girls was an immediate success. The story of four recent college graduates living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, partying in nearby Bushwick, and attempting to live out their aspirational Sex and the City fantasies, the show satirized as much as lionized its millennial protagonists. Girls was often criticized for its blunt depictions of sex and its often very white, very upper-middle-class perspective on New York City. The four women struggle to remain friends as they deal with the ups and downs of young adulthood—getting jobs, falling in and out of love, moving from one apartment to the next, and eventually being forced to grow up.

By the end of the series’ first season, Dunham was the talk of the town. Attending movie premieres, flying back and forth between the coasts, and doing photo shoots for the cover of Vogue, she was embraced as one of the great representatives of her up-and-coming generation. Unfortunately, Dunham soon discovered that the seeming magic of the industry also had a “corrosive” effect. Her friendship and creative partnership with Konner, while “cozy” and tight-knit, sometimes came with unexpected turbulence. Konner “especially loved me when I was on my game,” Dunham writes acerbically. At times, her colleague was “everything [she] needed—a best friend, a mother, a mentor all rolled into one.” At other times, she was mostly a boss: Konner told Dunham at one point that the network wanted her character to gain weight, under the assumption that women who are too skinny aren’t funny. As the pressures mounted, their relationship turned icy; while family and friends had helped her make Tiny Furniture, Dunham realized that the people involved in making Girls with her were ultimately neither.

This pattern of conflating her professional and personal life also crept into her other relationships. Apart from Konner, Dunham’s primary confidant during the period she was working on Girls was her boyfriend, the singer-songwriter Jack Antonoff. A power couple of sorts, the two lived with a “sense of doom” that things would not last. As readers of Famesick, we already know they won’t. Dunham started dealing with the complications from endometriosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which sometimes stalled production on Girls toward the end of its six-year run. Soon enough, Dunham’s illness and Antonoff’s touring schedule wound up pushing them apart. “He spent a lot of time telling me about the kind of person I was, and it wasn’t the good kind,” Dunham writes. Antonoff began spending more time away from her, even as Dunham got sicker and sicker. When he was home, Dunham writes, Antonoff was often “locked in the back room with the teen pop star” (a person who goes unnamed in the book but is widely believed to be the singer-songwriter Lorde), “whose needs seemed as massive and complex as my own, and who called me ‘Aunt Lena’ when I hobbled into the kitchen with my walker to grab another bottle of green tea.” By now it was clear that Dunham’s body—like her life—was not what it once was.

As her workaholic tendencies gave way to the stubborn demands of illness and the toll of bad relationships, Dunham’s family took her in, ready to buy heating pads and brew hot tea. Her parents, in particular, became her tether to the real world: Lena’s father, the artist Carroll Dunham, often served as a force of sharp reason. “Don’t you get it?” he once asked her. “You’ve won. You’re only twenty-eight, and you’ve been called a racist, a fat whore, an ignorant rich girl, and a child molester. What else is left?” When Antonoff missed a surgery that Dunham had scheduled—he showed up at the hospital several hours late and blamed it on the traffic—her father noted: “Surgery is like a train, not a tour bus. You either make it, or you don’t.” Dunham’s mother offered her own witticisms and rapport but also struggled with the cost of her daughter’s fame. The family was unable to maintain any sense of normalcy and frequently clashed over Dunham’s public persona. “When an image of my father’s work was highlighted in an article as clear evidence of the kind of left-wing perverts who produce a sex-obsessed narcissist,” Dunham writes, “it stopped being charming and started to undo every narrative thread that had kept us intact.”

As a result of the different diagnoses and surgeries that she endured during those years—including cysts, a hysterectomy, and failed egg-harvesting—Dunham came to realize that, for her, illness wasn’t a temporary destination but a city she “was going to pay taxes in.” As her primary relationships with Antonoff and Konner foundered, she was left to puzzle out a new life for herself. She became, in her own words, a “shipwreck”; writer’s block set in. This was when her drug use began in earnest, “that exquisite, fluffy cotton-candy high.”

To combat her debilitating health problems, Dunham’s doctors prescribed a hefty cocktail of Klonopin and pain meds, eventually leading her to develop a pill addiction that threatened to swallow her and her creative spark whole. After breaking up with Antonoff and wrapping the final season of Girls, Dunham was listless. She dated a string of men who had similar struggles with substance abuse. She also ended up defending a fellow Girls writer who was accused of rape in 2017—an episode that still plunges Dunham into feelings of shame.

The dysfunction of her personal life eventually forced Dunham to admit that she had a pill problem and needed help. “Rehab doesn’t happen to you,” she notes. “You happen to rehab.” Soon her appetite returned, and she learned a form of “messy empathy” from the addicts she encountered. This was when her redemption tour began in earnest. Becoming sober and moving to London “were like a lantern, lighting new paths.” It was this break from her former life, both in terms of relationships and geography, that allowed her to start over.

With the gift of time and deep reflection, Dunham offers a compelling story that dramatizes the relationship between illness and fame. Success is not a cure for the problems in someone’s life, and in fact, at such a young age, it often comes with a cost. The spotlight reveals not just our talents but our flaws.

Toward the end of Famesick, Dunham describes learning the concept of “living amends”: the idea that even without the promise of forgiveness, you should strive to live in a way that demonstrates your contrition. Life itself is your atonement, Dunham explains, “not only for yourself, but as a consistent measure of apology to those you have harmed.”

This idea is not dissimilar to one found in disability theory: that illness and impairment—“dis-abling”—are not temporary, onetime, fixed “events” but rather an alternative, ongoing way of acknowledging our bodies. Sickness is not something to be ashamed of but simply a set of facts that leads to a different orientation toward the world.

When Dunham is able to let go of the stories the world tells about her, she discovers that the narrative strands of her life have come loose. And perhaps that’s a good thing. At the beginning of Famesick, she wonders how others see her: “Little whore or Jack’s baby girl. Needy slut or loving wife. Grateful fat girl or feminist boss”—or even a “barren hag” after her eggs won’t freeze. Only later is she able to move through and then past these dichotomies. She rejects the binary choices: “I have loved being a woman, but I have hated operating the equipment,” she notes. Eventually, Dunham is able to complete the 12 steps of Narcotics Anonymous and kick her addiction, discovering in the process that she is more than any nickname or misnomer she may have once clung to.

While filming Girls, Dunham got news that a workaholic uncle was sick. Dunham asked if he felt that his life was over, since he could no longer work and do the things he had oriented so much of his life around. His answer surprised her: “I would never have stopped, and I would never have known just how much all of you love me.” Famesick is Dunham’s effort to slow down, to redirect and reorient her life away from work, and to finally see just how much life there is around her. At once moving and witty, the book is clear proof that our generation’s Nora Ephron has finally grown up.

The date is October 15th, 2011, and it’s the height of Occupy Wall Street. The movement had launched barely a month earlier, when hundreds of activists with sleeping bags descended on Zuccotti Park, a small public space blocks away from Wall Street, to protest growing income inequality, brutal government austerity measures, and other signs of a seriously unjust economy. Around midday thousands of us stream out of our home base and hit the streets, heading uptown. As the cops stretch their line to block us, people pour through the gaps like streams of water, forcing them to race us and try to regroup at the next intersection. There are just too many of us, and we’re too fast, too relentless, so they give us the streets, deciding to simply follow us as we snake our way between cars like waves around boulders. 

Soon, the march breaks up into different groups, each going to a branch of a different bank, and blocking their entrances. We shut the banks down for hours, until dozens are arrested. We continue from there to a rally in Washington Square Park, which fills and fills and fills until its entire ten acres are completely covered with protesters. Moments after walking off the makeshift stage, I can’t remember a word I said, only the sea of people, the shining faces, the sun glaring down on us, the extraordinary feeling of momentum.

After the rally concludes, we march again, beginning our journey of the thirty-five blocks to Midtown. Now there must be over ten thousand of us, so it’s impossible to go all together. We clog the major arteries of the city to a chorus of cars honking—some in frustration, some in solidarity. 

It’s evening by the time we make it to Times Square—80,000 of us by our count. We sing and chant and light sparklers, feeling big and powerful in a way that to this point I have only read about in books. I stand on a trash can on the corner of 42nd St and Broadway, and can see across the street the ABC building, which has a rolling ticker on its facade, where breaking news scrolls across a massive screen. And then suddenly, as if the world is responding to all these people here together, to our chants, to this dream, the ticker pumps out, in big, red, block letters: OCCUPY WALL STREET GOES WORLDWIDE. 

It feels like time has stopped. Where the days have felt like weeks, these few seconds of watching the red letters tick across the black screen feel not long, exactly, but rather like they’re on a different plane of existence. In this time that has stopped, with this sense that we are part of something world-historic and wondrous and dangerous all at once, I can feel the despair that has for years shaped my sense of powerlessness loosening its hold on me. And I know that years from now I will remember this exact moment as the first time I really considered that this movement—or movements like it, movements of the multiracial working class, movements for the world we all deserve—might win.

Fifteen years ago, Occupy Wall Street shook the world. Sparked by people’s anger at the banks that caused the Great Recession and their disappointment with President Obama’s response, and inspired by a wave of pro-democracy movements from Greece to Spain to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the occupation soon became a whole little world of its own, with hundreds of people camping out and many more spending their days there. At any moment, one might find a half-dozen planning meetings in progress, fresh meals being distributed, an impromptu concert by an actual rock star, an infamously loud and relentless drum circle, or a march to disrupt Wall Street. OWS became the launching pad for a dizzying amount of nonviolent disruption all over the city, leading to thousands of arrests. And the movement spread to hundreds of sites across the country, not just in big cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia but also in Charlottesville, Virginia; the lawn of the Nebraska State Capitol; and a parking lot in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The demonstrations that emerged included hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

The movement reintroduced class struggle into the mainstream narrative as the “99 percent versus the 1 percent,” politicized and trained an entire generation of activists, and led to dozens of new organizations and campaigns, ultimately ushering in a new era of social movements that drew unprecedented numbers of people into the streets to fight for racial justice, climate action, a free Palestine, and more. Looking back at it now, it’s clear that it also laid the groundwork for the surge in organizing for democratic socialism that has taken place over the past decade, from the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and the rise of AOC to the recent victory of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the exciting candidacies of left populists across the country.

But Occupy itself was short-lived. Two months after it began, police in cities all over the country raided the occupations and arrested their inhabitants. This was, perhaps, the way it was always going to end: The power of the militarized state far outweighed the power of a burgeoning social movement. But those of us who were there know that Occupy’s collapse was also the product of avoidable mistakes, internal weaknesses, and unhealthy tendencies in the movement. Those stemmed in large part from what I have called the “politics of powerlessness,” a set of ideas and behaviors that fetishize being the righteous underdog, turning movements away from their public and the broader task and inward toward each other. When our movements get used to being on the margins, they begin to accept their powerlessness, and they think and act in ways that perpetuate it. Though the political climate has changed significantly since then, underlying similarities remain, and there is plenty we can still learn from OWS:

Movements must actually want power. At Occupy, the politics of powerlessness took the form of tearing down leaders, refusing to articulate real-world demands or craft a strategy, and engaging in paranoia about being co-opted by liberals and unions. Many other movements and organizations suffer from similar dysfunctions: an insistence on being right over being effective; an obsession with maintaining the boundaries of the movement as though it were a club rather than a vehicle for mass change; an unwillingness to make hard choices that lead to good strategy. Movements must be willing to make sacrifices to get power and build the kinds of structures and processes needed to seize it and wield it.

Movements must combat despair. It is understandable to feel that the world we deserve is out of reach. But despair keeps us home, closes doors, kills movements—and what’s more, it doesn’t reflect the truth: We actually don’t know what’s possible. Occupy itself is proof of this. Mere moments before Occupy began, many of us didn’t really expect it to work. And then it did, at least in some ways, and here we are, 15 years later, tracing the impacts that are still unfolding around us.

Movements must create a sense of belonging that appeals to huge numbers of people. The best antidotes to despair are meaningful action and victories that open up our sense of possibility. Winning movements welcome people in all their beauty and brokenness and trust that those people will develop into agents of change through the movement’s vision, structure, and smart strategy. At its best, Occupy was the epitome of this: so expansive and easy to participate in that people who’d been ignored by the political system for decades could see themselves and their dreams in it, and they began to take action.

The world is, in many ways, even more frightening now than it was 15 years ago. But we are lucky that there are movements around us today that are breaking through, from the resistance to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, to the rise of democratic-socialist electoral power, to local struggles against data centers and housing insecurity and more. They are teaching us a path out of the politics of powerlessness, out of despair, into mass movements. They are showing us that we can have the world we all deserve if we fight for it.

If I asked you to describe what a communist movie looks like, you might think back to Soviet propaganda posters, to Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory, to black-and-white movies screened only in film class, to brutalist buildings all bearing the same look, and to a desaturated aesthetic that screams austerity. You might not think of Keke Palmer squatting in a vacant but decked-out chicken restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You might not think of miniature chase scenes, stop-motion sequences, teleportation devices, vibrant monochromatic garments, a carnivalesque Tune-Yards score, or a tilted condo building like a Leaning Tower of Pisa for the Bay Area’s most tasteless. But Boots Riley’s second film, I Love Boosters, is kaleidoscopic, refracting the director’s radical ideas into a new kind of communist filmmaking.

Like his debut film, Sorry to Bother You, and his TV miniseries I’m a Virgo, I Love Boosters amps up the absurdities of everyday exploitation to point the way to a future in which more workers embrace the possibility of a successful struggle to claw back the wealth that has been stolen from them by business owners and billionaires. More than montage, Riley’s filmmaking feels like collage. It’s not trying to be perfectly clean or seamless. Its vision is deeply human and yet also refuses to hold back or moderate its scope.

Though it can feel like Riley is preaching to the choir, his real goal is to show people that they’ve been humming anti-capitalist tunes all along, even if they haven’t learned the words yet. His version of bringing communism to the masses is so bombastic and crammed with diversions that viewers might be inclined to forgive how overtly the film delivers its lessons. In practice, Riley’s depiction of the splendors and terrors and contradictions of living under capitalism’s thumb might not coalesce neatly, but for many, the message will be worth the mess.

I Love Boosters begins with a regular night out for Palmer’s character, an aspiring fashion designer and shameless hustler named Corvette. To a backdrop of vibey R&B, Corvette sashays her way through a nightclub until she lays eyes on a sleekly dressed man. Soon, she is pointedly asking him about his shoe size and taking him to a private room she keeps nearby. But Corvette isn’t looking for a hookup; she’s out to make a sale. She is a booster, meaning that she “boosts” items of name-brand clothing from fancy stores and sells them at a discount to people who would otherwise not be able to afford the flashy attire.

Corvette and her two co-conspirators (and closest friends), Sade and Mariah, aren’t exactly shoplifters. Instead, they are artistes of boosting—they know which stores to target, what distractions work, and the best way to get the clothing off the racks and into their van. They also choose their victims wisely: They mostly steal from Christie Smith, a haughty and self-righteous fashion mogul (played by Demi Moore) who is the owner and head of Metro Designers. Smith is Corvette’s nemesis and obsession. Corvette claims to hate her, but she can quote Smith’s memoir from memory. At some level, she wants to be Smith—or, at the very least, to have her validation.

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When a security camera captures one of their heists and the footage is played on the news, Corvette and her friends are dubbed the Velvet Gang by the media, and soon the stakes get raised: Smith declares that boosters are her enemies and goes on TV to condemn them. As a result, the Velvet Gang has to get more and more inventive in order to execute its haute couture heists.

Corvette’s plans are interrupted when a new figure enters the scene: a rival with a device that can clear an entire shop of its designer clothes in a matter of seconds. The new booster is Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a worker from a Metro Designers factory in China who has stolen a teleportation device and is now using it to force Smith and her company to improve the life-threatening working conditions that afflict her family and coworkers. Realizing that they have a common enemy, the Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up, but for Corvette the struggle is still personal—she can’t look past her own animus toward Smith to see how her struggle and the factory workers’ intersect.

Even with Smith getting closer to catching them, the quartet is soon taking down one store after another. But teleportation is just the beginning; in typical Riley fashion, the giddy escalation never lets up. The gang discovers that the teleporter has settings that can both accelerate and deconstruct capitalism’s contradictions: In one episode, a coffee-fetching intern with his boss figuratively on his back is literally mounted by his boss (“He got his boss on his back!”); in another, it returns designer clothes into the raw materials used to make them and gives workers back the time they lost sewing them together.

Among all the acts of expropriation and the reversals of capitalist exploitation, a Bay Area–wide strike targeting the Metro Designers chain looms, and Jianhu and the Velvet Gang are transformed from petty criminals into revolutionaries. The dialectical teleporter is used to deconstruct thousands of Smith’s garments—giving thousands of factory workers back their time and health and turning employees into a phalanx of striking militants ready to transform the world.

Riley, who made his feature-film debut in 2018, developed his storytelling skills as a labor organizer in and around Oakland. He wrote short political skits for workplaces trying to unionize and planned rallies and shows to agitate for the cause of organized labor. Then, after seeing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” become a rallying cry in a neighborhood struggle with abusive cops, he became a musician. Music, perhaps more than any other art form, can bring people together in a shared aesthetic world. People feel deeply tied to music that conjures a world they want to be a part of (or already feel they are a part of). As the front man for the leftist hip-hop group the Coup, Riley aimed to make political commitment into something that didn’t have to be left outside the party’s doors.

There’s a direct line from the Coup to Riley’s movies, but there are notable differences as well. The hip-hop traditions that form part of the Coup’s genealogy place an emphasis on lyricism and storytelling in verse. It’s about the funk and the feel, yes, but listeners are also primed to think about what the MC is saying. Mainstream movie audiences, though, are much less interested in listening to a political argument. They want a diverting story first, and any message should be gleaned from the implicit terms of the narrative and characters.

Riley’s storytelling style has always been one of excess, where the gags don’t coalesce but instead keep one-upping each other. And he never leaves his message to chance: There’s always a character to explain the political analysis that’s implicit in the narrative. At times, these characters’ monologues feel organic—after all, Riley has spent much of his life surrounded by organizers. But at other times, they can be disconcerting. In films so full of color and ideas, references and side plots, a lecture can bring everything to a screeching halt.

At its best, I Love Boosters is a ride so entertaining that you don’t stop to question it, but at its worst, it can feel too hectic—one idea tacked onto another tacked onto another, each adding color and texture to an already overstuffed collage. Corvette’s interest in fashion is more of a background detail than a defining trait; she has a fight with Sade that flares up out of nowhere and goes nowhere too; her love of the color turquoise and red candy feel like red herrings that are discarded by the film’s final act. There are gags galore, and as with all of Riley’s work so far, the end result is a general strike, although how that strike is achieved is still a bit mystifying. We never really understand why there is a Marxist teleporting machine, or how it can transform the principles of dialectical materialism into reality with the push of a button.

Yet as we come to the end of I Love Boosters, we realize that the film’s nature, both discordant and discursive, is part of the point. Riley’s protagonists never start out as radicals; they need life—and some able organizers—to help them get there in the midst of all of capitalism’s messy excesses. This is the ultimate message of the film: that the path to collective action is neither simple nor linear. It takes many detours and a lot of time to cover the distance needed for any real and lasting social change to occur. As Riley explained in a 2024 interview, even “if I could snap my fingers and get to revolution, I wouldn’t, because it’s all about the journey and what kind of person the journey makes us into.”

Ever since the 2024 election, two mutually hostile conservative foreign-policy camps have raced to claim Donald Trump’s victory as a mandate for their respective views. There are the “restrainers,” a coalition defined by a skepticism of interventionist wars like George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and by a deep distrust of Israel and its lobby in Washington. And there are the latter-day neocons—the ones who haven’t defected to the Democratic Party, at least—who regard Israel as America’s indispensable ally and remain committed to the military overthrow of its enemies in the Middle East.

Each camp openly disdains the other. The restrainers see the neocons as Israel Firsters and warmongers, while the neocons see the restrainers as antisemites and isolationists. Both camps have power bases within the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, for instance, are known to be close to influential restrainers like Tucker Carlson and American Conservative executive director Curt Mills, while Secretary of State and national-security adviser Marco Rubio has been influenced by neocons like Elliott Abrams (who served in Trump’s first administration) going back more than a decade. Both camps, if they squinted hard enough, could argue that Trump supports their goals. And both camps keep being made to look foolish by Trump’s actual policies.

When Trump returned to power, the restrainers seemed to be ascendant. A New York Times article the week after Trump defeated Kamala Harris asserted that Rubio and other top picks for Trump’s national-security team, including Pete Hegseth (now defense secretary) and Mike Waltz (now UN ambassador), had shifted from “neoconservatism” in favor of “America First.” The week before he took office, Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff got Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, shaming the Biden administration and Israel’s maximalist supporters, who had backed more than a year of genocide in Gaza. And in February 2025, Trump and Vance insulted and demeaned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of a press pool in the Oval Office, suggesting a break with the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine against Russian aggression—support that the neocons had generally endorsed alongside liberals. “This just does not sound like a guy who wants to get involved in an insane war with Russia or Iran,” an optimistic Mills tweeted about Trump in March 2025. Writing in The Nation that month, Matt Duss, former foreign-policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, argued that Rubio’s cynical embrace of Trump showed that maybe the two camps weren’t so different.

But the triumph of the restrainers was short-lived. Trump and Zelensky worked things out, and in recent months Ukraine has actually been able to go on the offensive against Russia. By mid-2025, Trump was bombing Iran alongside Israel, and this year he’s deployed US military might with imperial abandon. In January, Trump, with substantial involvement from Hegseth and Rubio, kidnapped Venezuela’s president and installed a puppet government that Rubio now personally controls. Fresh off that apparent success, in February, Trump accepted Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to launch a regime-change war against Iran, something Israel and the neocons had unsuccessfully lobbied multiple administrations to do for literally decades. The result has been a disaster for America, the Middle East, and the entire world, as anyone who’s tried to buy gas or groceries this year can tell you. It has also been a series of humiliations for both the restrainers and the neocons, as Trump has managed to disappoint both camps through months of abrupt and ill-conceived reversals.

John Podhoretz, the pugnacious editor of the flagship neocon journal Commentary, exemplifies this whiplash. In June 2025, he was thrilled that his father, longtime Commentary editor and Trump fan Norman Podhoretz, was still alive to see Trump bombing Iran (Norman died six months later), and in July he memorably dismissed critics of MAGA antisemitism by tweeting, “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I’m concerned.” A few days into the 2026 Iran war, when Mills wrote on X that Trump and his administration “actually don’t know what they’re doing. Conned and bullied by Israeli hawks and Capitol Hill neocons,” Podhoretz replied by calling Mills “the Aristotelian fulfillment of the Platonic conception of clownish idiocy.”

And then the worm turned again. In mid-June, Trump suddenly pivoted to a peace agreement with Iran without Israel’s approval—essentially a return to Obama’s Iran deal, which Trump had pulled out of during his first administration, except that his new agreement was more generous to Tehran—causing a total meltdown at Commentary. “I honestly don’t know if this could be worse!” Podhoretz ranted on his staff podcast. “He has choked! He has chickened out!” (“The Iran Deal is a victory for Trump!” was Mills’s response.) Podhoretz needn’t have worried, though: Less than a month later, and at the time of this writing, the peace agreement had collapsed and America and Iran were once again exchanging fire over the Strait of Hormuz.

There’s a lesson here, not only for restrainers and neocons but for anyone who imagines (including elements on the left) that Trump can be an instrumental champion of their preferred policy agenda. As cringe as the “Blue MAGA” wing of the Democrats and the “Never Trump” conservatives of The Bulwark may seem, they at least have the virtue of consistency: For a decade and counting, they’ve accurately identified Trump as the flaky demagogue he’s always been. Everything Trump Touches Dies, the title of the 2018 book by former Republican strategist turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson, has been a pretty reliable mantra, whatever anyone thinks of Wilson or the book itself. Yet with Trump’s every course correction, the right’s foreign-policy minds keep convincing themselves that they’re special and that this time will be different.

When she was 33 years old, Clara Calvo came to New York City from the Dominican Republic. Alone and looking for a foothold in her new country, she took a job at a garment factory sewing cotton T-shirts. Her mother, a skilled seamstress who had raised 12 children, had passed on her sewing skills to Clara—skills that would help her earn more than the base salary of just over $4 an hour.

When Clara went to collect her pay after her first two weeks on the job, the floor boss told her she was owed for only one week. She remembers staring him down across the table that separated them. Her fellow workers had told her that the company owed them money too, but they were afraid to press the issue. Many of them were undocumented—what if the boss reported them to immigration officials? “Mantén la cabeza baja,” they told her. Just keep your head down.

From her mother, Clara had also inherited a lack of tolerance for bullshit. When the boss continued to insist that she had miscalculated, she pushed the table into his belly and said, “I want my money today or I’m going to call 911.”

She left with what she was owed and vowed to never come back. But finding better work proved difficult. Stints dyeing women’s hair at a salon on Staten Island—where the sharp smell of ammonia made her feel sick—and working in the unbearably hot confines of a food truck weren’t long-lived. Things at home were eroding too; she and her new husband fought a lot. One night, he hit her in the face and became violent with her young daughter. Clara was determined to leave him, so she needed a dependable job. But how?

In 2001, a friend recommended that she check out Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. “You could be a home attendant,” the friend told her.

Clara was hired and took to the work at CHCA immediately. She loved talking with her clients—seniors and people with disabilities—cooking them nourishing food, keeping their bodies fresh and clean, coming to understand where they ached and how to soothe it, who and what mattered to them most. But it wasn’t just the work itself that felt different. At CHCA, a worker-owned cooperative, she wasn’t just a body on the factory floor but a whole person. She learned that a worker-owned co-op is a business that is owned, controlled, and operated by the people who work there; the worker-owners share in the decision-making and in the profits. Soon, Clara was elected to the board of directors and was contributing ideas for the management of the co-op, including what should be done with surplus money at the end of the fiscal year. (She thought investing it in their insurance pool, rather than distributing it as year-end bonuses, made the most sense.)

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There are more than 3 million people in home-healthcare jobs like Clara’s in the United States, taking care of the elderly and people with long-term disabilities in their homes. (More than 680,000 additional caregivers work in residential settings like nursing homes and memory-care facilities.) This sector is expected to grow massively as the American population ages. During the past decade, the share of the population over 65 grew by nearly 40 percent. By 2030, there will be 59 million baby boomers, all of them over 65.

Family members—adult daughters, wives, husbands, and other loved ones—will, of course, take on much of the caregiving work; according to a recent AARP/National Alliance for Caregiving report, there are 63 million family caregivers in the US. But the burden on unpaid family caregivers can be heavy. If they lack the support they need, family caregivers inevitably burn out; 18 percent of caregivers caring for a spouse with dementia died before their loved one did because of the stress. And family caregivers often drop out of the workforce when the strain of juggling all the demands gets to be too much. According to AARP, about two-thirds of working caregivers report difficulty balancing work and caregiving responsibilities, and more than a quarter have reduced their work hours or shifted to part-time work in order to meet their caregiving responsibilities.

The direct-care sector, which includes home-care providers like certified nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal-care aides, is expected to add around 860,000 new jobs from 2022 to 2032—more than any other single occupation in the country. But, by and large, these are not good jobs. The annual turnover rate is a whopping 75 percent. Low wages combined with unpredictable hours make it challenging for direct-care workers to financially support themselves and their families. The median annual earnings for direct-care workers are just under $26,000—which forces nearly half of them to rely on public food and cash assistance.

In the 1990s, when today’s boomers were coordinating care for their “Greatest Generation” parents, the majority of home-care agencies were locally owned and operated nonprofits. Boomers’ kids, however, face a radically different landscape: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 83 percent of home-care agencies are now for-profit, largely because private-equity firms have discovered that this growing industry can generate handsome returns. According to Fortune Business Insights, the home-care market now has a value of more than $432 billion.

This increased privatization hasn’t benefited the recipients of home healthcare. According to some studies, for-profit home-care agencies are costlier for Medicare than nonprofit ones, and the quality of care is worse, with more patients requiring repeat hospitalizations.

There is, however, a growing trend in home healthcare that cuts against the spread of for-profit care provision. Worker-owned home-care agencies like CHCA differ from both for-profit and nonprofit agencies in a number of meaningful ways. In worker-owned home-care agencies—most often structured as worker co-ops—professional caregivers earn an hourly wage but also shape the training protocols, cultural expectations, and financial management of the company. Home-care workers in these agencies make, on average, $2 more per hour and have a 38 percent annual turnover rate. These care workers stick with their jobs not only because the pay is better but also because the jobs themselves are structured in ways that make them feel more respected and effective.

Clara’s current client is Sam, 47, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the 13th floor of St. Margaret’s House, a large building in Manhattan’s financial district that houses tenants who pay rent with Section 8 vouchers. Sam has cerebral palsy and uses an electric wheelchair. He dreams of running his own after-school program someday, but for now he spends most of his days with Clara gazing out at the South Street Seaport and talking about everything under the sun. At night, after Clara has headed back up to Washington Heights, he can hear the concerts at the nearby Rooftop at Pier 17; last summer, he even caught one of his favorite bands, Green Day.

Medicaid has been funding Clara’s work supporting Sam four days a week since 2023. She helps him with his laundry, goes to the supermarket or medical appointments with him, cleans his sparse apartment, helps him shower, and cooks meals for him—including his favorite of her dishes, baked salmon in coconut milk.

When I spoke with them in Sam’s apartment, Clara had just returned from a visit to the Dominican Republic. (CHCA has provided paid vacation time since it was founded, which is not the industry standard.) While Clara was gone, Sam had substitute caregivers who were nice enough, but he refused to eat anything but their breakfasts because, he says, “No one cooks like Clara.”

“She’s like my mom,” Sam adds, and Clara lights up. “She’s caring, inviting—with her, you feel comfortable talking to her about anything. She’s family.”

Sam’s beloved mom died of gallbladder cancer, which she contracted while working on the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She was known for being what Sam calls a “helicopter parent”—always hovering over him to make sure he was OK. His aunt, by contrast, pushed him to take risks and be independent; she died last year as well. Clara is Sam’s lasting connection to the spirit of the fierce women who raised him. “When Clara retires, I’m retiring,” he jokes. “I’m leaving New York!”

Sam has family in North Carolina who have told him he could move there if he needs a change of scenery. No matter how good the views are from his apartment, he doesn’t feel like it would be worth it to stay if Clara leaves. “I always tell her, ‘If I win the lottery, I got you,’” Sam says. “I got her.”

Though there are only 25 worker-owned home-care agencies in the United States, the number has sharply increased in the past five years. This is partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Care workers often lacked adequate personal protective equipment, pandemic-specific training, paid time off, or compensation for hazardous working conditions. Having learned just how little value employers placed on their well-being, many care workers have sought out existing co-ops, been part of efforts to transform care companies into co-ops, or created their own from scratch.

Academic institutions, advocacy organizations, and networks of worker co-ops have heeded this wake-up call—leading to some real momentum in the sector. At an annual national conference, worker-owners gather to strategize about how to increase their ranks and raise their profile (the 10th such conference will be held in Tacoma, Washington, in October), and many coalitions have emerged to help worker-owners exchange information about best practices, welcome new organizations into the movement, and collectively solve some of the sustainability challenges they all face. And nonprofit funders are also starting to wake up to the nature of what care advocate Ai-jen Poo calls a “triple dignity investment,” in which care workers, family caregivers, and care receivers all benefit. The foundation Next50 recently announced a $500,000 grant to the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center to launch a worker-owned home-care agency in Colorado.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gutted Medicaid at a time when there is already a major shortage of programs that serve seniors and people with disabilities. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill will cut federal Medicaid spending by $1 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the health-policy organization KFF. Some states will attempt to make up the difference, but many count on Medicaid for a significant portion of their budget and will have to cut services. Rural areas will be the hardest hit.

Our elders, family members, friends, and neighbors with disabilities don’t have a system that dignifies them, and those who take care of them don’t have a system that dignifies the work they do. But it doesn’t have to be this way, as worker-owned care agencies are making clear. As Clara says, her time with CHCA has “made me feel safe, like I have a voice.”

CHCA, which was founded in the Bronx in 1985 by the labor organizers Rick Surpin and Peggy Powell, is the oldest and largest worker-owned care agency in the United States. When I spoke with Powell, she was ending a long day of meetings in her role as a senior adviser at PHI, an organization she helped create, which focuses on increasing the quality of direct-care jobs through research and policy advocacy. Considered the godmother of this growing movement, Powell told me about her winding journey to home healthcare. She was raised in the 1960s alongside five brothers and sisters in Harlem and Queens by an Italian American mother and a Black father—factory workers who became civil servants (neither made it past middle school).

After graduating from City College, Powell worked as a secretary at the national headquarters of the Episcopal Church, which at the time had undertaken an initiative to address the root causes of poverty. Her mentors quickly realized she could do more than type 70 words a minute, so they asked her to join mission trips to Latin America. Those trips were “eye-openers” for her, Powell says; she watched poor Haitians siphon water out of the hotel pools for drinking. The poverty there was so much more visible than in the United States.

After she returned home, Powell went into community organizing but soon grew “disenchanted with fight-back politics.” When she met Surpin, they were both organizing for economic justice, particularly among restaurant workers. Neither knew anything about home healthcare, but they realized that, like food-service work, the jobs were easy to access and low-paying—an ideal vehicle for reaching the kinds of workers they were trying to empower. They decided to start organizing in that sector, setting up an agency owned by workers whom they would train and work alongside.

Powell was in charge of developing the training for the founding worker-owners of CHCA. Influenced by a paper by the missionary Carman St. John Hunter, who advocated “learner-centered education,” Powell shaped the organization’s ethos of welcoming workers with questions like “What do you already know about caregiving? Who have you taken care of? What did you do when you were taking care of them?”

This kind of Socratic training is a natural fit in an industry that delivers what is, after all, a universal part of human life—care. “The first place you start is with the learner’s experience,” Powell says. “Then you introduce the home-health context and ask, ‘What do you see? What are the connections between your experience and this job?’” The business structure makes them owners, but it is the learner-centered training that makes them feel like experts.

Today, CHCA is run by Powell’s daughter, Adria. Adria studied psychology and Black studies at Boston College and anticipated becoming a therapist, but her path began to change after she spent summer vacations back in New York working at CHCA. “I’m the granddaughter of a domestic worker. I’m clear that this work isn’t paid [enough], because it is steeped in a history where this work was done for free, done on the backs of slaves,” Adria says. “Getting people to understand and value home care is incredibly challenging because of the people who do the work.” Today, home healthcare is performed primarily by middle-aged women of color. According to PHI’s annual report on the evolving care workforce, 85 percent of home-care workers are women, and the median age is 48; 33 percent are immigrants, and 40 percent are multilingual. In addition to advocating for worker ownership, CHCA has also pursued unionization as a means of improving standards for workers. In 2003, CHCA members voted to unionize with SEIU 1199, the 450,000-member healthcare division of the Service Employees International Union. With SEIU, CHCA successfully agitated for legislation that has raised home-care workers’ pay and labor standards in New York State. “Achieving worker justice and power requires thinking beyond one business at a time,” Rebecca Lurie, the founder of the Community and Worker Ownership Project at the City University of New York, wrote in an article for Nonprofit Quarterly. “Opportunities to build economic power will be missed if worker ownership is not aligned with broad-based representation for frontline workers.”

Forty years after its founding, chca is still going strong, employing 1,600 workers, all in the New York City area, more than half of whom have opted to be worker-owners. The other worker-owned care agencies don’t employ nearly as many people as CHCA—on average, they have fewer than 50 employees. And in the for-profit home-care sector, there is increasing consolidation. The Chicago-based firm Waud Capital Partners acquired Senior Helpers, a home-care agency with more than 15,000 employees in 44 states, in 2024, and last year it acquired MedTec Healthcare, an Illinois-based company with 1,000 employees. Competing with such consolidated companies is tricky for tiny worker-owned organizations.

Cost is a huge issue for the industry. According to AARP, the average annual out-of-pocket cost of home care in 2021 was roughly $42,000 per person, for 30 hours of weekly care at $27 an hour. (As expensive as that may sound, it is still far cheaper than nursing homes, which have an average annual out-of-pocket cost of $108,000 for a private room.) Medicare doesn’t cover most types of home care, particularly those that assist with “activities of daily living,” or ADLs—things like bathing, dressing, and toileting. Seniors who qualify for Medicaid or get support through Veterans Affairs can get some home care paid for by the government, but otherwise most families are left making impossible choices: going into debt; leaving their parents alone when they know they need more support and hoping it will all be OK; cycling in and out of the hospital when it isn’t; or providing the care themselves, when they can. Most estimates indicate that over 60 percent of home-care costs are paid for out of pocket.

Low Medicaid reimbursement rates are one of the ethical and practical headwinds for this movement. These rates vary and are determined by a combination of federal and state contributions, but they are generally lower than the rate that agencies receive from private-pay clients. Grassroots cooperatives are too small to rely on Medicaid clients alone or even as a majority of their business, but these are often the clients that worker-owners would most like to serve: their neighbors, friends, and community members.

“I have always felt called to serve people from underserved or marginalized communities who need support to remain safely in their homes, but many of them rely on public funding or insurance programs, and these funding structures place limits on service hours, wages, or continuity of care,” says Terrell Cannon, the training coordinator and a worker-owner at Home Care Associates in Philadelphia. “It makes it hard to sustain long-term, consistent support despite real need.”

The national network of folks working to expand these cooperatives are addressing such challenges. The ICA Group, founded in 1977, which helps workers form cooperatives of all kinds, has a national initiative called Elevate dedicated to home-care agencies. It links small cooperatives all over the country so they can trade tips and share resources. It’s also forming what its members call “secondary cooperatives,” in which co-ops share a back office and therefore save on overhead and on the time spent learning how to run their businesses.

Vivid Life Home Care is a thriving secondary cooperative based in Los Angeles that links five home-care agencies with a total of 52 worker-owners. Led by longtime labor organizer Aquilina Soriano Versoza, Vivid Life has similarities to a franchise model, but without the top-down ethos or the competition among franchisees. Versoza and her collaborators spent nearly two years designing the structure of the secondary cooperative so that it would enable members to have real worker power but not overwhelm those who want to be caregivers rather than business operators.

Versoza wants Vivid Life to be poised to become the designated agency to partner with California if and when the state creates a universal public long-term-care program. Her goal is to have a cooperative operating in every region of the state within five years. “We need to transform long-term care,” Versoza says. “It’s part of being able to be really human.”

California would be following in the footsteps of Washington State, which is home to multiple worker-owned care agencies and established a first-of-its-kind public long-term-care insurance program, WA Cares, in 2019. But worker-owned home-care agencies are not confined to the coasts: Rural Wisconsin has a robust worker-owned care presence as well.

We know that worker-owned agencies create better jobs and better patient outcomes, but there isn’t sufficient research yet on how they accomplish that. Geoff Gusoff, a clinician and researcher based in Los Angeles, is currently conducting just such a study, funded by the National Institute on Aging. “We have a sense from talking to people that employ these co-ops that they think the care quality is great. Industry data shows patients stay with co-ops twice as long compared to traditional agencies, which may suggest significantly higher care quality and patient satisfaction,” he explains. “But we don’t know exactly why or how the co-ops achieve these results.”

Gusoff, like Peggy and Adria Powell, became interested in worker-owned care through faith and family. He grew up with his grandmother, who was a domestic worker. During graduate school at Boston College, he studied liberation theology and helped organize janitors. He went on to get dual degrees in medicine and business from the University of Pennsylvania and continued to organize, this time with farmworkers. For him, liberation theology and worker ownership are closely linked: “The fundamental insight of liberation theology is that it undoes hierarchy,” he says. Worker co-ops’ openness to information from all sources seems to be a major reason their home-care workers deliver better care. In more traditional settings, “we don’t get information correct because the people that know the most are able to say the least,” Gusoff explains.

A professional care worker may spend eight hours a day—sometimes more—with a client, which gives them intimate knowledge about the client’s health. But at traditional home-care companies, the workers are rarely included in conversations with doctors, nurses, or social workers or asked to share their observations about the client’s care.

While data about worker-owned home care may be lacking, the benefits are palpable in practice. Clara cares deeply about her clients and believes she has a sixth sense about how they’re doing. During the pandemic, she cared for an elderly person whose health appeared steady, but she had a bad feeling and alerted the family. Three days later, the client died in a hospital. When Clara walked into Sam’s apartment recently, he told her everything was fine, but she could tell from the expression on his face that he was in pain. Eventually, he acknowledged that his feet were killing him.

In 2023, my family started to come to terms with the fact that my mom could no longer care for my father, who suffers from frontotemporal dementia with Lewy-body dimensions, on her own. As with so many isolated family caregivers, her own mental and physical health was starting to fail. My brother, mom, and I took a big swing at a solution—moving all of our families within three blocks of one another in an attempt to take care of my dad collectively.

We managed it for about a year through a patchwork of care. For a season, we found an independent home-care worker who visited a couple of days a week. During another season, we used an excellent day-care program in a neighboring town, but it shut down shortly after we found it because low Medicaid reimbursements rates left it underfunded.

My dad’s symptoms worsened, as did all of our mental health. My mom couldn’t get a single night’s continuous sleep or spend a minute alone without worrying that my dad would walk out the front door and wander off. Caught between my dad’s needs and those of my 9- and 12-year-old daughters, I felt constant stress as a “sandwich-generation” caregiver. Slowly, we admitted to ourselves that we needed to find a memory-care facility.

As I was touring facilities all over the San Francisco Bay Area, I knew to ask about cost, activities, food, and caregiver-to-resident ratios. What I didn’t know to ask about was business structure. But when I walked into the Elder Ashram, a worker-owned residential facility founded in 2019, I felt something qualitatively different in the air. It was present in the interactions between the caregivers and the residents—what I can only describe as a familial feeling. It was present in the interactions among the caregivers too: lots of laughter and an easy orchestration of everyone’s talents to engage the residents and keep things lively.

Kirk Rivera, until recently the facility’s coordinator of resident relations, wouldn’t just send me a form about my dad’s ADLs, as a for-profit chain might; he e-mailed me a video of my dad singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and called to check in if he hadn’t seen me in the hallways in a while. Many of the Elder Ashram’s professional caregivers have worked there since its founding.

After my dad had a spate of falls, I sat around a table with a group of nine staff members to discuss potential solutions. The care workers were just as respected, and often even more insightful, than the MD and the nurse in attendance. One care worker noted that bed alarms, which are used in bigger facilities, can be agitating to people with dementia and suggested increasing the number of times the night-shift worker checked on my dad from four to eight to get more information about his patterns. High-status degrees can mean little when trying to improve a vulnerable loved one’s quality of life.

The movement for worker ownership in direct care is poised to grow even bigger. The ICA Group wants to see 50 worker-owned home-care agencies by 2030 and to double that number by 2040. To that end, Katrina Kazda, who leads the organization’s scaled home care cooperative work, wants to create an acquisition fund whereby ICA’s Elevate initiative could buy companies and help caregivers to become owners. But she recognizes that even rapid growth in the number of co-ops won’t fundamentally transform the sector alone; significant policy and payment reforms are also necessary. “The entire industry is moving towards consolidation, so one co-op here and there, operating independently, won’t solve the problem. We need to band co-ops together to push for larger scale systems change,” Kazda says.

Even in this politically polarized time, worker ownership is embraced by people across the political spectrum as a solution to unprecedented wealth inequality. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents (including 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of independents) in a national survey said they would rather work for an employee-owned company than for shareholders or the government. “Americans disagree about a lot of things, but this is not one of them,” says Joseph Blasi, the director of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the most enthusiastic backers of co-ops and employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) in Congress, is the lead sponsor of the Employee Ownership Financing Act, which would create a loan program to expand financing options for workers seeking to buy the businesses they work for. At a Senate committee meeting last year on employee ownership, while talking about ways to make the formation of ESOPs easier, Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted said, “ESOPs are one of the most virtuous forms of capitalism in America.”

Still, Adria Scharf, a researcher who works with Blasi at Rutgers, cautions that “we can’t overburden the worker-cooperative structure and expect it to solve all the systemic problems.” Indeed, increased public funding will be key to addressing America’s care crisis. The last significant effort to transform the funding landscape was in 2021, when President Joe Biden proposed the Build Back Better bill, which would have stabilized and strengthened the home-care sector. As the sector now waits for another big push at national reform, local efforts show what is possible. “These precious organizations are just hidden in the shadows, and they are so different,” Scharf says. “They’re so beautiful.”

Peggy Powell knows that cooperatives represent a tiny fraction of the larger sector, but she doesn’t see scale as the only measure of significance. “Coming out of working-class roots, coming out of roots where you know you have very little control over many things in your life…putting one foot in front of the other is the victory,” she says. Her daughter Adria is still fighting for full-scale transformation. “We need access to capital, technical assistance, co-op-friendly policy, robust and strong cooperative networks, and investment in leadership and development pipelines for workers and worker-owners in the cooperative sector,” she says.

“Worker-owned home-care service delivery in the US,” she adds, “is the cornerstone of a far more equitable and caring economy.”

Languages of Home is John Edgar Wideman’s first collection of essays, profiles, and creative nonfiction. Although it is a welcome addition to his oeuvre, its emergence might be surprising to Wideman’s closest readers. While a master novelist and memoirist, he tends not to be nostalgic or precious about his past work. He doesn’t like looking back, especially at his own literary record.

Wideman may even greet Languages with some ambivalence. He seems to suggest as much in “Joe Wood,” a gorgeous piece from his mesmeric, elegiac 2024 book of fiction and nonfiction, Slaveroad, in which the voice narrating “Joe Wood” worries that collecting his nonfiction would only lead to “inevitable disappointment.” That voice belongs to a writer—simultaneously Wideman-like and not Wideman at all—who, upon scanning his editor’s proposal for a book that sounds a lot like Languages, ponders the futility of such projects:

My initial reaction was who needs it—the who including in the first place, as usual, myself: Why task myself to stir up memories and revisit thoughts and ideas that I probably would just as soon forget, if I’d not already forgotten. Old words nobody else needs either. Writing largely ignored by the reading public when it originally appeared in print—commissioned essays, bits of memoir, lit crit, social and political commentary, woe-is-me victim statements protesting the outrageous, murderous discrimination still visited daily upon people who supposedly enjoy the equality promised by democracy, guaranteed by America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Glancing again at the proposed book, the narrator notices two pieces—“the preface to an anthology of Gulf Coast folktales Zora Neale Hurston had col-lected; an essay I’d contributed to a book about Malcolm X”—missing from the table of contents. He explains that those two essays need to be included, because he continues to draw “substance and reassurance” from their subjects. With “their renewed presence” and his “remembrance of their giant gifts,” the narrator might mitigate the “long-distance loneliness, the sense of wasted time and failure” that comes from revisiting his writing.

Both Wideman’s foreword to the Hurston collection, Every Tongue Got to Confess, and his essay “Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography,” first published in Joe Wood’s Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, appear in Languages of Home, making this new book a hub of crosstalk among the works in Wideman’s catalog, stretching from these 32 anthology introductions, book prefaces, magazine articles, and literary reviews to Slaveroad and his 1967 novel A Glance Away. In these pieces, you’ll find Wideman thinking through Black history and ethics, interrogating the legacies of violence in American life, and imagining how strong art can lead us to those elsewheres of dreams and possibility. In this way, Languages is an archival distillation of Wideman’s six-decade writing career, specifically in terms of his essays. But this compendium is also something more: It is a craft book about the African American literary tradition and Black vernacular practices, the aesthetic resources that both bestow, and the art of improvising in and on the essay form.

In his prefatory notes on Hurston, Wideman shares an anecdote from his early years as a professor of African American literature. In 1968, a group of Black undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania approached him with a request: Please offer and lead a course on Black American literature. Wideman, who was then teaching in Penn’s Department of English, demurred, arguing that his “education, social conditioning, and status as the only tenure-track assistant professor of color in the entire College of Arts and Sciences” precluded him from teaching such a class. Watching the students’ response to his “brisk, precise dismissal,” he saw

the cloud, the almost instantaneous dulling and turning away and shrinking inward of the students’ eyes speaking a painful truth: I had not simply said no to a course, I’d said no to them, to who they were, who I was in my little cubicle in Bennett Hall, to the beleaguered island of us, our collective endeavor to make sense of the treacherous currents that had brought us to an Ivy League university and also threatened daily to wipe out the small footholds and handholds we fashioned to survive there.

Wideman reversed his decision later that day. Designing a syllabus for that class initiated his training in and teaching of Black aesthetics. In 1971, he established and chaired the Afro-American Studies Program, and as he explains in his 1988 essay “The Black Writer and the Magic of the Word,” his commitment to Black writing and culture transformed his own literary art.

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Arranged chronologically, Languages of Home records how the author’s immersive studies reformed his writing. While the personal essays and criticism from the 1970s and ’80s are a public record of Wideman’s education in African American literature and cultural practices, the creative nonfiction of the ’90s and aughts displays his growing authority on matters of justice and the weight of witnessing, the technical properties of autobiographical writing, the stories of Emmett and Louis Till, the liminality of Dennis Rodman, the “hedge against oblivion” that siblings can offer us, the intonations and silences of Thelonious Monk’s music, and the powerful frequencies of time and harmony that one can hear in doo-wop singing.

In pieces like “Defining the Black Voice in Fiction,” Wideman riffs on Gayl Jones, Richard Wright, and Charles Chesnutt to identify what he calls the “unity in diversity” of Black writing. He also goes on to name several of the traits that these Black authors share and how each writer in this larger tradition is compelled to improvise their own singular, personal, aesthetic theories that advance the tradition and, simultaneously, literary art writ large. Reviewing Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues, Wideman remarks that “the fundamental ritual” of Black speech is one’s instruction in and experimental extension of its “evocative…transforming” practices. Precisely analyzing how Murray has assembled his book, Wideman then concludes:

The way Stomping the Blues is put together—the rhythmic counterpoint between words and images; its rhetorical strategies, the stylized intimacy of the narrative voice, the voice’s wide range of speech and literary styles, its incantatory use of exhortation and magic formula; the embodiment of black speech rituals (i.e., signifying, dozens): the constant metaphorical links between language and music, dance movement and speech—point to structural continuities in the various media of Afro-American expressive culture. Murray’s book literally evokes the Good Time atmosphere of the Saturday Nite Function. How we learn about the blues is part of what we learn.

Much like Murray, Chesnutt’s formal and rhetorical innovations influence and guide Wideman the essayist. In a 1972 essay for The American Scholar, and then later in his 1985 preface to Charles W. Chesnutt and the WPA Slave Narratives, he details how Chesnutt rigorously re-envisioned the rules of world building in fiction. Altering “the traditional frame which emasculated black speech,” Chesnutt helped the writers who followed him to recognize “the rich possibilities” found in Black oral narrative practice “when it is transmitted into written word.”

Since then, Black American writers have been transmitting their individual improvisations on Chesnutt’s innovations. Richard Wright, Wideman tells us, “viewed racial conflict in American society as a struggle over the nature of reality.” Black artists writing realist fiction had to challenge and defy that style’s guidelines to represent their realities in print. Chesnutt, according to Wideman, was the first writer to design a defiant Black-realist mode: juxtaposing “the dialect voice with standard literary discourse (a code for the real), dramatizing the inadequacy of the assumptions (encoded in literary discourse as part of the real) that locked the black voice and black character into conventionalized, formulaic molds.” If the old literary molds could not imagine or encapsulate Black humanity, then Chesnutt’s works modeled how African American writers could devise new formal and grammatical rules for representing Black speech and reality in novels and short stories.

Drawing from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, Wideman argues that through this oral mode, now put down in written form, Black writers have revealed that “the code of novelistic realism refers to a pictorial code which is itself not ‘reality’ but a set of conventions for depicting reality within the frame of a classical painting.” Artists such as Wright, Hurston, and Jones, Wideman argues, pushed the tradition in a range of new directions, attacked “the authority” of older practices of literary expression, and therefore bridged not only the gaps between Black speech and literature but also between the written word and experience. In this way, they not only formed “one of the unities in diversity which substantiate a Black Tradition in American Literature,” but they also remade the national literature, inventing aesthetic and intellectual possibilities otherwise not available in it.

The proximity between life and art borne out in the Black American literary tradition, however, created its own burdens, as Wideman also notes. Weak readings arise, he observes, as a result of critics who interpret Black writers “by examining the circumstances of their lives rather than by examining what they wrote.” For Wideman, this can be clearly seen in “the tendency among critics to divide Wright’s life into segments. Based on a broad outline of his life and treatment of each segment separately, the major phases of Wright’s career…are used as proof of a disintegrating rather than an evolving art and personality.” Though biography and history can be useful in literary interpretation, they can also obscure the artist and overwhelm the art. When critics reckon with African American writing on its own terms, Wideman suggests, they can face its power and genius most immediately.

Wideman’s reluctance to look backward seems to be motivated by his desire to keep his past labors from inhibiting his consistent creative output. Interviewed by Elias Rodriques for The Nation in 2021, Wideman explained: “I don’t want to look back. What’s in it for me? One of the scariest things is picking up a story and reading a line and thinking, ‘Why did I spend my time doing that?’ or ‘I wish I had a red pencil to get this boy in better shape.’” Yet what is striking is that although Wideman has long been ambivalent about history and biography playing a role in the critical appraisal of Black literature and art, both have also long haunted his literary works. After the completion and release of his third novel, The Lynchers, in 1973, Wideman entered a seven-year period of “‘woodshedding,’ as [jazz] musicians would say,” a complex, experimental conversion of his own biographical circumstances and family history into the basic material of literary art.

Playing one-on-one with the Black tradition, Wideman recapitulated the lessons he’d learned from his criticism, recalibrated his approach to writing, rejuvenated his prose musically, and crystallized a new style that simultaneously embodied the tradition, renewed it, and moved it into the future. These adjustments served his art and production enormously. Among the innovations of these books is Wideman’s transposing a very real place, the Homewood section of Pittsburgh—what we might call, after Albert Murray, his “briar patch”—into a very special setting in American literature.

Wideman accomplished this first in his 1981 short-story collection Damballah, in which a history of Homewood is established through interrelated stories tracing the French family’s lineage from slavery to the city, and in his novel from the same year, Hiding Place, which tells the story of how Tommy French hides in his reclusive great-grand-aunt Bess’s Hill District house after a botched robbery turns murderous. Wideman then rounded out his now-classic trio of fictional works with the 1983 award-winning novel Sent for You Yesterday, about a novelist and intellectual, Doot—another French family member—who experiences an artistic revival when he learns how to interpolate Homewood’s vernacular speech and blues-idiom music into his stories.

One year later, in his canonical Homewood-focused memoir Brothers and Keepers, Wideman explored his relationship with Robby, his then-incarcerated youngest brother. Robby’s imprisonment led Wideman to put his burgeoning command of African American literary aesthetics to use in narrating the intertwined histories of Homewood and his own family’s lived experience. When he taught Black Fire—the foundational anthology of Black Arts Movement writing and criticism edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal—to his UPenn undergraduate students, he began to see how the young, rebellious Black men in his native Homewood walked “the streets with, as one of the Black Fire writers put it, dynamite growing out of their skulls.” In Homewood, as in his studies of Black writing, Wideman found the aesthetic resources for remaking his own art: The neighborhood became “a repository of black insight, survival techniques, and expressive strategies [for] performing emancipatory rites.” As Wideman writes in the collection’s eponymous essay from 1985, some of Homewood’s powers are preserved in its “bilingual, Creole, maroon, bastardized, miscegenated, cross-cultural acceptance of itself in the mirror only it can manufacture.”

Homewood’s vernacular modes were, Wideman discovered, an expansive, enlivening archive of rhetorical and narrative practices. In the 2008 novel Fanon, Wideman parallels his mother’s style of flattening and fattening “perspective” in her stories with the images in the collages of the Homewood-reared painter Romare Bearden. Both, he notes, find ways to cram “everything, everyone, everywhere into the present,” into spoken and visual narratives that “flow, intimate and immediate.” Their stories are “truly democratic—each detail counts equally, every part matters as much as any grand design. Size and placement don’t highlight forever some items at the expense of others.”

As readers progress through Languages, Wideman turns away from explication—teaching us how Black writers, including himself, make art—and toward the making of that art. In this way, Languages is a guidebook about writing but also an illustration of it. In his guise as artisan, Wideman, like Bearden, is a turntablist, sampling and collaging both fiction and nonfiction. He takes his readers to Cairo and Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. He details his movements through these cities in a first-person voice that sometimes breaks and pivots into a formal interview or shifts into and out of a personal essayist/memoirist stance. Using typographical markers and rhetorical and scenic changes, Wideman encourages his readers to do their own cutting and connecting beyond any essay’s boundaries. As he suggests in an addendum to “Looking at Emmett Till,” his profound essay about the “unhealed because untended” wound of Till’s murder, readers and writers alike must embrace the imperatives of “imaginative truth-telling”—a form of “communication that gives the lie to language as fact.” “All information,” he continues, “includes a point of view, intention, and author. Facts pretend this isn’t so. Good writing reminds us everyone’s responsible for dreaming a world, and the dream, the point of view embodied by it, within it, is as close to fact, to reality, as we ever get.”

In his 1990s magazine writing, especially his efforts in Esquire, one finds Wideman mixing and matching brilliantly, urging his readers to accept their responsibilities in understanding the worlds around them and dreaming up new ones. Often, basketball serves as a performance model for such imagining. Basketball, especially playground pickup hoop, he argues, is infused with “the spirit of our American place, not the marketplace, mind you, but the vernacular, always-up-for-grabs agency of cultural change, creativity, and possibility.” In “Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide,” he evacuates the air from glossy-magazine celebrity-athlete puffery and sculpts from its constituent elements—travel writing, interviews, sports reporting, and personal writing—an avant-garde essayistic statuary. Here, Jordan becomes a Black-vernacular performer whose hang-time artistry, Wideman dreams, might release Americans from their racial strictures.

In a profile of Denzel Washington that was written in anticipation of the actor’s star turn in Spike Lee’s 1998 basketball movie He Got Game, Wideman further explores how basketball can free America from its racial strictures but also how it can sometimes imprison us. Breaking out of a close focus on Washington, he asks his readers why the film’s hero, Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by Ray Allen), must leave Coney Island to fulfill his promising basketball future:

Why does this sharp, affecting, skywalking film low-bridge itself with a tired trope? Why is one more African-American protagonist’s quest for integrity, for actualization, identity, and fulfillment, predictably enacted within the framework of escaping home?

Illustrating Wideman’s particular intellectual debts to W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, “Dead Black Men” observes the gulf between known and experienced reality while offering readers a trenchant, sophisticated, and melancholic study of Los Angeles in the aftermath of the 1992 uprising: There is the LA we know, or think we know, and then there is the LA that is full of a “whole lot of people, black, white, all colors in this country and in other countries,” forced to perform “the function of a captive, exploited, expendable source of labor and resources, colonized, sweatshopped, indentured, commandeered, apprenticed, the labor that built our country into a world power.”

Wideman’s writing on Los Angeles also anticipates his 2002 treatise “Whose War: The Color of Terror.” In the 21st century’s political discourse, he reminds us, not only does “terror” incarcerate all of us and return us to the old divides and perimeters of colonialism: “To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist’s gaze confers upon the native.” Worse yet, it also enables the state to proclaim that it is “besieged by terrorists” and therefore cannot be held accountable for its own actions.

The nation-state’s cries of terror have driven it to terrorize racialized and marginalized American communities. “We’ve accumulated centuries of experience dealing with problems of marginality,” Wideman writes, “problems that are suddenly on center stage for the whole society: inadequacy of language, failure of institutions, a disintegrating metropolitan vision that denies us or swallows us, that attracts and repels, that promises salvation and extinction. We’ve always been outsiders, orphans, bastard children, hard-pressed to make our claims heard.” While language and narrative can initiate new forms of freedom, they can also alienate, isolate, instigate, and harden marginalization.

Wideman recognizes these risks; his criticism has helped him source practices for mitigating them. Discussing Hurston’s penchant for positioning “herself firmly, insistently within the language of her Africanized culture,” he explains that “her goal is self-knowledge, self-gratification as she recalls, reconstitutes, the pleasures of speaking and acting within the culture, [she] accomplishes crossover with minimal damage to integrity. Her crossings are expressed through language and customs she shares with the people she interviews and invents.” Rather than commodifying Black people or their cultures, Hurston displays otherness to a perceptive reader “by remembering who she was, who she is, by listening, respecting, by staring clear-eyed at her self, her many selves past, future and present in the primal language, the language of feeling they speak.”

Completing Languages of Home, readers might discern that Wideman’s description of Hurston’s accomplishment could also serve as an elucidation of his own achievement—in the essay and throughout his catalog. In “What Is Afro, What Is American?,” his 1986 review of Ralph Ellison’s essay collection Going to the Territory, Wideman notes that great writers are “always teaching us how to read them. One measure of greatness is how much we need the lessons, how much we appreciate them and then take them for granted. In a master’s fiction there are implicit instructions and when he or she writes about writing, the messages become insistent.” These lines apply to Wideman’s Languages of Home as well.

Yet despite the sweep and capaciousness of the collection, there is something unfinished about the book. The closing piece, “Doo-Wop,” written in 2025, just after Wideman’s 84th birthday, is a response to Mitchell Jackson’s introduction to the collection. Beginning with some riffs reminiscing about his days singing with his Homewood homeboys in a group called the Commodores, Wideman’s essay builds up into a song that ends in ellipsis, an echo that calls for more response, not a final note. Perhaps this volume’s incomplete nature is fitting. Wideman, after all, is still thinking, writing, and participating in the great call-and-response of the playground court. One might argue that his impulse to improvise, to emulate the energy of a pickup game, informs the antiphonic nature of both the essays in Languages of Home and his frequent on-court sparring with the Black literary tradition. He may not need these essays, but we do. These pages communicate ideas for and questions about pursuing freedom. The process of reading them can feel like going one-on-one with the author, or better, rolling to an outdoor court with Wideman and calling out, “Who got next?”

Watching Jesus’s flight from Brooklyn, Wideman likely saw some reminder of his own late-’50s leap from Homewood to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League basketball player and Rhodes Scholar. He also saw the film repeating some of the constraints and limitations on Black American life that he charted in his 1992 essay “Dead Black Men and Other Fallout From the American Dream.”

The trick of Languages of Home is that the book may be what Wideman wanted all along. Because I’ve spent some time nosing around his archives at Harvard University, I know that he’s been thinking about some version of Languages of Home since the 1990s. In a file folder in one box among many others, there’s a copy of a letter that Wideman once sent to his agent, Andrew Wylie. Dated June 19, 1996, the note describes a table of contents that mirrors both the one described in “Joe Wood” and the one organizing the book in my hands now. “We do work in progress, Mitch,” Wideman doo-wops in reply to Jackson. These pieces are both a life’s work and the resonant call of Wideman’s next new song.

“Our republic has become a political industry dominated by two major corporations, the Republican and Democratic parties,” says South Dakota US Senate candidate Brian Bengs, a retired Air Force officer who has gained considerable traction as an independent challenger to Mike Rounds, a two-term Republican incumbent in one of the reddest states in the country.

Bengs isn’t alone in his frustration with the two-party system. A record number of US voters currently identify as independents: 45 percent, up from 34 percent in 2006, according to a Gallup analysis. Nor is Bengs alone in his bet that rejecting the two big parties is a route to electoral success. An unprecedented number of major candidates are running as independents in the 2026 midterms. Independent Voter News, the tribune of outside-the-box politics, reports that “2026 is seeing one of the largest surges of interest in independent candidates in recent memory.”

This creates a challenge for Democrats, but not as much as it does for the GOP—because most of these contenders have Donald Trump’s increasingly unpopular agenda, and the Republicans who back it without question, squarely in their sights.

America has always had its share of independent and third-party candidates coming from the left, center, and right. But longtime observers say that what’s happening this year feels different. Independents, often with antiestablishment critiques that echo those of US Senator Bernie Sanders, are securing ballot lines from Idaho to Mississippi and beyond.

Why now? Look no further than the bitter experience of Democrats in vast stretches of the West and the Deep South, where competitive statewide elections are increasingly rare. You can drive from the Mississippi River to Oregon, or trace a line from the Canadian to the Mexican border, without passing through a state with a Democratic senator. Some states haven’t elected a Senate Democrat in a generation or more—20 years in Nebraska, 52 years in Idaho, 56 years in Wyoming. That political stagnation has national consequences. A small minority of senators can block constitutional amendments to end gerrymandering or get big money out of politics. Senators from 21 states can band together to sustain a filibuster against popular legislation to feed hungry children or expand the reach of organized labor. And in a year when control of the Senate could be decided by the narrowest of margins, one state could determine whether Trump can add another right-wing judicial activist to the Supreme Court or maintain his war with Iran. If advocates for fairness and accountability cannot compete in whole swaths of the country simply because the Democratic Party’s “brand” has lost its flavor, then the project of upending Trumpism faces high hurdles.

Sanders, the longest-serving independent senator in US history, notes that “there are probably 10, 15 states where the Democratic Party virtually doesn’t exist—despite the fact that there are great progressive activists out there, great working-class activists out there, great trade unionists out there, people who are fighting for justice in every state in this country. And they largely have been ignored” by national Democratic Party donors and leaders. But it also runs deeper than that. In many states, the Democratic “brand” has been so battered that, even with resources and good ideas, the party’s candidates struggle to get their campaigns off the ground.

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This is the challenge that Bengs faced in his first Senate bid in 2022, when the lifelong independent decided to run as a Democrat against future Republican Senate majority leader John Thune. Bengs tried to focus on issues where voters were dissatisfied with the GOP. But even when he had a positive encounter, he’d run into the same hurdle. “I’d say, ‘Can I count on your vote in November?’ And the first words out of their mouth were generally, ‘So what are ya?’ And then I would respond, ‘Well, I’m a lifelong independent, but I’m running as a Democrat,’” Bengs recalls. For a reply, “I would get ‘I’ll never vote for a Democrat’—sometimes with an expletive in there as well. And that was it.” Bengs lost by 43 points, carrying just three of South Dakota’s 66 counties. That wipeout was pretty typical in a state that has not elected a Democratic governor since 1974 and where, this year, Democrats have filed to run for just 46 of 105 legislative seats.

The experience convinced Bengs that “I would never do again what I did in 2022. That was just draining and soul-sucking and just beating my head against the wall.” So the lawyer and former college professor struck out on his own, to the vexation of the South Dakota Democratic Party. Now Bengs says he will not caucus with either major party if he’s elected, arguing that “party politics is responsible for our broken government.” Instead, he promises to fight for systemic change to a “zero-sum, winner-take-all political system…where defeating the other party is what matters most.”

The Supreme Court’s destruction of campaign-finance regulations and the rise of unaccountable super-PAC spending has only made it more difficult for outsider candidates to break through. “The Big Money interests funding this partisan warfare are happy with the current political system and its insatiable demand for more of their money, which gives them greater control of elected officials and thus the government,” Bengs states on his campaign website. “Big Money uses this corrupting influence to protect and increase wealth and power for themselves by undermining the political relevance of regular voters.”

That kind of talk is being heard all over the Western United States this year. Many of the independent candidates—including the most prominent, former union leader Dan Osborn, who came close to winning Nebraska’s Senate race in 2024 and is running again in 2026—have been motivated by their deeply rooted nonpartisan convictions. Others are former Democrats. The National Republican Senatorial Committee calls candidates like Osborn “fake Independents who would push liberal Democratic policies in the Senate.”

But many of these independent candidates have taken a tougher line on immigration and gun rights than Democrats in coastal states. Some run to the left of Democrats and Republicans on economics, while others sample from the left, right, and center—often with a dash of libertarianism thrown in. What unites the independents is a recognition that dropping the “D” label makes it easier to build prairie-populist coalitions and defeat the GOP. They are also generally more sympathetic to term limits and much more critical of Democratic leaders such as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.

Following Osborn’s dramatically stronger-than-expected finish in 2024, Sanders argued that his campaign was a model for future candidates. “He took on both political parties. He took on the corporate world. He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska,” Sanders said.

After Democrats suffered severe setbacks in the 2024 election, Sanders told The Nation that it was time for the party and progressives to recognize that “where it is more advantageous to run as an independent, outside of the Democratic primary process, we should do that.”

That’s easier said than done. While some Democrats have accepted the notion, others reject it. Osborn is well positioned in Nebraska, where his bid has been embraced by the state Democratic Party. Party chair Jane Kleeb said on X, “We believe a coalition of Dems, Indys and Republicans can beat [GOP incumbent Pete] Ricketts and break up the one-party rule. We like the odds of a mechanic vs a billionaire.” In July, Nebraska Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank dropped out to clear the way for Osborn, just as Alaska Democratic House candidate Matt Schultz quit and endorsed independent Bill Hill. In South Dakota, Democrat Julian Beaudion suspended his bid in early August. But that is not the case everywhere. In Montana, for instance, independent Seth Bodnar is backed by several prominent Democrats but still faces a Democratic rival in November, as well as a Trump-backed Republican.

Should any of the independents overcome the odds and succeed this fall, they could play a critical role in upending the balance of power in the Senate, where the GOP holds 53 seats to the Democrats’ 47 (a number that includes two Democratic-aligned independents, Sanders and Maine’s Angus King). The Democrats might not automatically benefit, as most independents in the Western states say they won’t caucus with either party. But the headache for the Republicans would be worse, with candidates like Osborn pledging to “take on the corporations and their chosen political lapdogs to restore economic liberty and fairness for the working Americans who make this country run.”

That message from Osborn has resonated in Nebraska, where he’s running neck and neck with the incumbent, Pete Ricketts, a reliable Trump ally and the son of billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, who was hand-picked in 2003 by the state’s former governor to fill an open Senate seat. A May 2026 survey by a Democratic-aligned polling firm put Osborn five points ahead of Ricketts and suggested that the challenger will get 92 percent of Democratic votes; he also leads among independents by a 62–20 margin and has garnered 14 points among Republicans and 17 points among self-identified 2024 Trump voters.

Osborn is breaking through as a critic of Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his war in Iran—while also backing abortion rights and taking a more nuanced position on immigration enforcement than most Republicans. But he remains focused on “paycheck populism,” directing a palpable fury at union-busting corporations and agribusiness monopolies that shutter plants in Nebraska. Texas Senator Ted Cruz traveled to Nebraska in June to label Osborn “a left-wing Democrat,” an echo of when Trump called Osborn “a radical-left person, a Bernie Sanders–type Democrat” in a campaign video for Osborn’s 2024 opponent. But Osborn will not appear on the November ballot with a “D” after his name—and that could make all the difference.

Democrats in DC often scratch their heads when they see polls showing that voters in historically Republican states favor taxing the rich, regulating corporations, strengthening unions, and protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—even while electing Republicans who oppose all those priorities. Nebraskans approved a referendum for a $15-an-hour minimum wage in 2022, on the same day that conservative Republicans swept the statewide and congressional races. In 2024, Montanans voted to add abortion-rights protections to their state’s Constitution, even as they rejected the pro-choice Democratic Senator Jon Tester’s reelection bid. In Idaho, petitions with 110,000 signatures have been filed this year to force a referendum that could codify abortion rights in the state.

What Democratic loyalists often fail to take into account is that patterns of partisanship—some decades old, some developed since Trump upended our politics—can overwhelm ideology and, quite frequently, logic. States that once sent liberal lions like Idaho’s Frank Church and South Dakota’s George McGovern to the Senate no longer give Democrats a chance, just as Republicans struggle to compete in former GOP bastions across New England and along the West Coast. But what if Western and Southern voters are given a chance to vote for populist economics—and against forever wars—without having to tick Democratic boxes on their ballots? Could that create a new political dynamic in historically uncompetitive red states?

That’s the question Osborn started asking in 2024 and that’s now being asked by independent House and Senate candidates from Alaska to Mississippi. They are doing so at a turbulent moment when the upheaval that Trump has brought to American politics has reframed partisanship in this country, leading to a situation in which Republicans are under pressure from the president to march in lockstep with his agenda, and Democrats are under equally immense pressure to fall into line as a one-size-fits-all opposition to an erratic and dangerous executive. But tens of millions of Americans bristle at rigid partisan politics.

James Madison warned more than two centuries ago that the nation’s burgeoning democracy would be ill-served by a factionalized partisanship in which “the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and…measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

Despite such warnings, the drafters of the Constitution established a haphazard system that was quickly corrupted by partisans. After 1854, when the Republican Party was formed, the two-party system became firmly entrenched—and things have mostly stayed that way ever since. Republicans and Democrats have fought bitterly over the years, yet they have usually been on the same page regarding their duopoly, recognizing that, while they might have to divide power between themselves, they didn’t necessarily have to share it with anyone else.

Entire books have been written on the barriers to independent and third-party candidacies. In states across the country, independents often face staggering requirements to qualify as candidates—including daunting signature demands and tight deadlines for petitions—as well as the prospect of being placed in a hard-to-find spot on the ballot. The hurdles to getting onto the debate stage are high, and the media is inclined to cover two-party horse races rather than the competition of ideas. More than 100 years ago, Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader who ran for president five times on the Socialist Party line, said of his major-party rivals, “They are opposed to each other on no question of principle but purely in a contest for the spoils of office.”

In such a rigged system, third parties and independent movements in the United States are rarely recalled as anything more than momentary blips on the political radar. Most other democracies have robust multiparty systems, usually with their own major parties but also with politically viable minor parties that win places in parliaments, form coalitions, and influence policy. For too many Americans, on the other hand, elections are not a question of which party to enthusiastically support but which party they most despise—a real but limited choice between “the lesser of two evils.” And the tough reality for the Democrats in a number of red states is that most voters hate them more than they do the Republicans.

Jon Tester, who represented Montana for 18 years as a rural Democrat with a populist streak, lost his bid for a fourth Senate term in 2024 at least in part because his party label had become toxic. Republicans and their allies have fueled this toxicity by pouring tens of millions of dollars into crude and intentionally divisive campaigns that lie about immigrants, trans people, and diversity programs. But Democrats have not helped themselves by failing at the national level to position themselves as allies of farmers and rural Americans. Whatever the exact reason for the party’s unpopularity, Tester says he’s witnessed a real shift since he first ran for the Senate in 2006. “During my last two races, the Democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected,” he wrote in a widely circulated text message earlier this year. “That is not to say that is the only reason I got beat in 2024…but it was [a] hell of an anvil.” This year, Tester is backing Bodnar, a Rhodes scholar who served the past eight years as president of the University of Montana.

Bodnar and other red-state independents are distinct from the blue-state candidates who’ve sought independent ballot lines, such as the Chicago Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez. The democratic socialist filed to run as an independent after US Representative Chuy García chose not to seek reelection at the last minute, securing the Democratic line for a García aide. Illinois officials have moved to block bids by Sigcho-Lopez and another independent.

Another candidate running as an independent this year was the former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, who points out, “I’m a revolutionary socialist—I’ve always run as an independent.” She’s challenging Democratic US Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, with the mission of “building the strongest anti-war, anti-genocide election campaign in the nation.” The Stranger, an influential Seattle outlet, gave her campaign a boost in early July when it announced, “Kshama Sawant has the best chance of unseating incumbent Rep. Adam Smith, the unapologetic AIPAC darling whose weapons industry funding and long pro-war career have made him a pariah in his own district.” But Sawant fell short in a multi-party August primary that picked two November candidates.

Plenty of progressive Democrats and reformers have brought antiestablishment messages into the 2026 party primaries, including members and allies of the Democratic Socialists of America who have beaten incumbents and won open-seat contests from New York City to Colorado. But for many of this year’s independent candidates, frustration with the Democratic Party’s deference to the billionaire class has reached a breaking point.

“Ever since the [2010] Citizens United decision, billionaires and super PACs have been able to buy access, write policy, and drown out the voices of everyday working people. It’s not a government of, by, or for the people anymore; it’s a government bought and paid for by the highest bidder. And I refuse to be part of that,” says Ty Pinkins, a Mississippi lawyer who was the state’s 2024 Democratic nominee for the US Senate but this year is running as an independent. Pinkins announced his exit from the Democratic fold in a scathing 2025 essay in which he recalled the party’s response when he started thinking about challenging the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, in 2026. “The first question, over and over and over again, was, ‘How much money do you have? How much have you raised?’” he wrote. “Not values. Not vision. Just dollars.” Pinkins now faces Hyde-Smith and Democratic jurist Scott Colom in November.

The independents say that the money race has excluded candidates—and even entire states—from the calculations of party strategists. Todd Achilles, a former Idaho Democratic legislator, says he is running as an independent Senate candidate this year because the Democratic Party “has given up on little red states like Idaho.”

This frustration with both Democrats and Republicans is what inspired Osborn, who in 2024 won 46 percent of the vote for an independent challenge to Republican Senator Deb Fischer. Now back on the ballot in 2026, Osborn is telling Nebraskans that he’s running for the Senate because he wants to “challenge the system.” That’s a popular message: A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 62 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, while just 30 percent said it’s moving in the right direction.

But Osborn’s critique goes far beyond the objections raised by Democratic candidates about the failure of a Republican-controlled Congress to check and balance the president’s kingly abuses of power. In Osborn’s case, the challenge is to the Democrats themselves, and to an American political process that has historically limited voters’ options to a pair of entrenched but not particularly well-liked parties.

Osborn rips into both parties for all “the millionaires” in Congress who are “working for the billionaires and doing their bidding.” An industrial mechanic by trade, he led members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50G in a nationally recognized strike at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha in 2021. “I feel like there is still an appetite for my brand of politics,” he says. “I still believe that we need more champions for people who work for a living. I don’t think we have enough of that.”

Voters appear to agree. The number of Americans who identify as independents is now almost twice that of either major party. Trump’s miserable second term has led many independents who backed Republicans (including Trump himself) just a few years ago to lean toward the Democrats as the 2026 midterms approach. But as a Gallup analysis points out, “these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically.”

The inability of the Democrats to lock in an advantage even in the midst of Trump’s failed presidency cannot be severed from the frustration voters have with money in politics and its corruption of policy on everything from healthcare and gas prices to the development of AI data centers.

Sixty percent of voting-age Americans now say billionaires have too much influence on the politics of the country, according to a recent Politico survey. The poll also found that 39 percent of adults believe that money has the power to buy election results, and another 34 percent say it can significantly influence who and what gets on the ballot.

“People understand that the political system in this country is largely corrupt—both parties,” Sanders says. “Why is that? You know the answer. The answer is that you have billionaires in both political parties [who] determine what legislation gets to the floor and who is the candidate.”

This fall’s election results will help determine whether it’s possible to break these patterns. Osborn argues that now is the time “to create a coalition that the state of Nebraska’s never seen before…under one umbrella, with the idea and the truth that working-class people deserve a seat at the table in the United States Senate.”

Coolidge, Arizona, is a speck of a town, a place of small wooden bungalows, a few diminutive mom-and-pop stores, and a large number of churches, the steeples of which compete in height with the nearby saguaro cacti. It emerges like a heat mirage out of the desert dust an hour’s fast drive southeast of Phoenix. Blink and it could disappear just as quickly.

From its small, single-story cinder-block offices in Coolidge, Rural Arizona Engagement, or RAZE, is coordinating a campaign to expand voter rights, to educate its mainly Latino target population (nearly one-third of the state’s population is Latino) on how and where and when to vote this fall, and what to do if federal agents attempt to intimidate them at polling places or if their mail-in ballots are not delivered by the US Postal Service. It is also lobbying for the creation of voting centers around the state, which can be utilized by residents from any part of the county they are in, and more drop boxes, which would increase access for voters in remote parts of the state, who often have to drive hours to cast a ballot.

RAZE believes that the expansion of voting centers is crucial for increasing turnout. After all, President Donald Trump continues to undermine the electoral process, from forcing out the members of the independent federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to pressuring lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act, which the Brennan Center for Justice has said “would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress,” while the US Supreme Court has already weakened the protections provided by the Voting Rights Act. RAZE and its allies scored a major success earlier this year when, after a long and often acrimonious political debate, Apache County agreed to open voting centers. “It was a huge win,” Kassandra Alvarez, RAZE’s communications director, tells me in the poster-bedecked conference room in the Coolidge offices. “It’s a huge example of how you can make change locally.”

Arizona activists are leading by example in other vital ways. Every day, even in the triple-digit heat that scorches the desert from May through October, idealistic young RAZE canvassers head into remote rural areas, urging residents to add their names to the state’s early-voting list so that they’ll automatically be sent a ballot in the mail. It isn’t easy work. During the 2024 election, canvassers reported having guns drawn and dogs unleashed on them. Some had their car tires slashed. Others had their locations publicized on social media. But the canvassers see their work as an integral part of a national struggle over voting rights, particularly with regard to ballot access and the integrity of the vote count, that is shaping up to be the crucial backstory of the 2026 midterms.

From Fulton County, Georgia, to Los Angeles, the assault on democracy has intensified in recent months. Election deniers are suing to gain access to local voter rolls, looking to purge them of people who they claim—without evidence—are not US citizens. And beyond interfering in the upcoming elections via his actions at the EAC and at the Capitol, where he has so far failed to persuade Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, Trump has signed a slew of executive orders in an effort to undermine the vote-by-mail systems that were used by at least 48 million voters in the 2024 elections—a disproportionate number of whom lean Democratic—and to mandate onerous voter-ID requirements. One such order, which is facing legal challenges, calls for the US Postal Service to run its own citizenship tests on prospective recipients and to refuse to deliver ballots to those it concludes are noncitizens. The Postal Service is reportedly drawing up plans to implement Trump’s order, floating the idea of not delivering ballots in states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the feds. It’s unclear whether the Postal Service will move ahead with those plans or whether a court will halt the order before the midterms.

“It’s a very dark time and moment for our country and our state,” says Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of the voting-rights group All Voting Is Local, which has branches in eight battleground states, referring to the Trump administration’s pressure on Milwaukee and other Wisconsin cities regarding their voter rolls and vote-counting systems. “They will stop at nothing to meddle in elections.”

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Come the midterms, Trump—whose approval ratings have been plummeting over his handling of the economy, immigration, and his war on Iran—may well try to seize control of the voting process by declaring a national emergency. But many of the most significant efforts to suppress the vote and manipulate election outcomes are more prosaic. They are already underway in counties around the United States, often pitting election deniers, who have captured more than 20 percent of recent statewide races for offices that oversee elections, and other Trumpist state legislators against groups like RAZE and the Democratic secretaries of state who have pledged to protect their electoral systems from federal efforts to sabotage them.

In Arizona and elsewhere, frontline defenders of democracy are using a combination of legal action, public education, and street protest to combat the election deniers’ growing array of tactics. In Democratic-controlled states, legislators are also passing laws that bolster protections against federal interference in elections. And 11 states, including, most recently, New Jersey, have passed versions of the now-neutered Voting Rights Act to stop racially based gerrymandering and to provide courts with the power to intervene in assaults on the voting process in their jurisdictions. But in states like Arizona, which has a GOP-controlled Legislature and a Democratic-controlled executive branch, these battles over access to the polls are sowing division between the different branches of government.

At every step of the way, Arizona’s GOP state legislators and conservative county elections recorders have attempted to block the efforts of the state’s emerging voting-rights coalitions, both within the Legislature and among grassroots organizations, to expand the number of people who vote. Taking cues from the Trump administration, conservative Arizona politicians have proposed a raft of laws—many of them based on draft legislation provided by think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Heritage Action, an advocacy organization for the Heritage Foundation—that would put up road blocks to mail-in voting, further tighten the state’s already stringent voter-ID laws, limit the number of voting centers and drop boxes for ballots, and set up surveillance cameras around the drop boxes. One particularly Trumpian legislator even proposed a bill that would have made ICE’s presence at voting sites not just legal but mandatory. In Maricopa County, the elections recorder, a MAGA figure named Justin Heap, has been ramping up challenges to voter registration and ballot signatures. “Every week there’s a new threat,” says Alex Gulotta, the Arizona state director of All Voting Is Local. “We’re doing the best we can to not get distracted.” (Heap’s office ignored interview requests from The Nation for this article.)

To date, most of these laws have not passed, and others have been vetoed by Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs. But in some counties, such as Apache County in the northeast or sprawling Yuma County in the southwest corner of the state, where many Indigenous people and immigrants without stable housing do not have mailboxes or permanent addresses (homes on tribal reservations typically do not have street addresses) where they can receive mail-in ballots, election-denying county recorders have, over the past couple of election cycles, dramatically increased the number of ballot signatures they challenge. They have also unilaterally set up surveillance systems around election sites, despite the objections of Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes. RAZE and other advocates claim that in an era of indiscriminate ICE raids, these cameras are likely to intimidate eligible Latino voters and discourage them from voting.

“I think their intentions are bad,” says Edel Ochoa, a 19-year-old nursing student from the remote border community of San Luis. A soft-spoken and earnest young man with large glasses and a shock of curly hair, Ochoa is working as a political intern with RAZE this year and spoke to me at its Coolidge offices. “It’s a matter of fear,” he adds. “They’re trying to intimidate people.”

The organization’s chief of staff, Andrea Varela, wearing a maroon RAZE T-shirt emblazoned with a quote from Aristotle on the need for a strong middle class, concurs. “Our communities are being targeted,” she says. “And it’s not a coincidence. We see with everything going on at the national level that things become very difficult at the local level. It’s causing people of color and our communities to feel like they don’t have their voice.”

But a coalition of more than 20 voter-protection groups stands ready to intercede. The coalition is shoring up a people-powered monitoring system to ensure that neither the GOP nor federal agents intimidate people at polling stations statewide. The groups, ranging from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the American Civil Liberties Union to the Arizona Faith Network and the Arizona Native Vote Election Protection Project, are also ready to file legal challenges if election processes “are turned into political theater,” says Jenny Guzman of Common Cause Arizona. And they have gamed out how to quickly mobilize large numbers of people should the feds try to prevent vote counts from taking place in Phoenix and other large cities. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Guzman says.

Sitting in his flag-and-balloon-festooned campaign headquarters in Phoenix, Secretary of State Fontes, wearing jeans and a deep-blue linen sports jacket, alternates between righteous anger at what the Trump administration is attempting to pull off and confidence that, when push comes to shove, the democratic system will hold.

“The fraudsters and the hucksters [are] trying to get the conversation turned away from the [pro-democracy] work that gets done,” he says. “They’re trying to make everybody scared, and they’re trying to make everybody intimidated…. You realize it is just noise and bluster. It has an anti-voter and anti-‘little-d’-democracy intent behind it.”

For months now, Fontes’s office has been deliberating about what will happen if the Trump administration sends ICE agents to polling places or uses other federal agents to disrupt the voting process. “We’ve got protocols for dispatching law enforcement,” he says. “Because ICE agents don’t have any legal authority to be at polling places whatsoever. We’ve got our courts that will be on a hair trigger, ready to issue orders as quickly as possible.”

That sense of urgency reverberates throughout the country. Poll after poll shows that the GOP is unpopular with voters, and dissatisfaction with the Trump administration is increasing among the all-important bloc of independent voters. Samantha Tarazi, the CEO of the election-protection organization Voting Rights Lab, whose team of policy experts has been tracking voting processes at the state level, is extremely concerned about the multitude of ways that Trump officials, unhappy with the election forecasts, might attempt to undermine the vote.

In her mind, Tarazi keeps coming back to what unfolded in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year, when the FBI, under the personal supervision of then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, raided the election offices there in search of supposedly incriminating documents suggesting that the 2020 presidential vote had been manipulated. Agents walked out with hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other election-related materials; then, in the spring, the Justice Department demanded that Fulton County—which has a higher percentage of Black voters than most other parts of Georgia and a more Democratic political bent—turn over the names and addresses of every staffer, most of them volunteers, who worked in the 2020 election.

Tarazi has concluded that there is a three-part administration strategy in play: First, convince a critical number of Americans that the election system is broken; second, intervene in a way that triggers chaos over how individual states and counties administer elections; and third, use that chaos as a cover for the administration and its local allies to try to manipulate the election results, potentially even by declaring a national emergency and ordering federalized National Guard troops or ICE agents to seize voting machines and ballots. “They have an empowered network that knows the playbook and will apply it opportunistically,” she warns.

Astoundingly, in May, the administration attempted to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate participants in the January 6, 2021, insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power—a huge nod to the idea that Trumpian paramilitaries who come out to disrupt the electoral process in the future will be protected and rewarded. That same month, the Department of Justice scrubbed its websites of press releases related to Biden-era January 6 prosecutions. Election deniers and fabricators are now in positions where they will be able to challenge the election results and the integrity of the election process should the midterms not go MAGA’s way. And under Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer and the acting attorney general, the DOJ shows every sign that it will be a willing participant in such conspiracies.

In early June, even while California’s primary votes were still being counted, Trump previewed this strategy when he repeatedly and baselessly declared Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, the winner of the gubernatorial primary. He fired off multiple social-media posts alleging, without any evidence, that California’s election administrators were “rigging” the results of that race and the Los Angeles mayoral race. Following his lead, the DOJ sent a federal attorney to LA to monitor the vote count, and the US attorney in the city announced investigations into potential vote fraud.

The strategy of disruption was also previewed in the FBI’s Atlanta raid. Dana Barrett, the Fulton County commissioner for District 3 and a former candidate to be Georgia’s secretary of state, has repeatedly argued that it was nothing more than a sloppily put-together fishing expedition aimed at normalizing, in the run-up to the midterms, the idea of federal agents seizing ballots. “If the FBI is able to come in with a criminal search warrant based on nothing and take ballots and break the chain of custody, then they can do it anywhere after the ’26 election if they feel they’re losing,” she says. “It’s critically important given the precedent this raid sets.”

For months now, Trump has pressured Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which mandates that the names on voter rolls match the names on voters’ birth certificates, among other things.

As many as 69 million women who took their husband’s last name at marriage could find their right to vote challenged by these astounding provisions. And even as the legislation flounders in the Senate, many GOP-controlled state Legislatures are locking into place similar provisions, especially around voter-ID requirements. At least 10 GOP-led states have also cooperated with the DOJ’s request to hand over sensitive voter-roll data. The administration will run this information against a federal citizenship database, even though there is no evidence that this will be—or even can be—an accurate process, thus creating a pretext for the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to alleged noncitizens in these states.

Surrounded by family photos, a small potted plant on the window ledge, and a handful of books on the shelves in her Washington, DC, office, Hannah Fried, the CEO of All Voting Is Local, tells me that federal rule-makers aren’t even bothering to camouflage their intent. As she points out, then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem bluntly stated that the SAVE America Act is all about “making sure the right people can vote.” Noem didn’t explicitly say who the “right people” were, but the implication was clear: This legislation is intended to skew the voter rolls against Democrats and in favor of GOP voters.

During past efforts at voter suppression, Fried says, legislation was generally aimed at preventing people from voting in the first place. Since 2020, it has also been aimed “at the back end, when ballots are being counted.” The after-the-fact seizure of the Fulton County ballots from 2020, as well as the recent seizure of ballots from the 2025 elections in Riverside County, California, ordered by local sheriff and erstwhile GOP gubernatorial hopeful Chad Bianco, are “trial runs to attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots from a live election,” Fried fears. “The president, his allies, starting with the 2020 elections, Project 2025, the executive orders—it’s not a trail of crumbs; it’s whole loaves of bread. This is a test for us, the American people. How are we going to respond?”

Voting-rights groups, election officials, attorneys, and grassroots activist organizations around the country are answering just that question. “People in this country have shown there are lines you cannot cross with them, and they are going to hold those lines,” Fried says in a moment of optimism.

“Overall, in my state, people would not take well to that kind of threat, seizing ballots,” says Kerry Durmick, the director of the Nevada chapter of All Voting Is Local. Nevada is one of the battleground states reportedly targeted by election deniers, who are looking to create a narrative that “the illegals” are voting in Las Vegas and in Reno. Durmick believes that if the feds came to the state to seize voting machines, huge numbers of Nevadans would hit the streets in protest. At the same time, she says, the secretary of state and other legal partners would immediately countersue.

In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold agrees. “The risk is a power grab,” she says. “We’re seeing that play out in real time.” Griswold’s office has hired an additional attorney to help with potential election litigation. State legislators have passed laws requiring that the chain of custody for ballots and for voting machines be maintained; this way, in the event that federal authorities attempt to seize ballots like they did in Georgia, the feds would at least have to ensure that there was transparency in how the ballots and the voting machines were handled. In other words, the FBI or any other agency simply couldn’t seize ballots and voting equipment and then return them days or weeks later after having perused them—and potentially interfered with them—in private. And the state’s governor is now empowered to declare an emergency in the face of federal interference to keep the elections on track.

“We’re going to require mail ballots be sent out sooner, open drop boxes sooner. We’re going to enable voting centers to stay open after 7 pm if there is, for example, a shortage of ballots,” Griswold says. “We are making clear that our election-interference statutes extend to outside of a drop box and voting center. We’re also making it clear in statute that a candidate seeking a third term of the presidency will never appear on the Colorado ballot,” she says, referring to Trump’s unconstitutional suggestion that he might run for a third term.

Ashiya Brown, the director of Michigan’s All Voting Is Local chapter, says, “We are dealing with an administration that does not believe in law and order. This administration does not honor checks and balances.” But, she says, the state’s governor, secretary of state, and attorney general are willing to go toe-to-toe with the feds to protect Michigan residents’ right to vote. And precisely because the feds have been telegraphing their intentions for months, voter-protection organizations have had plenty of time to prepare. “They aren’t really good at keeping their plans secret,” Brown says with a wry laugh. “Nobody is resting.”

Meanwhile, in Maricopa County, Arizona, home to the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area, election deniers have sought one audit after another of the 2020 presidential election, despite an initial audit finding that Joe Biden did, indeed, win the state that year.

The GOP can’t win by the numbers, so it’s trying to prune the electorate, says Monica Sandschafer, the Arizona state director of the voting-rights group Mi Familia Vota. Sitting in her ninth-floor corner office, its huge glass windows overlooking sweltering downtown Phoenix, she explains the GOP’s voter-suppression strategies: “Black voters in the South, Latino voters here—disenfranchise people in order to maintain power. Obviously, it’s terrible at a federal level. But we are mobilized. We are organized, informed, and prepared for this fight.”

For Arizona Secretary of State Fontes, this is simply the new norm in Trump’s America. “This is the first time in the history of the republic that the president of the United States of America is actively moving the levers of power against the American public and their right to vote,” he says. “Trump is trying to pick his own voters. And that’s not how this country works—and everyone knows it.” At the very least, Trump’s efforts to interfere in the midterms are proof that he knows he has something to worry about if Democrats take control of Congress in November. “Donald Trump,” says Fontes, “is scared to death he’ll face accountability in Congress by demand of the American people.”

—40,000 child miners work in southern
Democratic Republic of the Congo

We juggled boastfulness with our phones
in our hands. K said he used one before I ever knew
what it was called. Then I sliced his insolence
with a photograph of a nine-year old me
holding his point-the-light-to-the-soup phone.
I was ignorant of the genesis of phones,
how the light it opened in my face came to be—
the sweats across the neck of little boys like myself.
F said Africans are ignorant in noisemaking for our wound—
to dissect the world with a shrill.
To pull every eye into the body of our drowning.
This time, it’s not cotton picking, but metal digging,
willing & unwilling. Ripping the canopies of schooling
off the backs of little children with a sack of cobalt.
I posted a change for Congo on my Instagram
& bought a new phone a year later.
Two years later, on YouTube, I watched the cobalt hands
of kids unearth the terrain the way it reiterates
the history of rubber & mutilated hands.
In Katanga, Arthur said he digs the world to live in the world—
to battle a shovel like his parents.
Richard carries a bag big as his body—
filled with red sand. Dorsan mourns his mother
with forgetfulness, a misery so big you forget your grief.
To subsist is to be capable of mourning.
what is that bright thing up there?
He asks of the light in the bulb.
Monica sits, the four-year old child
picking stones instead of brick toys.
Natalie says, my finger hurts.
Mukumba carries a lump on his neck,
as if the woes of his country like piles
unfolded inside it. I call mama on the phone,
asks how my sister, who is 3000 km away
from Katanga, fares in school—she’s doing well,
she says. I exhume my Instagram with a new protest post.
I keep watching. The world keeps watching.
Little children with faces as if the offspring of dust.

Repairs arranged by Donald Trump were botched,
But he still blames wild leftists for assault.
Then Pirro failed to grasp this simple fact:
With Trump it’s always someone else’s fault.

“Hope now has a permanent home,” Obama Foundation CEO and former senior adviser to the president Valerie Jarrett tells an audience of about three dozen reporters in a small auditorium designed for intimate, terraced seating. We are in part of what’s called the Forum, a section of the Obama Presidential Center that is open to the public. Just beyond these walls is a restaurant where one can buy an Obama Burger, and just beyond that is the Fannie Lou Hamer Walkway, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, which provides passage to the Nancy Pelosi Garden Pavilion, placed right beside the car park, perhaps an homage to how long the former speaker held her seat in Congress. Farther afield is the rest of the center, which includes a museum, offices for the Obama Foundation, several basketball courts, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, and a playground.

Tina Tchen is here to announce the foundation’s new leadership initiatives, which are about as revealing as the perfunctory placards and memorializations of “hope” and “change” all around us. These include a mid-career program for “the next generation of leaders”—not only “NGO leaders,” we are told, but“folks who are military leaders, who are in government, who are in business, big and small, who are in academia.” Among the participants, Jarrett continues, “we have a young man who is currently the deputy mayor for sustainability in the city of London. We have Emmanuel Macron’s economic adviser. We have a woman in our last class who was the director of the Kosovo Army military-training facility. Here in Chicago, we’ve got a Morgan Stanley banker who’s doing change in their neighborhood.” Oh, I’m sure!

Tchen is soon followed by John Roberson, formerly the city of Chicago’s chief operating officer and now the incoming executive vice president of the Obama Center. Roberson tells the audience that “this is an $850 million investment in the South Side of Chicago. I’m going to say it again: $850 million. Not a single penny of government money. That’s important because that shows the intentionality of the President and Mrs. Obama.” It’s also important because it captures a notable element of Obama’s presidency: promising social change only to implement economic austerity, for example, or bailing out the big investment banks while many Americans’ mortgages went belly-up—and with them, the foundations of their lives. It’s rather like the wall downstairs, largely out of sight, where the Obama Foundation’s offices are located, which lists the names of all the workers whose labor built the project: a hollow paean to the working class, even as the center itself and the real-estate speculation around it forces such workers out of their homes. More than hope and change, irony is the order of the day at the Obama Center.

Earlier, two beleaguered-looking figures took the stage, one tall and lanky, the other diminutive but better dressed in comparison. They were Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the husband-and-wife founders of the architecture firm TWBTA, who won the commission to design the Obama Presidential Center in 2016. (To give you some perspective, the competition winners were announced right after I graduated from college, and as I write this, I am 32 years old.)

As far as large projects go, TWBTA was an interesting choice by the former president, who was intimately involved in the design process from beginning to end. At the time of their selection, Williams and Tsien were in competition with some of the most famous architects in the world, including Renzo Piano, whose Whitney Museum of American Art had just opened in Greenwich Village, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who had just begun construction on the Shed at Hudson Yards.

TWBTA is best known for the extensive use of stone and other masonry, dramatic transitions in lighting, and spaces that feel intimate and handcrafted. (Seemingly in contrast, the interiors firm has designed boast a lot of patterns and colors, as seen in its lobbies and atria at David Geffen Hall.) While TWBTA wasn’t a household name, its small-to-medium-scale museum work, such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the former Folk Art Museum in New York, was well regarded in architectural circles. As far as architects go, it was a very Obama choice: The firm signaled erudition and sophistication while still being well-known enough to generate buzz.

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However, like ma-ny other architecture firms today, TWBTA has a hard time scaling up. This is almost embarrassingly obvious when it comes to the various structures that make up the Obama Center. Instead of a single building, the center is really a sprawling campus. There’s the aforementioned Forum, the public-library branch, the Home Court (designed by a different architect), and the playground, as well as the towering, almost tomb-like museum—nearly windowless and clad from top to bottom in New Hampshire granite—which has been variously called by detractors “the Obamalisk” and “the Death Star.”

When a member of the press asked Williams about the criticism of the building’s design and its Star Wars–like qualities, he said that the museum was built for longevity and that public opinion often changes over time. An Obama Center official then interjected to say that Mark Hamill himself had come to tour the tower with Obama.

Offering their own architectural tour of the center, Williams and Tsien stood awkwardly in front of a presentation and tried to explain their process and choices. A lot of architectural communication is bullshit, but the bullshit is often revealing. As for what inspired the shape of the building, the architects say that it was “designed to look like four hands coming together.” The exact number of hands that were involved in the design, and whose hands they were, was not made clear—but the extent of Obama’s involvement certainly was, as the architectsmentioned that the president wanted the building “to be interesting from all vantage points.” This explains some of the more baffling design decisions, such as the seemingly arbitrary articulations on the surface of the façade on the southeast corner. At the opposite corner from these ridges is the text from Obama’s speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma. It’s easy to joke that the words are pretty much illegible except, perhaps, by drone, which is doubly ironic—not only because it brings to mind Obama’s penchant for using drones to stealth-bomb Afghan weddings but also the use of drones by real- estate people to showcase their properties’ scale and worth.

Much as with Obama’s presidency itself, as one tours the Obama Center, one realizes that the liberal language of community and social justice has often served as a cover for economic disruption and an intense battle to privatize that which for a century has belonged to the public. The center sits on a vast area of Jackson Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, which—despite a legal battle by the nonprofit group Protect Our Parks that was ongoing for almost 10 years before the latest lawsuit was dismissed in 2024—the Obama Foundation has essentially made its own by securing a long-term lease from the city in order to build on it. During the center’s construction, the foundation made its possession of this public park clear by removing swaths of trees, whose absence makes the plaza and the playground almost unbearably hot in the summer.

Like many large-scale ventures in real estate, the Obama Center has also not helped the community in which it was built. As it approached completion, rents in the neighboring communities of Woodlawn and South Shore began to skyrocket, with many residents being priced out of units they’d lived in for years or even decades. To help residents prepare for the onslaught of tourists, the friendly folks at Airbnb have partnered with the Obama Foundation to “host a free virtual workshop focused on helping local residents welcome new visitors, earn supplemental income, and champion their neighborhoods…building off of Airbnb’s historic donations to community organizations focused on boosting economic empowerment.” According to Airbnb’s statistics, South Side residents earned more than $15.1 million from hosting visitors through Airbnb in 2025—“income,” the company tells us, “that approximately 60 percent of hosts say helped them stay in their homes and manage the city’s rising cost of living.” Economic empowerment, indeed.

The Obama Center is not a presidential library, though many of the event’s speakers engaged in the parapraxis of calling it that. A spokesperson told me that because Obama’s was the first digital presidency, there was little need for a paper trail. Technically, the library portion is held at the National Archives in Washington, DC. For all the recent outrage about Donald Trump’s commissioning a presidential library that’s actually a hotel, the precedent has been set by his predecessor, who has built for himself a kind of complex, much of which apologizes for itself.

The center’s eight-story museum is so obviously a tourist destination that the idea that the rest of the grounds are for local people is fairly laughable. Allegedly, the lawns and gardens are there to serve as a front lawn for the community, although unlike an actual park, the monumental site, the impeccable landscaping, and the phone-scrolling rent-a-cops pretty much inhibit this outright. Beyond that, timed passes for the museum have been reserved through next year, so we will have to see how the conflict between the explicit restriction of flows of people and the purported function of public space play out.

Intended for the local community or not, the campus sprawls across Stony Island Avenue, where the Main Court—the former president’s NBA-regulation basketball court—resides with the aluminum-paneled hulkiness of a college cafeteria. (It was designed by the firm Moody Nolan, whose Chicago office is led by the local architect Renauld Deandre Mitchell.) The playground, which is the most public-facing and engaging part of the center, suffers from being exposed to direct sun but is otherwise very sweet, with tall, fast-moving slides and jungle gyms shaped like dragonflies. The landscape architecture, especially the green roof of the Forum and the parking garage, is more sensitive than the stone palazzo, complete with an unsettling, hollow-eyed bronze statue of Mr. and Mrs. Obama holding hands, that anchors the three buildings by TWBTA. It reminds me of the REACH, Steven Holl’s addendum to the Kennedy Center, which is more visually dynamic and better integrated into the site. It’s also worth saying that the two smaller buildings—the ones Obama appeared to be significantly less involved with—are not unhandsome. The scale of the Forum and the new branch of the Chicago Public Library are both grand and intimate, and the stonework—made of the same granite as the museum—is, in this context, tactile. TWBTA’s interiors for the library (which includes a reading room of Obama’s favorite books) are likewise bright and engaging.

The two smaller buildings, however, are not the main draw of the Obama Center. That would be, of course, the towering museum, which is completely out of proportion to the rest of its environment. Visually, it is more in communication with the University of Chicago than with the rest of the South Side. In addition to its inappropriate scale, there is the inappropriate scale of the granite slabs that clad the building. They are both too big to add texture and they are too small to create the desired, monumental effect that the building is a singular cast-in-one volume. Combine the outsize scale with the building’s shape, which is somewhat akin to a brutalist Himalayan salt lamp, and one really gets a sense of how mistaken the whole entity is: a massive and unsightly pillar whose awkwardness is only further amplified by the nearly indecipherable text and other stuck-on accoutrements.

When one enters the museum, it almost feels like a joke: The entryway is hostile—one is met with bright lights, security guards, and metal detectors, on the other side of which is the word HOPE in the script of a ransom note affixed to a concrete wall. After picking up an Obama audio guide, one is confronted by a series of confusing atria that feature large-scale works of public art and sculptural stairs and corridors that lead nowhere. It takes a while to find the actual passageway into the museum itself: a claustrophobic escalator cornered against the north-facing wall of the building. Fredric Jameson once remarked about John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel that even in architecture, late capitalism works tirelessly to conceal, abstract, and obfuscate flows of capital and people, and the Obama Center is perhaps as exemplary of this phenomenon as Portman’s precipitous, topsy-turvy lobbies were. The escalators turn into elevators, and the elevators have strange and private stops—to get back down from the top floor, one needs to take a separate, much larger elevator than the one they took going up.

When one finally arrives on the first floor of the museum’s exhibition space, they are greeted by a copy of the Declaration of Independence alongside Native American petitions in a glass case. There are also a handful of small displays that include artifacts from many US civil-rights struggles: the abolition movement, women’s suffrage, the fight against Jim Crow, union activism, and the social programs established during the Great Society era. And that’s about where all of the actual history in the museum stops. These displays and a backlit collage of objects from the ’60s exist merely as a backdrop for the main event: Barack Obama is born.

It is hard to describe just how much this museum is a temple to Obama. While many presidential centers have exhibitions lauding their subjects’ successes, they also tend not to equivocate on their less-successful policies. For example, the mausoleum-like Lyndon B. Johnson Library makes sure everyone knows that he fucked up in Vietnam. There is no such fair play at the Obama Center, however, which is all about celebration. Obama’s voice booms on every floor. Videos abound of him talking about how the 1990s were a time of opportunity. The walls are covered in the careful documentation of his achievements; “hope and change” is baked into the structure.

The first floor of the exhibition is the most interesting, because it covers the time when Obama was most interesting: when he was a community organizer on the South Side, when he was a state senator for Illinois, and of course the 2008 election, which was a genuinely monumental achievement. When I was 14, I attended Obama’s 2009 inauguration on a school trip and remember it very well—the freezing cold, the voice projecting over the jumbotron, the celebrations in the streets. The speech he gave was one of the few times in my life when I considered myself unabashedly proud to be an American. But what follows on the next two floors of the museum exhibition is increasingly ludicrous. The second floor tells us all about how Obama solved the Great Recession—ignoring the fact that he bailed out the banks and General Motors and left everyone else behind. Then there’s a section on his foreign policy, with titles like “Strengthening Alliances” and “Destroying Terrorist Networks.” “To destroy the terrorist groups al Qaeda and [ISIL] President Obama used every element of US power. This included the military, intelligence, diplomacy, homeland security, and a commitment to the rule of law and human rights.” This, despite the fact that the rule of law was seriously undermined by Obama’s expansion of digital surveillance and that human rights no longer applied to the many civilians who were collateral damage in the United States’ targeted strikes.

While there’s a wall and video display devoted to LGBTQ people in the military, the topic of gay rights, which were greatly expanded under Obama, is less prominent. On one of the walls, we get yet another list of Obama’s achievements: the Paris Climate Accords, the Affordable Care Act, restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba. But we get very little on how his continued expansion of the power of the executive branch ensured that Trump could—and would—undo nearly all of these.

In a learning corner for children that feels like an afterthought, one can be taught important concepts of democracy, almost all of which ring hollow, while an iPad lets visitors view “memes” (i.e., political cartoons) from history. Banned books lie behind lift-a-flaps. Several displays ask the viewer: “How would you respond?” A typical question goes something like: “Some Americans question whether freedom is granted equally—or whether certain rights should be guaranteed. If you heard: ‘My rights don’t mean as much as a rich person’s do—I can’t afford to buy a giant billboard or a bunch of ads as part of my free speech,’ how would you respond?” The correct answer is, of course, placation—your rights do matter. (Even though the question is telling the uncomfortable truth.) Another insipid display features three wells of light shining on three buttons and the question “In a 2023 poll, just 28% of Americans said they were satisfied with how our democracy is functioning. What should we do about it?” Visitors can vote for (a) “Continue to make change while upholding democracy”; (b) “Throw democracy out and start over with a new system”; or (c) “I don’t care.” It’s pretty clear at this point that we no longer live in a legitimate democracy of any kind, and yet we are forced to pretend otherwise. As is the case with the rest of the museum, the present—the here and now, the political world we currently inhabit—simply doesn’t exist. The nostalgia for the moment before the disaster and the refusal to reckon with what has actually happened since then is so palpable that at times it borders on delusion. At the Obama Center, one walks into 2008 and never leaves. “Hope and change” doesn’t disappoint, and as such it becomes little more than a brand or, perhaps worse, just something one can say without meaning it. Hope has a permanent home, as Jarrett put it. It is a tomb.

But perhaps what is most ridiculous about the Obama Center museum is the celebrity of it all. The top floor of the exhibition features a number of absolutely asinine displays: little dioramas of parties at the White House; a bust of the man himself; a comic strip about the Obamas’ dogs; a display of Michelle’s dresses; another devoted to the various species named after the former president. Many presidential libraries have a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it was inhabited by their namesake. In the selfie age, this has more of a photo-booth feel than a historical element to it. By the time one takes the elevator to the observation deck, they’re beginning to feel drowsy with Obama fatigue. Finally, we have escaped—if only we could muster the energy to enjoy the view.

Somehow, the observation deck also has its flaws. An enclosed room at the top of the building, it has a ceiling installation consisting of a pyramid from which little blue rays of text from Obama’s Selma speech emanate. It feels overwhelmingly flat in a room that, with its stonework, textured wood walls, and gargantuan letters, is otherwise dynamic and tactile. The text that interrupts the view is perhaps one of the few interesting design choices in the entire building—one wants to reach out and grab the beveled letters. But unfortunately, once you’ve had your fill of this feature, you then make your way back into the nostalgic world of Obama adulation, taking the elevator down to the ground floor of the Forum, where you’ll be greeted by an expansive Obama-themed gift shop.

After I left the center, I began thinking about what it means as a piece of architecture. For me, it functions as a kind of cenotaph for neoliberalism: a monument—or tomb—for a subject whose body is lost or buried elsewhere. The most famous cenotaph in architecture was the one proposed for Isaac Newton, designed in 1784 by the French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée but never built: It consisted of a single, giant, vacuous sphere. And while artifacts and objects technically exist in the Obamalisk, it is spiritually vacuous, its substance is the empty world that Obama’s presidency never actually built. It is a tomb without a body—anyone’s body.

One cannot deny that the Obama Center will have a special place in the architectural canon, not because it’s good but because it is arguably the last building of the 2010s—itself an extension of the 1990s and 2000s—built half a decade too late. The model of production for civic buildings—museums, libraries, concert halls, etc.—by famous architects, reliant on both large-scale private (and sometimes public) funding and large swaths of cheap, developable urban land, is over. The architects responsible—giants of their field—are dying, and both the operations of their firms and the scale of their projects are far less economically viable at a time when land is extremely expensive and governments are turning away from civic architecture. The buildings of this now-bygone era, such as the Whitney, the Shed, and the Paris and Hamburg philharmonic halls, are ostensibly “public-facing” while generating rents of a different kind—those that the Brazilian architectural theorist Pedro Fiori Arantes calls the “rent of form”: They make money through the increased value of the surrounding real estate, as sites for advertising and photo shoots, and as venues for the tourism industry, which has come to displace many others.

For better and for worse, this approach to architecture no longer exists, even as the Obama Presidential Center offers us one last homage to its ambition and optimism. In this way, perhaps the most tragic element of the center is just how far it ended up being from its own declared purpose, which is to foster hope and the inspiration to effect change in the hearts of its visitors. Instead, hope and change exist only in the past tense, though I guess you can buy them on a water bottle in the gift shop.

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world.

The lack of faith in universities is striking. According to Gallup, the portion of Americans who were “confident” in American higher education dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent between 2015 and 2025. Moreover, only 35 percent of US adults now say that college is “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. A poll by Pew likewise found that “7 in 10 Americans now say U.S. higher education is going in the wrong direction.”

Behind this general loss of confidence lie misgivings about specific issues. Pollsters for Pew have discovered that 79 percent of adults “say colleges are doing a fair or poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable,” while “about half or more give colleges and universities fair or poor ratings on preparing students for well-paying jobs in today’s economy (55%), providing financial help to students who need it (52%), and developing students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills (49%).”

Faculty morale is no better: As anyone employed at a US university will readily acknowledge, depression, even nihilism, among professors is real. It’s not for nothing that it is faculty themselves who have published books about higher education with titles like The Great Mistake and Poison Ivy. Both the public and the professors are convinced that something has gone terribly wrong with the American university.

There are various sources of this discontent. First, the labor structure of universities has been transformed from one defined by stable employment to one defined by gig work. A 2023 survey by the American Association of University Professors revealed that almost 70 percent of all US faculty held “contingent”—that is, part-time or adjunct—positions, up from 47 percent in 1987. Then there are the millions of former students who are struggling to pay back the debt they incurred while attending college or graduate school. As of early 2026, the total student-loan debt held by those educated at US universities was $1.833 trillion, with the “average public university student” borrowing $31,960 to get their degree. Finally, universities have become key sites in our never-ending culture war, which has made campuses hostile places for faculty and students, with the general public increasingly viewing them with suspicion. Even on the lists that American university administrators have long sought to dominate, US higher education is in decline. According to the 2025 Leiden Ranking, which rates universities by the number of publications they produced between 2020 and 2023, only one US university—Harvard—ranks in the global top 10. Among the rest, eight are Chinese universities and one is Canadian.

Having long sought to destroy the “radical” and “liberal” university, the right wing now smells blood. In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump launched an attack on universities. On January 20, 2025—his first day in office—he signed Executive Order 14151, which focused on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.” On March 20 of the same year, he signed Executive Order 14242, which instructed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Beyond these executive orders, the Trump administration also unilaterally eliminated billions of dollars in research grants that the federal government had earmarked for universities; deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to seize and arrest numerous student activists; revoked the visas of more than 8,000 international students, focusing especially on those connected to pro-Palestine protest movements; demanded that Columbia University place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership; and, in exchange for federal funding, offered nine universities the opportunity to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that promoted the teaching and research of identifiably “conservative ideas.” The modern American university system, which emerged in the period following World War II and was responsible for educating and uplifting millions of people, has never faced such a concerted assault.

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Into this breach steps Lee C. Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University and the lawyer renowned for winning Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that upheld the affirmative-action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School until the court declared affirmative action illegal in 2023. Bollinger understands that US universities are in serious trouble, and his new book, University: A Reckoning, is his attempt to save them. But while the book contains numerous compelling ideas, it is limited by its author’s faith in a liberal center that no longer exists.

Bollinger wrote University: A Reckoning because he was aghast at the feeble way that universities have responded to the Trump administration’s assaults. He was especially disappointed by Columbia, which paid the federal government $221 million in settlements and agreed to implement the various reforms that Trump demanded. In effect, he hopes University: A Reckoning will provide the intellectual basis on which the managers of higher education can “confront the crisis and reimagine who we are now and for the future.” According to Bollinger, “the fundamental purpose of the university” is “to preserve and advance human knowledge about the human condition, about life and about the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.”

Already with this statement, fundamental problems with Bollinger’s rescue mission begin to emerge. His identification of higher education with the modern research university ignores the millions of students who attend non-research institutions, such as community and other two-year colleges. Furthermore, Bollinger’s framing completely ignores the degree to which the university system has essentially become a credentialing mechanism geared toward producing workers for the American market and, at its most rarefied levels, reproducing the extant—and increasingly oligarchical—class structure.

In the contemporary United States, wealth inequality is the worst it’s been in over a century. According to a recent report by Oxfam, “the richest 0.0001 percent control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age.” Indeed, the report notes, “between 1989 and 2022, the increase in wealth of a household at the top 1 percent cutoff was 101 times bigger than the increase in wealth for the median household, and 987 times bigger than the increase in wealth of the household at the 20th percentile.” It is no exaggeration to say that the United States is now ruled by an oligarchy.

Though elite colleges profess a faith in meritocracy and insist that they are engines of class mobility, in practice they reward the already rewarded. A recent study by the economists Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, for instance, revealed that “children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.” As The Harvard Crimson likewise noted some years ago, “roughly 26 percent of members of the Class of 2025 who answered a question about parental income in TheCrimson’s annual freshman survey said their families make $250,000 or more per year—earnings higher than 94 percent of American households.” If Bollinger hopes to engender a consensus in favor of research universities, it is unlikely to be built without the support of the many Americans who attend two-year and non-research institutions and who rightly understand elite colleges as gatekeepers of class privilege.

But even when it comes to the research university, Bollinger’s understanding is woefully out of date. For instance, he insists that it is “expected of a professor…that their scholarship must be made fully available to the public.” However, as anyone who isn’t employed by or enrolled at a university is aware, most scholarly material is not available to the public but instead is available only to those who pay significant access fees to various, oftentimes for-profit organizations. In fact, some of those who have tried to skirt these paywalls have suffered serious penalties. The activist Aaron Swartz, to take the most egregious example, was hounded by the government for downloading and making available millions of academic articles from JSTOR, one of a number of groups that belong to an oligopolistic infrastructure whose business model relies on the free labor of scholars.

This is just one of several instances in which Bollinger ignores the actually existing political economy of the modern research university. Most galling for a history PhD like myself, he makes only passing reference to the jobs crisis that has beset so many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In Bollinger’s vision, everyone is either tenured or tenure-track, working on behalf of advancing public knowledge—an untenable position in an environment in which the tenure-track researcher is more the exception than the rule.

Bollinger has for decades been ensconced in hyper-elite universities that, until recently, were able to shield themselves from the degradation of the higher-education system as a whole. He imagines a university defined by “gatherings in the faculty commons, workshops over drafts, formal lectures to attend, and shared social events.” But this world doesn’t exist—indeed, it can’t exist in a context in which the disciplines are failing to reproduce themselves. In the past, even when a wider public audience was often prevented from accessing most scholarly production, professors could assume that there would at least be an academic audience for their work. This audience might have been small, but there was a promise that it would continue to exist in the future. Today, that promise has dissipated, which naturally affects how scholars approach their research. It’s not for nothing that a prominent scholar recently joked to me that “podcasts are the new journal articles.”

That Bollinger does not reckon with the reality of what it means to be an academic in the mid-2020s underlines a key feature of his work: While he has much to say about the glories of scholarship, he is ultimately not interested in the people who produce it. This is a serious problem for his program, because at the end of the day, universities are above all else workplaces, and their defense requires a buy-in from the workers who make them what they are.

The most innovative part of University: A Reckoning is not Bollinger’s analysis of the current state of the American university, but rather his legal arguments about how to protect the university from state interference in the future. Working through a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, he argues that “the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and press” can be used to protect universities from government intrusion.

To understand Bollinger’s position, one must run through a potted history of the First Amendment, which he ably provides. The Supreme Court, he notes, started hearing First Amendment cases only in 1919, when numerous radicals—including the Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs—were prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 for inveighing against US participation in World War I. The cases against Debs and others eventually made their way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the radicals’ speech was not protected by the First Amendment. By the end of 1919, however, the court had significantly changed course: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued an opinion in which he argued that, first, freedom of speech was necessary to improve knowledge; and second, truth could be discovered only when all ideas were allowed to compete in the marketplace; and third, the Constitution itself was an “experiment” that could function only if ideas were freely exchanged. Thus, Holmes declared, the government could limit free speech only when there was a “clear and present danger” that would be addressed by doing so.

While there were moments in the 20th century when freedom of speech wasn’t respected—Bollinger highlights the McCarthy-era prosecution of Communist Party leaders—he contends that, in general, Holmes’s pro-free-speech perspective carried the day. This was true even in situations that offended many Americans, such as in 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for Ku Klux Klan members in Ohio to openly wield weapons and threaten Blacks and Jews so long as the Klan’s speech wasn’t, as Bollinger puts it, “directed at inciting imminent lawless action.” With this ruling, he notes, the court made it clear that Americans were expected to “live with the most reprehensible ideas, really until they are about to become action.”

Bollinger cites another case that he argues also has relevance to protecting universities. In 1960, L.B. Sullivan, the city commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama—a hot spot of anti-Black racism and civil-rights resistance—sued The New York Times for running an advertisement that criticized the city’s police force for committing numerous injustices. After hearing this case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had not committed any violation because, Bollinger explains, the Constitution assumed “that sovereignty resided with the citizenry and not with the government itself.”

In Bollinger’s telling, this ruling indicated that “the authority and responsibility of citizens to exercise self-government meant that public officials could not be permitted to sue citizens for damages or damaging falsehoods about them absent truly extraordinary circumstances.” If public officials were allowed to sue the press and ordinary people, the Supreme Court warned, Americans might become wary of engaging in public debate, which would undermine the foundations of American democracy.

This all makes for interesting reading, but how does it relate to American universities? For Bollinger, these cases, and much of First Amendment jurisprudence, establish a clear reason why universities need to exist—and to be free of government interference. Since there are “no legal checks on speech that disrespects others, urges violence, revels in misinformation and falsehoods, propagates stupidity, or forsakes ideas and norms we all should value,” the university, he argues, has a critical social function: It can serve as a “moderator” able to “help lead and guide the discussion.”

Bollinger contends that this role has traditionally fallen to the press. But today, he notes, the professionalized press, dedicated to disseminating facts about the world, has been supplanted by social-media companies that have little interest in the truth as such. In Bollinger’s view, “this is where the university comes in.” He insists that “universities are a version of the press [that] offer deeper inquiry into public issues and are always on call to serve as a check on government and society.” Therefore, similar to the press, they should be conceived as an additional, and protected, estate—“a fifth branch” of democratic government “as essential as the press to our collective life and success.”

Bollinger’s case for the university is essentially a functionalist one: that universities should be protected from government intrusion because they serve a crucial, moderating function in a society defined by very permissive First Amendment jurisprudence.

There are several significant problems with this argument. For starters, the First Amendment has nothing to say about higher education, and no amount of legal reasoning will change that. Therefore, any First Amendment–based case for the university will have significant limits and will likely face severe pushback. Second, the labor of journalists and of academics are in practice quite dissimilar. In an ideal world, journalists check government and private power through the rapid and timely exposure of information and behavior. Academics, by contrast, engage in years-long research projects that are concerned primarily—as Bollinger well knows—with expanding our knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. Such work might check state and corporate power, but that is not its primary function, nor should it be. Finally, even if universities were reformed to become the referees of public speech, it is by no means clear that this would engender a better, let alone more moderate, society. If the past several decades have revealed anything, it’s that experts often get things wrong—just look at the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis. In both of these cases, experts failed to check power and contributed to policies that actively made the world worse.

Bollinger’s program embodies the liberal faith in expertise. Like many liberals, Bollinger assumes that the “correct” ideas, developed, articulated, and promoted by an educated elite–cum–expert class, can impel and preserve good governance. It’s an ahistorical perspective that refuses to take seriously the many failures of expertise that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. After all, it was the experts who advanced the arguments that brought us deregulation, financialization, and endless war. Many Americans have thus lost faith in the experts. To paraphrase Anton Chigurh, if the experts we followed brought us here, of what use were the experts?

This leads to the fundamental problem with University: A Reckoning. Bollinger premises his book on defending a liberal “center”—a center defined by its belief that a college-educated elite should make the most consequential political, economic, and social decisions—that has lost its legitimacy. Indeed, his inability or unwillingness to accept this new reality leads him to have little interest in those who could actually defend the university from Trump: the professors, graduate students, and staff who ensure that the university works.

Bollinger, in fact, might be among the most unsuitable people to offer a defense of the university in the present moment. During his 21 years as president of Columbia, Bollinger witnessed multiple graduate-student strikes, one of which was caused by his administration’s unwillingness to recognize their union. Workers, it seems, don’t occupy much space in his imagination, or for that matter in the imagination of most university administrators. In recent years, for instance, administrators at Harvard, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have shown significant unwillingness to recognize, bargain with, or offer concessions to the workers attempting to unionize their workplaces.

Administrators’ hostility to unionization is unfortunate, because if faculty and graduate students don’t organize with one another and with staff across campus, the American university will continue to decline. One only wishes that Bollinger, when he had the power to do so, had aided instead of impeded the workers who made his university what it was. They are, after all, the people on whom any defense, let alone a remaking, of the university will rely.

Should you worry about cyclospora? Emily Oster doesn’t think so. Writing in The New York Times in July, Oster, the economist and self-appointed health guru, told readers that the nationwide spread of the cyclospora parasite, which causes watery, sometimes “explosive” diarrhea, was no grave concern. After all, she noted, the infection is treatable, rarely causes serious injury or death, and is not transmissible from person to person.

All of this is true enough—and if, like Oster, you view health as a private family matter, you might draw comfort from her words. But if you think that the Trump administration’s devastating ongoing attack on public health in America is important, the cyclospora outbreak, which investigators think was caused by tainted produce, should matter very much to you.

First, this is the largest outbreak of the protozoal disease since 2019, with more than 11,500 cases confirmed or under investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of late July. This doesn’t come anywhere near the prevalence of other diarrheal diseases like norovirus. But the point isn’t that cyclospora is not as bad as norovirus; it’s that our food supply shouldn’t be making us sick.

Yet the federal agencies responsible for monitoring foodborne diseases, like the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC, have been decimated by staffing cuts in Trump’s second term. The FDA was already having difficulties in inspecting foreign food facilities before Trump 2.0; now, as Brian Ronholm of Consumer Reports told the Times, these cuts have “really put [the FDA] further behind to the point where it’s virtually nonexistent.”

Meanwhile, the CDC last year gutted its food-surveillance program, cutting the number of monitored pathogens from eight to two. One of the pathogens dropped from the list? Cyclospora.

The Trump administration also shut down two Department of Agriculture food-safety committees in 2025 and closed two food-safety labs, only reopening them after a public outcry. Finally, new FDA food-traceability rules, which would have dramatically expedited the search for the infectious culprit in this outbreak, have been pushed back to 2028. At the local and state levels, public-health departments are struggling to survive after multiple rounds of budget cuts by the federal government. The Associated Press reported that “the cuts are reducing the entire system to a shadow of what it once was, threatening to undermine even routine work,” let alone dealing with outbreaks that threaten our communities.

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The Trump administration’s endemic corruption is also making it impossible to trust the government’s public-health decisions. The FDA initially suggested that the culprit in the outbreak may be lettuce sold to Taco Bell restaurants by Taylor Farms, a huge national produce supplier. Taylor Farms’ produce is everywhere; as the Times reported, the company “said it made more than 40 percent of all salad kits sold in American groceries” in 2025.

Taylor Farms has been cited for food-safety violations related to previous cyclospora, E. coli, and salmonella outbreaks. It has also donated to pro-Trump super PACS, and its executives met with government officials in the White House amid the latest outbreak. Days after the meeting, the FDA pulled back and said the tests on Taylor Farms’ products were a series of false positives, while insisting that the company is still a focus of its investigations. Are these things connected? The fact that this is even a question says it all.

The conclusion that emerges from all these events is that the United States’ food-safety system is in deep trouble—and it’s just one of the many serious public-health crises we are facing, all as a result of the Trump administration’s relentless assault on the institutions that protect us.

The Emily Osters of the world seem oblivious to all of this. In her Times column, Oster called for wastewater testing and investing in better risk communication, better disease surveillance, and better-funded local health departments, which makes me think she just awoke from an 18-month sleep like Rip Van Winkle and believes Joe Biden is still president and someone in the White House still cares about public health.

We cannot afford to be comfortably numb, wrongheadedly certain in our own safety at this moment, but this is the gospel that Oster and her ilk preach. It is rooted in a selfishness that says no one matters outside “the family firm,” to borrow the title of one of Oster’s books. Just when we need to be thinking about the public good, we have prominent pundits telling us, in so many words, that the answer is to maximize our personal effectiveness and minimize our own anxiety about the world around us.

The cyclospora outbreak may be affecting only a few thousand people in the US right now, but basic human decency should move us to care about them. Absent that, basic self-interest should spur us to recognize that this outbreak is a harbinger of even greater danger ahead, as our public-health system starts to buckle and break, leaving all of us more vulnerable in the years to come.

To hear the DC insiders tell it, insurgent socialists and progressive firebrands are wrecking the Democratic Party. Don’t believe it. The insurgency that swept across the United States during the spring and summer of 2026, with its spike in voter turnouts and headline-grabbing primary results for young candidates who are challenging entrenched incumbents, is not, as some would have you believe, undermining the world’s oldest political party in this critical midterm-election year. The insurgency is revitalizing it. And if established party leaders don’t screw things up—by echoing Republican talking points about a “dangerous” left, or by opting for caution when the electorate is calling for action—this revitalization has the potential to build a vibrant coalition of Democratic base voters and legions of younger, more diverse, and newly registered ones. If it is sufficiently bold and innovative, strategic and inclusive, this coalition can do more than simply check and balance Donald Trump, by giving Democratic candidates and economic-populist independents control of the House and the Senate and key governorships nationwide. In the run-up to the 2028 presidential election, it can merge Democratic candidacies and movement energy into a political force capable of finally realizing the deferred dreams of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights and the Freedom Budget for All Americans that A. Philip Randolph and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. advanced as an essential extension of the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s.

Too many Democratic Party leaders in recent years have complacently mounted campaigns that address legitimate fears of Republican hegemony, yet fail to offer a bolder vision that speaks to the most powerful of all incentives to vote: hope. We’re not talking about vapid “It’ll all work out in the end” optimism or, worse yet, the dismissive “Just trust us” messaging of old-school politicians. We’re talking about a radical hope that lives can be made dramatically better by movements that recognize and embrace Patti Smith’s promise that “people have the power…to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools.” This is the prospect that FDR entertained when he dramatically expanded the Democratic coalition by proposing a New Deal that pundits dismissed as extreme—even socialistic—but that the electorate embraced as essential. This is what Barack Obama understood when he had the audacity to call a divided nation to “come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.” And this is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson was talking about four decades ago when he pleaded for a new Democratic politics based on the idea that “if you raise up truth, it’s magnetic. It has a way of drawing people.”

The progressive gospel that Jackson preached in his Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s, and that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders outlined in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, laid the groundwork for what a new generation of candidates and activists propose today. They are speaking confidently about enacting Medicare for All, taxing the rich, ending poverty, protecting immigrants, and changing our foreign policy. They are remaking American politics and policymaking—as the July vote by 103 House Democrats (including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi) to end US aid to Israel demonstrated. What Politico described as a “seismic shift” in the party and in Congress is taking place because voters all over the country are demanding a new politics.

After a trio of insurgents—Democratic Socialists of America members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier and veteran progressive Brad Lander—swept New York’s Democratic primaries in June, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was mocked for his claim that democratic socialists with working-class economics and values-driven agendas “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.” Less than a week later, 29-year-old DSA member Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent in a Colorado House primary. That same day, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who pledged to stand up to corporate monopolies on behalf of workers, farmers, and consumers, overcame a 30-point deficit in the polls to beat a sitting senator in the state’s primary for governor. Weiser’s win shocked the Democratic leadership and his own progressive supporters, whom he heard asking on primary night, “Can I really believe again?”

It’s not just that Democrats can believe again. They must.

The Democratic brand as it’s been defined by its congressional leaders is unpopular, even among Democrats. It doesn’t have to be that way. The party can become every bit as appealing, and electable, as it has ever been. But that won’t happen if control over its future remains in the hands of the people who spoiled the brand in the first place.

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Democratic voters know that the party needs a new direction, and they are forging it by nominating candidates such as US Representative Analilia Mejia, a key aide to Sanders during his 2020 presidential bid whose February special-election victory in a suburban New Jersey district shocked commentators. “People will say that this district is not the kind of district in which a progressive or a lefty could win. But it’s not about left/right,” Mejia, the sole candidate in a crowded Democratic-primary field to call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide, said on election night. “It’s about right and wrong.”

By choosing candidates like Mejia, who easily won her general election, Democratic-primary voters are charting a new course. They know—better than many party leaders, it seems—that it is necessary to remake the party as a popular movement for economic, social, and racial justice, for saving the planet, and for a foreign policy that chooses human rights and diplomacy over bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.

That gap between the electorate and party leaders has led to this dynamic and sometimes contentious moment. Media outlets are paying attention to Democratic primaries and scrutinizing the results from Maine to California, Pennsylvania to Texas. Right-wing publications like the New York Post run articles warning about dire consequences for Democrats as a result of a “socialist takeover.” Former Clinton-administration commerce secretary William Daley—whose centrist choice for Illinois’s March Senate primary got crushed by a progressive contender—complained that “this far-left socialist, some call ‘progressive,’ part of society [is] basically trying to take over the Democratic Party.” Leaders of Third Way, the DC think tank that puts a contemporary spin on the neoliberal agenda of the old Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—which Jackson called “Democrats for the Leisure Class”—warn that “the DSA’s radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased; it is a movement to be opposed.”

But voters don’t see it that way. They are open to candidates—be they democratic socialists such as Pennsylvania House nominee Chris Rabb, or progressives like Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, or old-school economic populists like Troy Jackson in Maine and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—who break with status quo politics. That’s not surprising. Remember: Bernie Sanders represents a rural state and was the first non-Republican to win his Vermont Senate seat since the 1850s; and some of the most progressive members of Congress, such as Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan, represent urban, suburban, and rural districts. And look at the polling analyses from groups like the Center for Working-Class Politics, which remind us that “championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party” and that “contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades.”

Instead of getting distracted by the establishment’s hand-wringing, Democrats should recognize a moment of renewal and potential. The party suffered devastating defeats in 2024, in part because of an enthusiasm gap among its core constituencies, and in greater part because of its failure to engage with the disaffected potential voters who will be essential to a robust governing coalition. Yet now it is suddenly experiencing what the CNN data analyst Harry Enten describes as a “supercharging” moment. A July Washington Post/Ipsos poll, conducted amid the hype about upheaval in the party, found that Democrats had a 10-point advantage over Republicans when it came to voter enthusiasm. That was eight points better than in 2018—the “blue wave” midterm-election year that saw seven governorships and at least 40 House seats flip to the Democrats. “And,” the Post noted, “more than seven in 10 Democrats say it is ‘more important’ to vote in 2026 than in previous midterm elections, compared with just over half of Republicans.” Of course, voters are eager to cast ballots against Republicans who back Trump, but they’re also eager to cast them for a bolder, better Democratic Party.

Jesse Jackson saw this moment coming. “If we lift up a program to feed the hungry, they’ll come running. If we lift up a program to study war no more, our youth will come running,” he declared as he sought to forge a new Democratic politics. “If we lift up a program to put America back to work, and an alternative to welfare and despair, they will come working.”

In 1984, Jackson surmised that the people have the power to change a party and a nation. In 2026, a new Democratic coalition—fueled by the energy of a dynamic multiracial, multiethnic progressive insurgency—can prove him right.

On Saturday, federal marshals in Miami arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate—two brothers who run a social-media empire in which they purport to be the voice of male empowerment—on charges of rape and sex trafficking. The arrest was made after an extradition request by British authorities (the Tates are dual UK-US nationals). The brothers had previously been arrested on rape and trafficking charges in Romania and the United Kingdom. As The New York Times reports, the new charges against the brothers are grave, as are the accusations in an ongoing criminal case against them in Romania:

The new charges against Andrew Tate, 39, include seven counts of rape; three counts of sex trafficking; three counts of assault; and 19 more charges relating to sexual images of children and “extreme pornography.”

Tristan Tate, 38, faces two new charges of rape; one count of sexual assault; and three counts of sex trafficking….

In Romania, where the Tates previously lived, prosecutors have been investigating allegations that they coerced dozens of women, including a 17-year-old girl, into pornography. They have also investigated Andrew Tate over allegations that he raped one of the women and had sex with a 15-year-old.

In June, The New Yorker published an extensive report by Heidi Blake that made clear, in harrowing detail, the despicable nature of these alleged crimes. Multiple women told Blake that they had been manipulated, sexually tortured, and raped by the Tate brothers. (The Tates have denied any wrongdoing.) These acts, Blake wrote, were motivated by a bluntly misogynist ideology often expressed by the brothers and also served an economic purpose.

The Tates ran a webcam-pornography empire where many of the women they employed had been groomed into the job. The business model relied on paying these employees as little as possible. The verbal and sexual abuse allegedly inflicted upon them seems to have served as a way of keeping wages low.

In an online network he calls “The War Room,” Andrew Tate offers lessons on pimping, or as he once put it, recruiting women into “sexual slavery.” On one occasion, Tate instructed his students, “You have to fuck them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business. You have to be militant with your fucking pimping.” He would have the women who work for him get a “Tate owned” tattoo.

These allegations are horrifying enough on their own. But they are compounded by the level of Tates’ influence, which stretches far beyond the online reaches of the so-called “manosphere.” The Tate brothers have been deeply allied with MAGA for years, with Andrew Tate cultivating personal relationships with key figures in the Trump orbit—including Trump’s youngest son, Barron.

As The New York Times reported in December 2025:

As his notoriety grew, Andrew Tate shrewdly courted Tucker Carlson and other media stars of the right, who in turn tapped into the brothers’ loyal following to expand their own reach.

Andrew also nurtured relationships with Donald Trump Jr. and his younger brother Barron, who recognized the role that young male voters could play in their father’s return to power.

Barron, now 19, admired Andrew, and spoke with him over Zoom last year, according to Justin Waller, a mutual friend who was on the call. During the call, they discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates, he said.

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These relationships paid off handsomely; as Donald Trump prepared to retake the White House in January 2025, his incoming administration successfully pressured the Romanian government to remove travel restrictions preventing the Tates from leaving the country and returning to the United States.

There is an obviously self-serving element to forming these bonds. But there is also plenty of evidence that the Tates and their MAGA allies share the same hateful worldview.

Andrew Tate had started cultivating a relationship with Donald Trump Jr. shortly after the 2016 election. After a visit to Trump Tower, Tate posted a photo of himself clasping the hand of the president’s eldest son, accompanied with a note reading “The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” On another occasion, Tate praised Donald Trump by saying, “He’s grabbing bitches by the pussy. I like that guy.”

Andrew Tate is also an open admirer of longtime Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein. In a deleted tweet, he once wrote, “EVERYONE wants to be friends with the pimp. Doubt me? EPSTEIN HAD ACCESS TO PUSSY. Look at his fucking friends list.”

In describing Tate’s “empire of abuse,” Blake makes clear that the accused predator is a low-rent Jeffrey Epstein. Both men recruited young women (some of them allegedly children) via modeling agencies. They would shower these prospective victims with attention and affection. They both operated in murky political jurisdictions to avoid the law (Epstein’s private island, Romania). Both benefited from friendships with elite political and media figures. Both justified their actions with a nihilistic philosophy of a Darwinian right of the strong to dominate the weak.

Perhaps the main difference between Epstein and Tate is one of cultural style. Epstein was a centrist elitist who cultivated connections with Ivy League scholars, particularly at Harvard. As such, he belonged to a historical period where even monstrous criminals tried to give their actions the sheen of respectability. Tate is emblematic of a cruder and more populist period—a social-media influencer whose clout comes from his unabashed, hateful vulgarity.

It’s hardly surprising that Donald Trump had a quondam close companion in Epstein, while two of his sons fell under the sway of Tate.

The connecting thread in this story is misogyny. Trump’s own sexual predations (the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” remark, the sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll) might embarrass some of his supporters, but they also excite others. Trump and Trumpism have become rallying points for a misogynist backlash against feminism. This reactionary movement has only intensified in reaction to the #MeToo movement.

As Blake reports, Tate’s unabashedly misogynist and abusive actions had strong support from many MAGA luminaries:

When Tate was arrested on human-trafficking charges, his allies defended him. Donald Trump, Jr., called the case “absolute insanity,” and [Elon] Musk suggested that the authorities were targeting the Tates while ignoring “actual sex trafficking.” [Tucker] Carlson, who had just released a documentary called “The End of Men,” devoted hours of airtime to proclaiming Tate’s innocence; so did the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens. The activist Charlie Kirk praised him onstage. “What he says is so powerful,” Kirk said. “Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.”

To be sure, not everyone in MAGAworld was on board. There were significant dissents from Ben Shapiro and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said about Tate, “This actually is toxic masculinity.” But these critiques were minority voices in MAGA.

If a feminist wanted to insult MAGA, she might say Andrew Tate is the ultimate embodiment of right-wing masculinity. Tellingly enough, all too many in MAGA would likely agree.

At Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC, a small monument marks the spot where former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police on the morning of September 21, 1976. The monument is inscribed with the words “Justice – Peace – Dignity”; every year dozens of friends and colleagues gather at the circle to honor the lives of the two extraordinary people whose conscientious pursuit of those goals were cut short by an act of international terrorism.

This September, the annual gathering will carry a special meaning—and not only because it is the 50th anniversary of the assassination. It comes after a Chilean judge has called new attention to the case of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, finalizing a 15-year judicial effort to bring long-overdue accountability for her death as a victim of the Pinochet regime’s ruthless repression, rather than as collateral damage in the regime’s effort to eliminate its leading international critic, Orlando Letelier. Fifty years after she was murdered, there is finally a degree of justice for Ronni Moffitt, and a significant step toward closure in the infamous Letelier-Moffitt case.

The Long Arc of Justice

Ronni Susan Karpen Moffitt was just 25 years old when a piece of shrapnel from the car bomb cut through her neck, as she and her husband, Michael, were commuting to work at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) with Orlando Letelier that fall morning 50 years ago. A Jersey girl—she was the daughter of Murray and Hilda Karpen, proud owners of Karpen’s Delicatessen in Passaic, where I once enjoyed a delicious knish—she had just been promoted to a fundraising position at IPS where she worked closely with cofounders Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet. “Everyone loved Ronni, who used to babysit for me and my siblings,” Representative Jamie Raskin fondly remembered during a special ceremony at Sheridan Circle in 2023.

“My Aunt Ronni was music,” as her niece Rebecca Karpen recalled the highlights of her short life in an interview with The Nation. “She wanted to create an after-school music program for low-income kids of color. She got married in the backyard of her parents’ home in Passaic, New Jersey, where she walked down the aisle in a flower crown and posed inside the family deli food truck. She was kind, but not weak. She was just confident of her worth and unwilling to shrink herself to conform to outdated stereotypes of women’s roles in the workplace. I’ve been told that she didn’t take anyone’s shit!”

“Ronni lost her life because the dictatorship decided to exterminate those it defined as enemies,” notes Dr. Elizabeth Lira, who directs the Human Rights Center of the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile. Indeed, Ronni was not the target of the assassination plot; her outspoken Chilean colleague Orlando Letelier was. The FBI investigation, codenamed “CHILBOM,” soon focused on the Chilean secret police, DINA, which served as Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s arm of repression both inside and outside of Chile, targeting pro-democracy opponents of the military dictatorship.

Eventually, the FBI identified two DINA operatives, American-born Michael Townley and Maj. Armando Fernandez Larios, as leading suspects. The US then sought the extradition of DINA’s top two officers, Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza—which General Pinochet personally blocked. A comprehensive CIA review of its own intelligence on the car bombing concluded that there was “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder” and that Pinochet “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency.”

When Chile finally returned to democracy in 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration made a deal with the incoming civilian government: The US would drop sanctions against Chile for protecting the DINA officers if the new government prosecuted Contreras and Espinoza. That unprecedented trial—the first of its kind in post-Pinochet Chile—became the Chilean equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial in the United States. For most Chileans, the nationally televised legal proceedings provided their first exposure to the true nature of the Pinochet regime’s sinister system of repression—and flagrant acts of international terrorism.

Contreras and Espinoza were both found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Orlando Letelier; and given inexplicably short prison sentences of seven and six years respectively—to be served in Punta Peuco, a special luxury prison built just for them. But Pinochet, still the powerful head of the Chilean Army, remained untouchable—along with all the other torturers and executioners from his ruthless 17-year dictatorship.

Only after Pinochet’s historic October 1998 arrest in London under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention was his immunity from accountability broken. Although the British ultimately released him after over a year of house arrest, within 72 hours of his return to Santiago, a courageous judge, Juan Guzman, filed papers in court to strip Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. At the time he died at age 91 on December 10, 2006—ironically, International Human Rights Day—the former dictator faced at least half a dozen indictments and investigations for corruption and human rights atrocities.

In June 2011, a leading human rights group called the Agrupacion de Familiares de Ejecutados Politicos—the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed Persons—filed legal complaints on behalf of over 1,000 murder victims of the Pinochet regime whose cases had never been specifically adjudicated. The case of Ronni Moffitt was one of them. In 2012, a Chilean court formally ordered that her case be officially investigated. A lengthy investigation over the next 14 years ensued, with depositions and documents filling massive volumes of evidence. On June 15, 2026, Chile’s special magistrate for human rights, Judge Paola Plaza, finally issued her verdict.

In her 138-page ruling, Judge Plaza found three former high officials of the Chilean secret police, DINA, guilty for killing Moffitt. Brig. Gen. Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s former deputy director for operations, was sentenced to 15 years; Gen. Raul Iturriaga, a high-ranking officer in DINA’s “Exterior” department, was also sentenced to 15 years, as was retired Brig. Gen. José Zara Holger, also a director in DINA’s international operations division.

Espinoza has been incarcerated for decades for his high-level role in DINA’s criminal repression. Iturriaga, now 88 years old, is currently serving cumulative sentences of 500 years for his human rights crimes. But Zara was released in August 2025 after completing his sentence of 15 years for his role in the car bomb assassination of Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires in September 1975—a DINA operation that set a precedent for the Letelier-Moffitt attack. Less than a day after he left Punta Peuco—the special prison built for military officers convicted of human rights crimes—Judge Plaza ordered that Zara be rearrested as a co-conspirator in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination.

The Meaning of the Moffitt-Letelier Case

Fifty years after the assassination, the Moffitt ruling becomes part of the final chapter in the long legal effort to hold General Pinochet and his DINA henchmen accountable for an act of international terrorism in Washington, DC. Just this past week The New York Times published an exposé on ICE’s detention—and then release—of one of those henchman, Armando Fernandez Larios, who defected to the United States in 1987, and served all of five months in prison for his role in the assassination plot. Last October, in its quest to find immigrants with real criminal backgrounds, ICE detained Fernandez Larios; the Department of Homeland Security labeled him “the worst of the worst” for his past crimes of homicide. But after he filed a “wrongful detention” lawsuit against ICE, he was quietly freed from the Krome Detention Center in Miami on March 19. Whether he will ever be deported, as so many immigrants with no criminal backgrounds have been, remains to be seen.

But both the Fernandez Larios case, and the recent ruling in the case of Ronni Moffitt have returned international attention to this atrocity, committed a half-century ago. Indeed, the pursuit of justice, peace, and dignity has never really stopped. For five long decades, the Letelier and Moffitt families, IPS (where they were employed), and human rights advocates in both the United States and Chile have successfully kept Ronni Karpen Moffitt and Orlando Letelier in the public spotlight, sustaining pressure on the authorities in both countries to hold those who killed them accountable.

Those persevering efforts have transformed Sheridan Circle into hallowed ground. It is no longer only the place where an infamous act of international terrorism took the lives of two beautiful people; it is now a place of community dedication to the sanctity of human rights. “We are gathered here because the military dictatorship that took power 50 years ago tried to put its bloody mark on this spot,” Sarah Anderson, an IPS director, told those attending the annual commemoration in September 2023. “But we have taken it back.”

“We have turned this site of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt into our place,” she said. “Our place for remembering our fallen heroes, a place for renewing our commitment to justice and democracy. And a place of hope.”

A few years ago, I was in Berlin as part of a congressional staff delegation to meet with some of our European counterparts to discuss the issue of Iran. Trump had become president the previous year but was still a few months away from following through on his threatened withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015. The conversations in Berlin were about how to sustain the agreement, and the implications and consequences of a possible US withdrawal.

As the discussion went on, with some of my American colleagues making some of the usual claims about the threat posed by Iran, a German analyst spoke up. “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I have to say: The way you in Washington talk about Iran just seems crazy.”

“Thank you for saying that,” I immediately responded. “I totally agree.”

The way we talk about Iran in Washington is crazy. Look no further than Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent comment to reporters: “Every problem in the Middle East tracks back to Iran.” This is obviously absurd. Yes, the Iranian regime poses challenges. Yes, it has done, and continues to do, very bad things in the region and to its own people. We don’t need to rehearse all those arguments here; you’ve no doubt heard the talking points more than enough times to repeat them yourself, verbatim. But the fact is that the amount of time spent in Washington obsessing over Iran compared to the actual threat it poses to our country’s safety and prosperity is insane. Donald Trump’s catastrophically stupid, and now hopefully concluded, war on Iran is a vivid display of how that obsession has distorted our foreign policy and ended up dramatically diminishing, rather than advancing, Americans’ safety and prosperity, and the safety and prosperity of the world.

To state the obvious, this problem did not begin with Trump. As with so much else in his corrupt and reckless presidency, Trump is the most blatant expression of pathologies that have infected our politics and policy for a long time. The war on Iran is no different. For decades, Washington’s Iran obsession, accompanied by exaggerated and often blatantly bigoted claims about the uniquely evil nature of the Iranian regime, has constrained efforts at rapprochement and kept us inexorably on a path to conflict. Consider the amount of time and energy that President Barack Obama had to waste fighting with his own party over an objectively good nonproliferation agreement—a domestic political struggle none of his European counterparts had to face. Consider that President Joe Biden broke his promise to rejoin that agreement in part because of his own calculation of the political costs of keeping it. Trump is the one who launched the war, but the road to it was paved by decades of bipartisan hawkish idiocy. Revisit the 2024 Democratic platform’s section on Iran and realize it could’ve been written by John Bolton.

Enough already.

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I am extremely hesitant to suggest that there are any upsides to Trump’s war on Iran, but there are a few. One of them is that the neocons once again have been utterly discredited; the question is whether we’ll finally learn to ignore them before they’re allowed to shit the bed again. But another is that the humiliating defeat Trump and the neocons brought on our country provides an opportunity to turn away from hawkish idiocy, for us to take a hard look at the US’s relationship to the Middle East, to finally question many of the assumptions that guided us repeatedly into disaster there, and hopefully to reset our relationship with and policy toward the region in a way that is rooted in a more realistic assessment of US goals, interests, and values.

This will obviously require an overhaul of the US relationship with Israel, whose advocates in Washington have long sought to discipline and punish anyone who dares suggest that the threat posed by Iran might be a wee bit overstated. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for decades that Iran is on the brink of building a nuclear weapon, despite the US intelligence community’s assessment, consistent since 2007, that Iran has not made that decision. (If Iran truly were “racing” toward a bomb, it would be the longest race in recorded history.) There’s no doubt that, however much Netanyahu and his allies may or may not believe their own claims about Iran, they also see it as a useful distraction from Israel’s ongoing efforts to remove the Palestinians from both their own land and from the international agenda. The “Maximum pressure” campaign of pro-Israel think tanks like the comically misnamed Foundation for Defense of Democracies isn’t primarily about improving Iranian behavior (if it was, it’s been a colossal failure) but about keeping American behavior in line with Israeli preferences. 

Much has been made of Vice President JD Vance’s recent criticisms of Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon in breach of US commitments to Iran as part of the MOU, but until the Trump administration shows a willingness to impose actual consequences, those criticisms mean about as much as Joe Biden leaking that he’s upset with Bibi for the 100th time. It’s still not clear that Trump is prepared to take the necessary steps to curb Netanyahu. A better approach will require being willing to cut off arms supplies, to withdraw the US diplomatic cover that has unfairly protected Israel at the United Nations, and to impose sanctions on Israeli government officials involved in human rights abuses, just as we would with any other habitually offending country.

The last decade and a half have been a series of harsh lessons for the United States, which has neither the capacity nor the right to transform the Middle East to its liking. Decades of economic strangulation, proxy conflict, and direct military interventions have not produced better Iranian government behavior. Only sustained, engaged diplomacy has done that. The idiotic 2026 Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran can be the moment when we finally choose to learn these lessons.

In the beginning, there were seemingly infinite natural resources and the violent consolidation of one-third of a continent under a single flag. In the middle, there was air conditioning.

What separates the history of architecture in the United States from that of Europe is essentially a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle. Europe may have invented the petite bourgeoisie (which America arguably perfected), Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, and the International Style, but it was also a place of castles and borders, princes and bureaucracy. The US, meanwhile, played fast and loose and big. This is, after all, where Mies van der Rohe—who once designed a memorial to the fallen socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—became a friend of the dynastic family behind the Seagram liquor fortune. It’s the place that made Walter Gropius, stripped by the war of his Weimar-era tenderness, dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

Why didn’t the British invent the skyscraper? Because for the United States, colonialism was local, while in Europe it was diffuse, relegated to the farthest peripheries of an exploited world. Chicago, where the skyscraper was born, stood between the Western frontier of violence, timber, and gold and the banking capitals of the East Coast. It was at the center of a bridgeable world and the resources that flowed through it, requiring a degree of capital consolidation the likes of which had never been seen before.

This centralization brought us the Fordist assembly line, vertical integration (housing a company’s entire supply chain under one roof), and the postwar multinational corporation (itself made possible by the jet engine and the postwar economic deficits of Europe). The American industrialist Elisha Otis patented a device to improve elevator safety in 1861, and less than 50 years later his countryman Willis Carrier figured out how to cool rather than just heat a building’s interior. These innovations expanded the limits of what was architecturally possible in terms of site, height, and durability beyond all prior comprehension. Windows no longer needed to open, stairs no longer needed to be climbed, and there were no fixed restrictions on a building’s scale. The function of adaptation to the world was removed from the form.

“Form follows function” is itself an Americanism (and a Chicagoism—a maxim of the architect Louis Sullivan). Shortly after it was first uttered in the late 19th century, it became ironic. The function of a building is to regulate the relationship between site and inhabitant. As the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius would have it, a building must serve at the intersection of firmitas, utilitas, and venustras, or firmness, commodity, and delight. (A more contemporary translation of his famous triad might be “durability, utility, and beauty.”) But in America, advances in engineering rendered a building’s site incidental. As anyone who has ever driven through a mountain suburb knows, our architectural ethos treats the land as something meant to be taken from, not worked with. This is what grants American architecture not just its ugliness but its boldness. It is what unifies the bespoke and the ordinary—although it is the ordinary that has always been the true soul (or perhaps the deepest confession) of the American built environment.

Durability, however, is something that the US has never taken as seriously. There are a handful of precious buildings from before the Industrial Revolution scattered around the country’s small towns and historic districts. The hagiography of the American Revolution has led to these structures, with their Georgian fanlights and saltbox roofs, being stereotyped as true or classical “American architecture.” But the base and ugly reality of the American built environment is that the average age of a residential building here is a paltry 46 years.

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This happens for a simple reason: a continent-wide superabundance of natural resources. The United States, unlike Britain, never seems to run out of timber. Unlike mainland Europe, it never seems to run out of oil either. Vast swaths of old-growth forests were felled in order to produce the balloon-frame houses that marked the beginning of industrial architectural production. When they were depleted, platform framing (which uses shorter spans of lumber) was born, and it remains the primary system of construction today. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 did not spark a conversation about more durable materials and ways of building, but rather the invention of all kinds of fire-mitigating systems and fireproof materials (most infamously asbestos, which haunts buildings like a ghost, impeding reuse even today). Cheap oil afforded us climate control, the skyscraper, the suburbs, the automobile, asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, wall-to-wall carpeting, Styrofoam insulation, and the majority of materials from which our buildings are fabricated. This bodes poorly for our future.

This ethos of disposability is perhaps best exemplified by the mid-century gutting of some of the most remarkable cities in the world and, along with them, unfathomable amounts of history and culture. We ravaged places like Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, in service of the notion that the ideal way to live is on one’s own in a little house on a puny plot of land—or, to put it in a more politicized parlance, that to own and defend is always better than to share. As quickly as the world, the economy, and the urban core centralized, perhaps what is most indelible to the American way of life is the rapidity with which it decentralized, too. An economy previously predicated on productive capacity reoriented itself, over the past 50 years, around the ownership and appreciation of assets. What the single-family house represented in the 1940s and ’50s—a highly subsidized reification of individuality and success—has been completely remade by this age of scarcity into one of the only ways to accumulate wealth and to maintain base stability in the face of a predatory rentier class. In this we can say that the McMansion is as important to American architectural history as a Louis Sullivan or a Frank Gehry—perhaps, in an age where the architectural dominance of the US has begun to wane (and the Global South’s has begun to rise), even more so.

The sprawling postwar suburbs and the highways that connect them are, whether we like it or not, our cultural legacy. But it’s hard to hate them completely. Built on the back of racist and antisocial economic and social policies were a million childhoods spent among the Googie drive-ins, the postmodern supermarkets, the ersatz urbanism of the shopping malls. Beginning in the 19th century, the suburbs also showcased some of our greatest architectural contributions, from charming Queen Anne houses, California ranches, Craftsman bungalows, and the catalog houses of Sears and Montgomery Ward to minimal, traditional Cape Cods and even the faux old-world Tuscan kitchens and double foyers of the aughts. These would never have come into the world elsewhere, because nowhere else had either the space or the economic capacity for them. And each great suburb was great in its own way. There would be no Frank Lloyd Wright without Oak Park, Chicago’s leafy, diverse suburb. There would be no Julia Morgan (the pioneering civil engineer) without the Bay Area’s hills or Paul Rudolph (the seminal modernist architect) without the low-lying beaches of Sarasota.

Modernism may have been a global project spanning from Chicago to Algiers, but postmodernism (and its computerized kissing cousin, deconstructivism) was perhaps the most quintessentially American architectural movement. Its governing text, 1972’s Learning From Las Vegas (by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour), would not exist without America’s remarkable diversity of vernacular architecture—and the long-running disdain the architectural establishment held for it. To celebrate buildings as signs, to take the artifice of Hollywood at face value, to embrace irony and image, spectacle and jokes—it really was a helluva time at the end-of-history buffet. Everything became decontextualized; the Georgian segmental pediment could become the crown of a strip-mall grocery store. The Walt Disney Company is not only among the nation’s major media conglomerates but also owns one of the largest collections of works by the last half-century’s most important architects—Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and Robert A.M. Stern, to name just a few.

So where does that leave us now? The modernist tactics of centralization and technological hierarchies (easier than ever with computer programs) remain the bedrock of architectural production. This is to the detriment of both the labor relations within architecture and the built environment itself. Meanwhile, the flamboyant world of postmodernism still haunts us. My generation, which suckled at the teat of the Mouse, longs nostalgically for the era of theme-park-ification via the Instagram pop-ups and “barcades” that populate cities we can barely afford. The building as sign has become the building as brand. The baroque fantasies of the late-19th-century nouveau riche, as reimagined through the languages and techniques of mass production, are currently being plastered with gold on every surface of the Oval Office. Online, the so-called trads cloak their desire for a pre-civil-rights world of strong men and “true” beauty in the architectural language of white pillars and Doric columns. The anti-suburb yet pro-development rhetoric of ’90s New Urbanism, once confined to building fake town centers near commuter rails, has since developed into something called YIMBYism. All the world’s buildings are forced into a slurry from which they emerge as AI slop.

At the same time, a new era of architecture is emerging, one that is less concerned with stardom and spectacle. Recently, I had the pleasure of adjudicating the “Emerging Voices” competition at the Architectural League of New York. In the many entries received from around North America, I discovered, to my delight, many bright futures. Some of the most interesting are firms such as the Washington, DC, outfit BLDUS and New York City’s CO Adaptive, both of which are tackling what may be the most urgent question in architecture today: What do we do with the things that have already been built, the materials that have already been industrialized, the things we have already used?

BLDUS, for example, takes disposable building materials like the two-by-four, the casement window, and the plywood sheet and transforms them into warm and elegant spaces—architecture that is simultaneously unique and affordable. CO Adaptive has been working with the leftovers—auditorium chairs, ceramic blocks, wood paneling—from the Hunter College Brookdale Health Science Center and has opened the Salvaged Material Artist Studio, built entirely from items rescued from architectural demolition sites. These are not just matters of conservation, preservation, or environmentalism, but a reckoning with the past. That past includes not only modernism but the mindset of disposability that has become untenable in a warming world. This may be the closest thing to what we can call the “spirit” of American architecture: its fractious relationship with the past, its flexibility, cleverness, and boldness, but also its willingness to change. For a long time, that change has been, on a global scale, for the worst. Now, maybe, despite it all, it can be for the better.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, you’ll hear a lot about the progress that’s been made in this country. What you won’t hear about is the progress that’s been undone by the oligarchs, who have been horrifyingly successful at exploiting our labor for their profit.

For the past 80 years—beginning with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the right to strike and engage in other forms of mass action—corporate interests have been fighting to restrict union power. They’ve been aided by both the courts, which have sided with corporations to further erode labor law, and a long succession of presidents. When Ronald Reagan fired the striking air-traffic controllers in 1981, corporate interests saw his action as a green light to aggressively attack workers and their unions. Lopsided trade deals and consolidation further hastened the loss of union jobs, to devastating effect. As union density has fallen, wages have also dropped, with corporations and billionaires slurping up the profits.

This is the recent history of the United States—the history that is rarely taught in our schools or debated in our Congress. To put things in perspective, consider this: After generations of assaults on working people, the ultra-rich have now hoarded more wealth than the industrial tycoons of the Gilded Age.

Back then, when robber barons ruled over the US economy, workers had no legal right to demand their fair share of the profits. But they organized anyway. From the late 19th century through the 1920s, they built solidarity, made demands, and launched epic strikes against the coal barons, steel magnates, textile producers, and owners of the docks, railroads, and transportation industries.

Where true solidarity took root—where workers looked past the differences that bosses used to divide us—they won. As the Great Depression gripped the nation, white tradesmen and Black assembly-line workers joined in a common cause. Immigrant, US-born, and Native workers linked arms on picket lines. Men and women stood shoulder to shoulder because they knew they needed one another.

Working-class solidarity transformed the political, economic, and social dynamics of the United States during this period. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency on a wave of anger at the wealthy elite who had crashed the economy. With pressure from a mobilized working class—which organized and struck—he soon enacted the National Labor Relations Act, which set the stage for unions to fundamentally change the social contract in our workplaces and our society. And with the support of a strong labor movement, he established Social Security and the minimum wage—just as, three decades later, that same solidarity gave Lyndon Johnson the power to enact Medicare, Medicaid, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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For decades, solidarity moved our economy and our country forward. Workers started to believe that progress, ushered in by strong unions and their allies in the civil-rights and consumer-rights movements, was inevitable. But then corporations set out to destroy the unions, and too many unions stopped mobilizing and began to treat membership like an insurance policy rather than a radical act of solidarity. They forgot the lesson that the great labor organizer Mother Jones taught us more than 120 years ago: “We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: ‘We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing.’”

And the capitalists did join together. Unions were already in decline when Reagan arrived in office and began attacking unions and deregulating Wall Street. Faced with an administration that turned corporate greed into coercive policy, many unions turned inward rather than fight for the future. Corporate CEOs and billionaire investors used hedge funds, privatization and deregulation schemes, and warped tax policies to forge an economy that enriched them by disempowering workers. They bought off politicians and remade the courts. Their judicial lackeys declared that corporations were people and money was speech. They corrupted our economy and our democracy by stealing workers’ labor and their voice.

Today, the ultra-billionaires and their allies believe they have won. They embrace corruption with the bravado of people who think that no one is ever going to hold them to account.

But the American people disagree. Unions are more popular now than they have been for generations. Gallup polls show that approval for organized labor has reached levels not seen since the late 1950s and early ’60s. Americans want strong unions, and they want to join the fights those unions wage. When 19 baristas in Buffalo voted in 2021 to form a union, they set off a wave of organizing in coffee shops nationwide. After the United Auto Workers won their historic “Stand-Up Strike” in 2023 and brought the Big Three to their knees, more than 10,000 nonunion autoworkers signed union cards.

Unfortunately, while support for union power is growing, the scales are still tipped against organized workers. Barely one in 10 workers has a union at their job—and in the private sector, that number is barely one in 17. But we also know that, just as it took radical solidarity to wrest our economy and our democracy out of the hands of robber barons, it will take radical solidarity to do it again. That’s why, in this 250th year of the American experiment, people who recognize the necessity of unions have set out to make some history of our own.

In April, Union Now was founded with support from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as well as established leaders of unions and a new generation of activists. The group’s purpose is to expand union density by enlarging the pool of resources that can support workers who are organizing or striking for recognition and first contracts. It’s time for the 70 percent of Americans who approve of unions to be able to have one—and to write a new history for democracy in both the workplace and the public square. The bosses have controlled too much of America’s first 250 years. We need to fight to win the next 250 years for the working class, to return the nation to its rightful owners: the people.

I’m often asked to comment on the American economy—how it’s doing, where it’s going, what it will look like a decade from now, whether it will help the Democrats or the Republicans in the next election. But what is “the American economy”?

The founders of the American experiment provided an outline for an economic system in 1776, and again in 1787. They were revolting against an empire that imposed its demands on them, and they sought to create something new. Over time, they did. But where are we at now that 250 years have passed?

The standard measures we use for the economy show a system that’s functioning fairly well. Look deeper, though, and you will see something so far off track that most inhabitants of the United States may soon be ready to support revolutionary change—just as a good many of their colonial predecessors were when they soured on the British East India Company’s manipulations in the 1770s.

The most common contemporary measure of economic health is the Gross Domestic Product, which shows that the American economy continued to grow at a respectable 0.7 percent annualized rate in the fourth quarter of last year. Consumer spending is up. Corporate investment is up. Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, was at 2.4 percent. Corporate profits are at record levels. Unemployment is at a relatively low 4.3 percent.

So why are so many people feeling bad about the economy? Every poll shows that Americans are deeply unhappy about the state of things. Consumer sentiment has dropped about 20 percent below where it was a year ago.

If we are to explain the gap between what the numbers are saying and how people are actually experiencing them, we should start with healthcare, housing, utilities, fuel, and financial services. Most of us are paying more for all of these things than we did a year or two ago—not because we enjoy consuming them so much more or because they’re so much better, but because we have no choice. Most big corporations face less competition than ever under Donald Trump, who has effectively ended antitrust enforcement. They’ve been taking advantage of their market power by raising prices, which Trump’s tariffs have lifted even higher. They’ve also been tacking on inexplicable fees at every possible opportunity, have made it almost impossible to reach a human to answer a question, have imposed Kafkaesque processes to figure out or contest bills, and have subjected customers to endless paperwork, ever more elaborate Internet loops, and longer wait times.

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Meanwhile, public goods have taken a beating. The environment is becoming more polluted. Banks are taking more risks with other people’s money. Workers are subject to more dangers on the job. The official unemployment rate may be relatively low, but it has become harder to find a job or leave the one you’re in for a better one. While the United States added 1.46 million jobs in 2024—the last year of former president Joe Biden’s administration—it added just 181,000 in all of 2025. That makes 2025 the worst year for hiring since 2003 (apart from the nadir of the Covid pandemic). In 2025, manufacturing lost 108,000 jobs. Until the end of February, when Trump went to war with Iran, the stock-market value of American-based corporations continued to rise, as did the market itself. Until the end of February, the S&P 500 was at near-record heights. But that’s irrelevant to the 90 percent of Americans who own few if any shares of stock.

The standard of living for most people turns on their income, not their capital gains. And although the average pay rate for Americans is rising, the compensation of the super-wealthy has risen so far and so fast that they’re bringing up the average. (Knowing that Shaquille O’Neal and I have an average height of six feet doesn’t give you much insight into the actual difference in size between us.)

Looking at the median pay of Americans gets you closer, because a median means that half are above it and half are below it. But as the middle class shrinks and those at the top live increasingly like royalty while an ever vaster number at the bottom are homeless, unhealthy, and hungry, not even the median describes what’s really going on.

As the French economist Gabriel Zucman has shown, today’s wealth concentration is the highest it’s been in our nation’s history. Nineteen of the country’s largest fortunes have about $3.4 trillion combined—the equivalent of 11 percent of all the goods and services produced in the United States in a year. This is nearly three times more than what the wealthiest Americans were worth at the peak of the Gilded Age, after adjusting for inflation. Under Trump’s watch, billionaire wealth grew 22 percent in 2025, from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion, and the number of billionaires increased from 814 to 935. But most people in the United States are treading water or sinking. What, then, is the American economy? It’s the standard of living of most people living and working and trying to make ends meet in a place called the United States. By this measure, the American economy is crap.

Not only are jobs in short supply, wages lousy, and public services dysfunctional, but so many of the rest of the things that people rely on are falling apart.

The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a healthcare system in which they can buy concierge care, a climate in which they can buy clean air and water and access to pristine mountains and shorelines, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail. Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate indifference, worsening air and water, and legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

All of this was bad before Trump. He’s made it far worse. The good news is that this is now becoming clear to most Americans. The actual state of the American economy has been hidden behind the GDP, the CPI, the S&P 500, and the unemployment rate. Yet the real economy can no longer be hidden, because most people are experiencing and living it every day and are fearful and furious.

Remember the “reveal codes” in WordPerfect software that gave you a screen view showing the hidden formatting tags embedded in a text? It’s as if most of us are now clicking the reveal codes and seeing the true structure of wealth and power in America. It is not a pretty picture. But seeing it is the beginning of major structural change. When the gap between people’s ideals and known realities reaches a breaking point, we have a real chance for revolutionary reform.

And by that I mean reforming our political-economic system in revolutionary ways—such as getting big money out of politics so we can raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for universal healthcare, childcare, eldercare, and affordable housing. I mean increasing the minimum wage to make it a living wage. Providing everyone with paid family and medical leave, a universal basic income, a good education, and affordable higher education. Busting up monopolies to bring prices down and reduce the political power of concentrated corporate leviathans.

Revolutionary reform also means economic democracy: strengthening unions and giving workers a say in how work is organized. Sharing the profits with workers. Giving them more job security. And it means reversing climate change and saving the planet for future generations.

What’s known as “the American economy” isn’t some autonomous system lying beyond our power to change it. It’s the product of laws and rules governing taxes, antitrust, labor, and the environment—which we have the power to alter.

But we can’t do that today, because Trump and his sycophants and plutocratic backers are in control. But ever more Americans are turning on the reveal codes and seeing the real structure of wealth and power in this country—creating a basis for revolutionary reform. That’s the silver lining in this dark Trumpian cloud. As the gap between what we think the American economy should deliver and what it does deliver becomes apparent to more of us, we’ve got a fighting chance to remake the American economy into a system that works for all of us.

America was conceived in the midst of a fight against monopoly power.

After the British Parliament gave the ailing British East India Company a series of corporate grants to command private armies, collect taxes, and administer its own vision of justice on the Indian subcontinent, it was still struggling. The company was drowning in debt, sitting on 17 million pounds of unsold tea languishing in London warehouses. Parliament decided to bail out this “too big to fail” corporation by passing the 1773 Tea Act, which eliminated competition from American tea merchants.

In revolt, colonists dumped 342 chests, containing over 92,000 pounds of tea, into Boston Harbor. This was the anti-monopoly action that sparked the Revolutionary War. The arguments of the pro-monopoly faction of the time were similar to those used during the 2008 financial crisis: England couldn’t let the monopoly fail; doing so would trigger a credit crisis. Britain’s power was dependent on the success of the East India Company.

The colonists were not moved. Over a decade later, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a letter to James Madison proposing that the Constitution that was being drafted for the United States needed protections for freedom of religion and freedom of the press, and that it might also be well served by language regarding the “restriction against monopolies.” For Jefferson, freedom meant freedom from the government destroying printing presses and protection against gross corporate power.

While the Constitutional Convention of the new nation decided against adding the anti-monopoly language—treating it as implicit in the basic protection of freedoms—many states were not so sanguine, and they moved to include anti-monopoly provisions in their constitutions.

What they did not anticipate, however, was the arrival of the modern corporation and the Industrial Revolution. There were very few corporations during the early years of the American experiment—around 319 in 1800. Early American corporations received their charters one by one, through special acts of state legislatures. Many of the charters were the topic of fierce public debate: Did we need a corporation to build a turnpike? Should the Bank of North America receive corporate privileges? These charters weren’t routine filings with a secretary of state; they were often corrupt affairs with connected friends obtaining special arrangements.

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The processes for obtaining such arrangements began to change in the early 1800s, and those changes accelerated in the 1850s, as democratic reformers joined with investors to push for “general incorporation” laws. With general incorporation, a businessperson did not need to petition the legislature for a special charter. Now anyone who met certain requirements could incorporate by filling out forms and paying fees. However, some statutes passed in the antebellum South excluded non-white people from incorporating. New York was the first state to adopt general incorporation, passing its statute in 1811; Connecticut followed in 1837. By the 1860s, general incorporation was nearly ubiquitous. The number of corporations exploded: Thousands came into being, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands.

Along the way, a new form of monopoly power appeared, threatening both the old freedoms of white landowners and the hard-won freedoms of Black Americans. Under general-incorporation laws, rival railroad and oil and sugar and whiskey and sewing-machine companies proliferated across the landscape—and the new firms colluded with one another. They bought up other companies, formed pools to suppress output, and fixed rates. They engaged in predatory pricing, slashing rates to drive out competitors and then jacking them up once they had established their monopolies. Jay Gould, who controlled the Erie and Union Pacific railroads and countless other properties, kept a special room in Albany for distributing cash to keep state lawmakers quiet while he crushed his competitors without mercy.

Monopoly now took on a new political meaning for populist reformers, becoming a rallying cry to condemn any corporation that had excess power to set prices and terms. The farmers and small-business owners who dealt directly with these monopolies hated them. They poured their energy into organizing the populist crusades of the post–Civil War years, which became one of the greatest democratic movements in American history. By the 1870s, about 800,000 farmers were active in the National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry. These class-conscious activists became the core supporters of a great cooperative anti-monopoly movement that spanned lines of race.

On July 4, 1873, the anti-monopolists issued a “Farmers’ Declaration of Independence,” which began by invoking the original: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a class of people, suffering from long-continued systems of oppression and abuse, to rouse themselves….” It went on to declare that the history of the railroad monopoly was “a history of repeated injuries and oppressions, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the people of these states unequaled in any monarchy of the Old World, and having its only parallel in the history of the medieval ages, when the strong hand was the only law and the highways of commerce were taxed by the feudal barons.”

One of the most famous populists was Mary Elizabeth Lease, known as “Yellin’ Mary Ellen,” who traveled the country excoriating what she called private government. “Wall Street owns the country,” she declared. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. Monopoly is the master.”

The state and national Anti-Monopoly parties (which later evolved into the People’s Party) had leaders who were pro-civil-rights and supported the direct election of senators, a fair income tax, labor arbitration, and powerful antitrust laws to break up the largest of the combinations.

Long before social media, the Farmers Alliance built a communication system of 40,000 lecturers, from church basements to schoolhouses, creating a network of Americans who knew precisely the threat that monopolies posed to their livelihoods and their democracy.

Their movement and its allies secured the direct election of senators. In 1887, they won approval of the Interstate Commerce Act, the first federal anti-monopoly law, which required railroads to post their prices publicly and charge equal rates. The Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 were only partial and imperfect responses to the demands of the populist agitators, yet they became a legal foundation that Franklin Roosevelt—and, more recently, Lina Khan—would later build on.

Eventually, Northern finance worked with Southern elites to crush these movements through Jim Crow segregation laws and racist violence. Those elites understood exactly what was at stake: When white and Black farmers organized together, powerful political interests faced the threat of electoral extinction. So Southern Democrats used racist appeals to drive a wedge between Black and white farmers, thwart multiracial populism, and protect the fortunes of the monopolists. By the early 20th century, the question of how to maintain democracy in industrial society was coming to a head.

One faction, represented by the future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, believed in breaking up monopolies and in decentralized capital. Their solution was structural: to take apart the big banks, prohibit interlocking corporate directorates, and build an industrial policy around strong labor and a diverse, flourishing economy.

The other faction, influenced by the author and public intellectual Herbert Croly and President Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” accepted corporate behemoths as the inevitable engines of progress and thought the only problem was that they operated without adequate public oversight and control. The solution wasn’t to break them up or prohibit them from using discriminatory contracts; rather, they wanted expert administrators to steer them in a supposedly more humane, or at least more responsible, direction. Croly’s 1909 book The Promise of American Life envisioned a technocratic state that would manage capitalism for the public good. Top-down rationality would replace the chaos of competition.

In 1912, the anti-monopolists won a partial victory after Brandeis and Du Bois and many of their allies backed the successful presidential bid of Woodrow Wilson, who embraced an anti-monopoly vision in his campaign. Wilson signed the Clayton Act, a major antitrust law that was, in the words of one of its sponsors, designed to “preserve the independence of the man as distinguished from the power of the corporation.” But Wilson would go on to abandon his campaign promises, governing as a rabid segregationist and, in the economic panic caused by the start of World War I, leaping into the arms of big industry.

Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933, as the country was in a state of economic crisis. His New Deal coalition mirrored the split that had riven progressives since the Gilded Age—between those who wanted to concentrate power under expert management and those who wanted to break it up. The initial New Deal, according to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, “breathed the spirit of the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly.” FDR’s National Recovery Administration attempted to renew the economy with planning and administration from above, setting prices and production targets across industries. These early New Dealers “saw economic concentration as inevitable and national planning as desirable,” Schlesinger wrote. But the later New Dealers breathed “the spirit of the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson and Louis D. Brandeis.”

FDR and his allies came to the same conclusion that the Grangers had a generation earlier: that concentrated private power and the death of democracy were conjoined. As fascism emerged in Europe, built on the backs of a German and Italian cartel, it became clear that democracy faced a deeper political threat than many had realized. Roosevelt took aim at capital, requiring commercial banks to be separated from investment banks and bringing down the hammer of trust-busting Assistant Attorney General Thurman Wesley Arnold’s Antitrust Division—which brought more cases in five years than had been brought in the previous 50.

FDR’s influence would continue for decades at the Department of Justice and on the oversight committees of a US Senate where Democrats like Estes Kefauver flexed their muscle. But by the late 1970s, anti-monopoly politics had withered, and antitrust enforcement dropped off a cliff. It wouldn’t recover for the next 40 years. Big business, eager to capitalize on the inflation of the ’70s and the backlash against the progress achieved by the civil-rights movement, pushed a new theory: Antitrust enforcement was merely about prices, not power. As “experts” declared that consolidation wasn’t a problem and that “natural markets” would select the best products, Crolyism suddenly intersected with the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s privatization and deregulation agenda.

Federal officials, armed with papers by Friedman and his Chicago School cronies to justify their actions, radically slowed down challenging mergers and bringing lawsuits against big companies under the Sherman and Clayton acts. Ronald Reagan’s head of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice called prior antitrust law “rubbish,” “misguided,” “not well informed,” and announced that he would ignore prior antitrust precedent. Reagan’s deregulation cleared the way for consolidation in many industries, and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 did the same for the media. Barack Obama, despite his rhetoric, oversaw some of the largest mergers in American history. All told, between 1980 and 2021, the federal government cheered on hundreds of thousands of mergers—leading to consolidation in every major sector of the US economy, from agriculture and groceries to health insurance and media to telecommunications and the tech industry.

As America turns 250, we are witnessing the rise of a new anti-monopoly movement, with more energy and resilience than we have seen in the past five decades.

This new anti-monopolism has become a part of our federal politics, through the work of Biden appointees like former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. And even if the current administration doesn’t do its job, the smart candidates for the presidency in 2028 will be running on anti-monopoly platforms.

Anti-monopolism is a part of state politics as well, with state attorneys general actively looking for ways to enforce laws that address monopolistic abuses by companies like UnitedHealthcare and Amazon. They’re fighting to stop the manipulation of prices and to end the latest manifestations of what is best understood as a 50-year crime spree by some of the largest corporations in the world.

And anti-monopolism is arguably most vibrant at the grassroots level of our politics, where the heirs of the Boston Tea Partiers fight to block billions of dollars’ worth of data-center projects nationwide and reject the grandiose schemes of tech billionaires who claim that they alone can manage the future.

This 250-year fight is just gearing up for one of its biggest confrontations. This time, the foe isn’t John D. Rockefeller or Jay Gould, but the tech lords who have built moats around their power. The robber barons of old have been reborn as the CEOs of companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which owns the largest television network in America (YouTube) as well as a big chunk of the cloud, and which has hoovered up gargantuan federal contracts and maintains a monopoly on both Internet search and online advertising. Google, whose CEO spent a few minutes opposing Trump in 2017 and basking in the resulting liberal adulation, has followed the same path as the industrialists in Italy when Mussolini came to power: initial opposition and then quick pragmatic acceptance—a surrender of principles that sees one of the most powerful companies in the world willingly suppressing social-media content criticizing ICE.

They promise to carry us into the future and that a future without them is no future.

The East India Company made the same promises 250 years ago. The anti-monopoly movement takes the premises of the American democratic vision and applies them to the economy, demanding that we be equal and free in all arenas of life. Without anti-monopoly, and a commitment to people having real economic power as workers and small-business owners throughout America, we can only ever be halfway free.

Abortion is older than America, but for the past 250 years, the ability to access it has almost always depended on one’s own ingenuity. Healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, was never promised by the founding fathers. Sure, they suggested that we all deserve “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the devil is in the details: The colonizers who made that promise in 1776 would go on to commit horrific atrocities and cruel acts of violence and genocide against Native Americans and enslaved Africans over the next century. The only “life” they were referencing in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence was their own.

For thousands of years before those colonizers set foot on what would become the contiguous United States, people here and around the world used medicinal herbs and plants such as bear root and juniper to stop or prevent pregnancies. As Renee Bracey Sherman, my coauthor on the book Liberating Abortion, points out, the earth provided them with what they needed to control their reproduction. We found while conducting research for our book that people did not consider these terminations to be abortions as we think of them today, but rather a process for “restoring the menses.” The misogynistic argument that an embryo or fetus had a “right to life”—an idea that is not unlike the European colonists’ belief that they had a right to steal land that wasn’t theirs—was nonexistent.

But these abortion practices are also not as ancient as they may sound. In the 19th century, Indigenous people in what is now southern Montana used medicinal plants like calamus and horsetail to end undesirable pregnancies—for example, during brutal winters when it was too cumbersome to carry a pregnancy, or when the woman was ill. Enslaved Black women throughout the South notoriously chewed cotton-root bark to end or prevent pregnancies and experience some modicum of dignity in the atrocious system of chattel slavery and forced reproduction. Abortion has been a part of US history for as long as women have been.

There are two founding fathers who seemed to understand this need—that abortion was essential to the exercise of our unalienable rights. Benjamin Franklin, the US Postal Service’s first leader, included an abortion recipe in The American Instructor, his 1748 reprint of a popular British textbook that offered guidance on basic tasks and subjects, including arithmetic and writing. In 1792, when Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha gave her cousin Nancy gum of guaiacum “to produce an abortion”—because Nancy had been impregnated by her sister’s husband—and had to testify in court about her involvement, Jefferson wrote in a letter to his daughter, “I see guilt but in one person, and not in her.” He added that his abortion-providing daughter was “on firm ground” and that he should “be made very happy if you are the instrument not only of supporting the spirits of your afflicted friend under the weight bearing on them, but of preserving her in the peace and love of her friends.”

That’s the thing about abortion: It is always necessary, whether it’s because the pregnant person needs one or because they want one. But care has never been guaranteed in America, not even under Roe v. Wade, despite being essential to a functioning democracy and gender equality.

The effort to control who could have or provide abortions began in earnest in the mid-1800s, when the American Medical Association started a campaign against them, led by the anti-immigrant zealot Horatio Storer, that promoted the notion that “the child is alive from the moment of conception,” and when the Catholic Church shifted its stance from tolerating abortions prior to “quickening”—when the pregnant person feels fetal movement—to condemning them. The resulting tug-of-war culminated in the US Supreme Court ruling in favor of a national right to abortion in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But anti-abortion lawmakers immediately started to chip away at that right: The same year that Roe was decided, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to ban federal foreign aid from being used to pay for abortions elsewhere in the world, and congresspeople—including Illinois Representative Henry Hyde—began floating a proposal to bar federally funded insurance programs from covering abortions in the US, as Amy Littlefield reports in her book Killers of Roe. In 1977, these anti-abortion lawmakers got their wish, and the Hyde Amendment went into effect. Soon thereafter, Littlefield writes, the pro-choice movement pivoted away from demanding that Medicaid cover abortions to focus instead on general threats to access. They relied on the courts to protect nationwide access—a strategy that failed them.

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After the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, and more than a dozen states moved to enact total abortion bans, many political observers argued that the complacency of the broader base of abortion-rights supporters played a major role in how we arrived at our current crisis. The challenge for movement leaders has been to keep the public engaged on this issue, particularly as news coverage has dried up.

Further, as Molly Murphy, president of the polling firm Impact Research, who studies public opinion on a range of issues affecting families, explained recently, people in the political center tend to think that the post-Dobbs laws work well enough, with some exceptions, such as Texas’s more prohibitive laws (if they are aware of the state laws at all). These voters tend to believe that what happened to the women who have suffered under abortion bans won’t happen to them. “They might worry that things are going to happen,” Murphy said at a gathering of abortion storytellers and advocates in March, “but telling people that something bad might happen in the future is really hard to persuade people on,” as opposed to talking to them about current realities. This is how we end up with a situation in which 38 percent of the voters who supported Donald Trump—protector of women “whether the women like it or not”—in the 2024 election also believe in the right to abortion.

Giving people access to hear or read stories about how state restrictions effectively amount to a total ban is crucial, Murphy told me. “People really don’t like bans, and then there’s a whole lot of gray area in between on the number of weeks or the circumstances or where or whether there are exemptions. I think that hearing from people that they are in fact having their rights banned—even if, on paper, what people would say is ‘Oh, it’s 12 weeks, that’s very reasonable,’ or whatever—[is why] storytelling matters a lot.”

But it is less clear to me whether stories can disarm one of the worst of America’s founding principles, American exceptionalism—especially when the stories may reinforce, for some listeners, narratives that they’ve been told about how the pregnant person, and not the system, is responsible for the suffering that they were forced to endure.

For 250 years, America has failed to treat women as though they were equal to men. If we were truly considered as such, abortion would be as easy to access as ibuprofen, because it’s just that common and essential to our ability—as well as the ability of trans and gender-nonconforming people who need abortions—to participate fully in society and our democracy. Instead, America has weaponized abortion access, setting limits around when we can exercise our reproductive rights. It’s a system in which those who can find a way to get their abortions will get them, and everyone else must make do, no matter what “making do” actually means. And because some people have succeeded at getting care, we can, as a country, excuse this system for not working for everyone. That’s just how it’s always been.

“We do, as a country, rally around self-reliance, and I think that’s a big part of it,” Murphy said when I asked her why it sometimes feels like our stories are not enough to successfully address issues like abortion access and the maternal healthcare crisis as the structural problems that they are. “When it comes to women having kids, we beatify mothers and say, ‘You’re so amazing and self-sacrificing’ and all of these things, and it allows society to not then try to support them.” This belief system is also rooted in anti-Black racism, because not all people are seen as deserving of support.

We have known for decades that abortion bans kill people, especially women of color. In 1977, a young woman in McAllen, Texas, named Rosie Jiménez was the first person confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have died as a direct result of the Hyde Amendment. Her two previous abortions were covered under Medicaid, but Rosie became pregnant again one month after the amendment went into effect in her state. When her provider denied her care, the 27-year-old mother of a 4-year-old sought an illegal abortion and died from septic shock after a botched procedure, leaving behind a $700 financial-aid check that she had planned to use to further her education and build a better life than the one her parents, migrant farmworkers, could give her. After Rosie died, national reproductive-rights organizations initially organized against Hyde, as Littlefield’s Killers of Roe details, calling the amendment a blatant attack on the poor. (If Rosie had been in a different income bracket, she might have been able, as some women do, to travel out of state for her procedure.) Yet not only has the Hyde Amendment continued to reign, but anti-abortion lawmakers have gotten even more creative in their efforts to ban abortion and gender-affirming care through government insurance programs.

Meanwhile, people and their families continue to suffer. In the summer of 2022, Amber Nicole Thurman sought an abortion because, much like Rosie, she understood that she couldn’t handle another child, let alone twins, while she attended nursing school. After her medication abortion, which Amber had to get out of state because of the near-total ban on abortion in her home state of Georgia, the 28-year-old mother of a 6-year-old son suffered a rare complication—but the hospital providers near her home delayed the routine abortion procedure she needed to clear her uterus of tissue that had remained in her body after she took the medication. By the time they did perform the procedure, it was too late: Amber died after developing sepsis.

Amber’s mother, Shanette Williams, has been speaking out about her daughter’s unjust death ever since the 2024 presidential race, and today she is fighting alongside Democratic leaders to build support in Georgia for the Reproductive Freedom Act, which would restore and expand reproductive rights in the state, including protecting access to abortion care.

I first heard Williams share her story in Austin, Texas, in early 2025. Her family had learned that Amber’s death was preventable only after an investigation by ProPublica. When I caught up with Williams at the storytelling convening in March, I could sense her frustration about the moment we are living through. She told me that when she visits her daughter’s grave site, “It’s upsetting to me that I can’t tell her anything different, that I can’t tell her we have a win…. My baby is in the grave,” she added, “and while we’re smiling, on the inside I am saying, ‘What am I smiling for? I’m not happy—I’m not happy about what I see.’” Still, she continues to fight for justice for her daughter, speaking out against Georgia’s extreme abortion ban. “Every time I’m at that grave, I hear my baby tell me, ‘Don’t stop, don’t quit, keep going,’” Williams said.

It’s a message that all of us should heed. Sharing and amplifying such stories is an important step. But even more, we need to rebuild the healthcare system so that it never again allows care for some at the expense of care for others. Because until we can treat women—Black women, trans people, young people—and everyone in our society who has been denied equal rights as deserving of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” none of us will ever be truly free.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the state that Senator Jesse Helms represents.

America is a young country. I have plenty of friends who—like Jane Fonda, my fellow contributor to this special issue—make note of the fact that they’ve been alive for a third of its 250-year history as a nation. One thing this has meant is that America came to full consciousness—literary and political—in the period when we were turning its forests and topsoil into money. Unlike in Northern Europe or the countries of the Mediterranean, where these transformations were ancient history by the time people were writing books, the transformations happened here in relative modernity, which explains why one of America’s great gifts to the Western world has been the environmental idea.

That Indigenous people had long since hit upon this complex of ideas almost goes without saying. But its slow rediscovery, beginning, I think, with Henry David Thoreau, has been a crucial part of the American story. Thoreau was little read in his time; not so George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature, published two years after Thoreau’s death, stands as one of the first decisive works of environmental exhortation. Marsh’s understanding that, by cutting down vast swaths of timber, humans were altering the temperature and aridity of our landscape led pretty directly to early experiments in land conservation—things like the protection of the Adirondacks. And they helped charge the air that Teddy Roosevelt, the first giant of conservation, breathed so deeply.

Roosevelt’s name, of course, reminds us that this legacy can be troublesome—at points, American environmentalism has been linked with eugenics, with anti-immigrant nonsense, and with a kind of privilege-based affection for scenery. But at its heart, I think, it’s mostly been helpful to the human cause, a challenge to the accumulations of industrial wealth and power. Rachel Carson was among the first people to knock some of the shine off modernity, and her testament in Silent Spring—combined with such horrors of the 1960s as the Santa Barbara oil spill, and with the glories of our natural world as revealed by everyone from Ansel Adams to Jacques Cousteau—produced by 1970 the single greatest outpouring of environmental protests in American history. Twenty million people joined demonstrations, celebrations, and teach-ins for the first Earth Day—10 percent of the population, for a celebration-cum-protest that drew at least some of its power from another American first: the photo that the Apollo astronauts had recently taken of our blue-white planet floating, beautiful and fragile, in the black void.

That dramatic demonstration of sentiment (combined with the defeat that autumn of a number of congressmen on the “dirty dozen” list of despoilers compiled by the group Environmental Action) produced a flood of legislation. Within a couple of years, the United States had created the Environmental Protection Agency and vastly strengthened its clean-air and clean-water laws. These were signed by Richard Nixon, himself the farthest thing from an environmentalist, but a man with a strong sense of electoral reality. And they quickly inspired similar laws around the world, effective regulations that accomplished their goals to a surprising degree. Choking air turned much cleaner; you could swim in lakes and streams that had previously been chemistry experiments.

But these regulations had another effect, which was to deeply anger the industrialists who were their targets. At first their rage was impotent, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s ascension it had gathered real power. It was no surprise that the new president took his predecessor Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House and became committed to the ever-more-rapid development of America’s fossil-fuel resources. For a while, it looked as if the emergence of climate change as a reality at the end of the 1980s might complicate that task: After all, there was no more perfect example of the power of American science than the discovery and elucidation of this deep problem in atmospheric physics. Even Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, allowed that we’d have to solve the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.”

That didn’t happen. Instead, the power of Big Oil, unleashed in a massive campaign of disinformation, managed to mostly neuter America’s response. (It’s worth remembering that the Koch brothers were America’s biggest hydrocarbon barons, with sprawling refinery and pipeline investments.) We’ve turned from coal to natural gas as the biggest source of our electricity, but even that has proved a Pyrrhic victory, since the leaked methane is doing nearly as much damage as the CO2 from the coal had been doing. Joe Biden, in the process of earning Bernie Sanders’s support in 2020, committed to something resembling a Green New Deal, and he was as good as his word, or at least as good as Joe Manchin would allow. The Inflation Reduction Act, with its billions for battery factories, was the most important environmental legislation since Nixon.

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The billionaires soon took their revenge, all but wiping the Inflation Reduction Act off the books with the help of a Republican Congress. So now we face a remarkable moment. America—the country that pioneered environmentalism, the country whose scientists measured and understood the climate threat, and the country whose engineers developed the solar cell, the industrial wind turbine, and the lithium-ion battery, not to mention the country that poured the most carbon into the air—is now the only country on earth that has officially renounced the idea that greenhouse gases pose a danger, and the only country to abandon the global climate talks. We currently aim for “energy dominance” by controlling fossil-fuel supplies (Trump didn’t even bother to pretend that there was another reason for attacking Venezuela), and yet we have risked fatally undermining the premise of that dominance by waging an illogical war on Iran that has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

America, over the past 15 months, has ceded much of its technological, economic, and hence political leadership to our theoretical adversaries in Beijing, who are clearly basing their future prospects on clean energy. If we are to recover our mojo sometime in the next 250 years, it will require that we embrace once more the legacy we did so much to pioneer. We’ll have to choose biology over billionaires and chemistry instead of crackpots. And perhaps beauty, too.