All spots in the inaugural Seminar on Liberalism and Its Critics are now filled. But if you were thinking of taking part, there’s good news.

Since so many of you want to participate, I decided to add a second section. It will meet on Wednesdays in January (1/8, 1/15, 1/22, 1/29), from noon to 2pm Eastern. You can sign up here. (And if you are still hoping to take part at 6pm, you can add your name to the waitlist here.)

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Noah Smith is a writer and a former professor of finance at Stony Brook University. Smith is the author of the Substack Noahpinion.

In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Noah Smith discuss the rise of the YIMBY ("Yes, in my backyard!") movement; why childcare, housing, and health care costs are so high in the United States; and what it would look like to embrace a genuine "abundance agenda."

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I've been trying to think through the state of economic policy at the moment, and it seems to me that we're in a strange moment where there was a clear paradigm that economists followed in the ‘90s and perhaps the early 2000s, and that ran aground. Then there was a principled alternative to it that parts of the left tried to put forward, but that seems to have run aground as well.

Do you think there's a kind of clear structure to how, let's say, the mainstream of the Democratic Party thinks about economic policy right now?

Noah Smith: Well, in the 2000s, a kind of an intellectual movement among progressives started to crystallize, which I guess for want of a better term you could call anti-neoliberalism. People basically got a short list of things they thought the market got wrong and told this sort of simplified, potted history: In the 1980s, we decided markets could do everything, cut the government, and then this led to rising inequality, falling worker power, environmental degradation, etc.. And they thought that in order to get rid of those, we need to basically reverse the neoliberal changes—to strengthen unions, various kinds of regulations, and the welfare state. And that was the basic progressive program. And you saw some elements of that program get implemented by Biden, but a lot got blocked.

But the neoliberal turn was a lot less dramatic, I think, than people realize. We never actually cut the welfare state, for example; in terms of social spending, it was about flat as a percentage of GDP. And then under Clinton, it went way up. Under Bush, it went up again. The regulatory state was never really cut; Reagan appointed people who were generally unfriendly to regulation, and we did some targeted deregulations in things like finance, which ended up blowing up in our face. But overall regulation didn't really go down. And some of the most important regulations, like land-use regulations, actually got tighter and tighter. We did open up trade a significant amount. And so that was probably the place where the neoliberal turn was most real, most substantive. But a lot of the anti-neoliberals dramatically exaggerate the degree to which we cut government in the ‘80s and in the ‘90s.

The real impact of this kind of neoliberalism, if you will, was not the things we did, but the things we didn't do. There were a number of things we could have done to respond to the competitive threat from China. The People's Bank of China bought a whole bunch of dollar-denominated bonds, which made the yuan very cheap, which made their exports artificially cheap. This exacerbated the so-called “China Shock” and caused manufacturing to leave America faster than would have been economically efficient. We should have said “No, we'll brand you a currency manipulator under the WTO and we'll use countervailing duties to force you to upvalue currency” in 2002. We could have done that and we didn't do it because we were geopolitically distracted with the War on Terror and because we were ideologically committed to free trade.

Mounk: I think we need to take one step back. What actually were the problems that the “neoliberals” were responding to in the first place that helped to shape some of what they were doing?

Smith: So you had a number of problems. First of all, there was inflation, obviously, which they responded to by tightening interest rates and implementing a more hawkish monetary policy regime under Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker, which continued all the way up until this day (we've never really transitioned out of that hawkish monetary stance). Companies in America were very badly managed and got very poor return on equity. I think the kind of the shareholder revolution, which included revolutions in corporate finance, was intended to clean that up.

You did see increases in profits. You saw increases in innovation. You saw increases in employment. So the crappiness of companies in the ‘70s was one thing that was being responded to. Also, some of the regulations that Carter did actually before Reagan—deregulation of trucking, transport, energy, things like that—actually had an effect. Deregulating energy supplies gave us cheaper energy, and everyone was pretty happy with that. And so there were a number of problems that the Reagan program, or the Carter-Reagan program, was designed to address and did address. Free trade in the ‘80s and ‘90s did displace a few people, but ultimately trade with Japan and with Europe and with Indonesia benefited the United States.

It wasn't until China really came on the scene that we started to see a different result. Free trade was good right up until it wasn't. Wages and income started rising again, and you did absolutely see a rise in inequality, starting with Reagan. And we can argue about the reasons for that. But income started rising too. The value of people's assets kept rising, stocks rose even more, real estate rose. Middle class people had wealth in a way that they'd never really had before, through the value of their homes, especially, but also through their pensions and their 401ks.

A lot of things that people liked came out of the neoliberal era, along with some things that people didn't like. But that's why I think you saw pretty good satisfaction with the economy right up until 2008, when the Great Recession came and sort of knocked over the old world.

Mounk: So to summarize where we stand, the phase immediately before the rise of “neoliberalism” was a lot more troubled than people sometimes remember. This was not the golden era of the 1950s and 1960s, where the economy was growing, but a moment of stagnation. And the neoliberal moment itself was a lot more complicated than people sometimes portray it as, both because the people who did want to cut the wealth estate and regulations didn't always succeed in doing so, and because many people subsumed into that program self-consciously wanted to expand social spending in many categories. At the same time, we do have some of the things that end up producing 2008—you have banking deregulation and trade with China, which starts to really undermine manufacturing jobs in places like Michigan and so on in the United States.

What is the anti-neoliberal consensus that crystallizes at that point? And why are you not convinced by it? What are the shortcomings in the actual policies of the anti-neoliberal crowd?

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Some of my favorite memories in life are from late-night debates in dorm rooms; from great conversations over lunch; or from those rare moments in the seminar room when a light suddenly went off in my head, ever-so-slightly altering my perception of the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how hard it is to cultivate this love of learning and conversation once you leave college. Life gets busy. Your close friends move away. Some other task always feels more pressing.

So, a few months ago, I had an idea: What if we build on the wonderful community that is growing around this Substack to create a space for this kind of intellectual exploration? A new way for all of us, from student to CEO, to read important texts and reflect on pressing questions together?

I’m calling it “The Seminar.”

Here’s the basics. Once a week, for four weeks, we meet for two-and-a-half hours to discuss exciting texts that grapple with an important topic. In this way, we explore some of the deepest and most urgent questions facing the world together. These won’t be impersonal lectures designed to be watched passively; rather, a small group of us will meet live, under my guidance but with everyone’s active participation.

For the first iteration, I decided to focus on one of the big debates of the moment: Liberalism and Its Critics: From Mill to the MAGA Movement.

Principles like free speech, due process, and individual freedom have long stood at the core of our democracies. But citizens are clearly dissatisfied with many fundamental aspects of our societies. And increasingly, a new cohort of post-liberal thinkers is making the case that we should abandon those principles.

Do they have a point? And, if not, how can we reinvigorate liberalism for the 21st century? We’ll be asking these questions by reading a mix of classic texts, like John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, and more recent thinkers.

The first seminar will run on Wednesdays in January (1/8, 1/15, /1/22, 1/29) from 6-8.30pm EST, on Zoom.1 I want to make this experience as accessible as possible. The standard rate for this live, small-group seminar is $500. If that’s beyond your budget, you can choose to pay the needs-based rate of $250. Don’t worry: I’m not going to ask you to share any financial information—please just select the rate that is appropriate given your financial situation.

Would you like to join the first cohort? Or, especially with the holidays coming up, gift participation in The Seminar to someone who would?

Join the First Cohort

If that’s still beyond reach, we offer a limited number of full scholarships. Please fill out this form to be considered.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, just drop me a line by responding to this email.

See you soon in class,

Yascha

Keep Me in Mind for Future Iterations

We’re once again keeping the comments open for today’s column. Just remember: Be nice to each other and engage in good faith.

And, as ever, please do support my work—and get all my writing, plus ad-free access to full episodes of the podcast—by becoming a paying subscriber today.

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For a few months in the winter of 2016, German chancellor Angela Merkel was widely hailed as the last bulwark of Western democracy. Some went so far as to call her the true leader of the free world. After outgoing United States president Barack Obama had his final official meeting with Merkel, he reportedly told his team: “She’s all alone.”

Donald Trump had just been elected the 45th president of the United States. The United Kingdom had recently voted to leave the European Union. The leaders of France, Italy, Japan, and South Korea were looking weak. In Russia and China, dictators were gaining in confidence. Only Merkel was steadfastly standing up for liberal values (or so the story went).

Now, Merkel has published her memoir, pointedly called Freedom. It is a reminder of how remarkable her life story is. Raised as a pastor’s daughter in communist East Germany, she was 35 years old at the time of reunification. Underestimated by her friends and foes alike, she enjoyed a meteoric political rise after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the time she was 51, she held the most powerful office in the country, one that she would not relinquish for the next 16 years.

I came away from reading Merkel’s memoir fully convinced that she is as decent as she is dogged. But when Merkel starts to discuss the key turning points of her time in office, a feeling of tragedy descends. Although she always strived to do the right thing, she ultimately got nearly everything wrong—a lesson she refuses to learn to this day. “If it helps someone to say, ‘It was Merkel’s fault,’ then let them do that,” she sullenly suggested at the official presentation of her book in Berlin. “I just don’t think that’s going to help the country.”

Since Merkel left office in December 2021, the shine has come off her legacy. The German model has stopped working. And in retrospect, it is painfully obvious that the major decisions Merkel took in office—including her soft line on Russia and the trade deals she struck with China—accelerated its demise. Sadly, there is little reason to think that Merkel’s successors have learned the lesson.

In an age that favored loudmouths and demagogues, Merkel’s style was consensual, even laconic; her ideology, if she had one, was to stay the course. Though Merkel led a conservative party, she unabashedly made her home in the political center, deferring to the apparent will of the majority at every step. When conflicts and civil wars in the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of refugees to Germany’s doorstep, inspiring a powerful but short-lived wave of compassion, she refused to close the country’s borders, stating with characteristic simplicity: “We’ll make it work.”

And yet, Merkel’s refugee policy has, with the benefit of hindsight, come to seem neither particularly sensible nor particularly humane. It is a virtue to welcome genuine refugees. And the recent fall of Bashar al-Assad’s cruel regime in Syria serves as a reminder that many of the people fleeing his rule had good reason to fear for their lives.

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But it is far from clear that enticing desperate people to hand their life savings to unscrupulous criminals in order to attempt a perilous voyage across the Mediterranean qualifies as true compassion—especially when those who aren’t willing or able to do the same are left to their own devices. That policy starts to look downright hypocritical given that Merkel touted her decision to keep open Germany’s borders even as she cut a costly deal with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the strongman leader of Turkey, effectively paying him to do the job of stopping the flow of desperate humans for her.

As it turned out, this dishonest approach to the refugee crisis also came at a heavy political cost. Even as she did what she could to stem the flow of refugees, Merkel persistently refused to acknowledge that she had changed course. In federal elections in the fall of 2017, the Alternative for Germany—a far-right party whose leaders have repeatedly invoked Nazi slogans and suggested that Germans need a “180-degree turn” in how they interpret their history—entered the Bundestag for the first time. Since then, in part because many refugees failed to integrate into the German labor market, and some turned to violent crime, the party has kept growing in popularity. According to current polls, the AfD will become the country’s second biggest political force in federal elections scheduled for February 2025.

Even for advocates of a humane approach to migration, Merkel’s decisions in the refugee crisis have turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. In 2015, any criticism of her open-border policy placed you on the far right of European politics. But its consequences helped to make voters across the West much more fearful of uncontrolled immigration, and provided right-wing leaders from Giorgia Meloni in Italy to Donald Trump in the U.S. with resonant talking points. A decade later, even left-wing parties are desperate to emphasize that they’ll never allow a similar influx to repeat itself on their watch.

Germany’s crisis goes deeper than that. In the memorable formulation of Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Germany has long “outsourced its security to the United States, its energy needs to Russia and its export-led growth to China.” Merkel doubled down on all three of these bets. Since she left office, all three have gone belly up.

At dizzying speed, Germany has gone from economic powerhouse to the new “sick man of Europe.” Manufacturing in the country is down significantly. Its vaunted car industry has been particularly hard hit. Volkswagen, for example, recently announced that it would shutter some of its German factories for the first time in the company’s history. It is no exaggeration to say that Germany now faces its deepest crisis since the end of World War II.

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In the postwar era, West Germany found itself in a curious position. With the Iron Curtain running right through Berlin, it was a key frontier in the Cold War. But because of Germany’s recent history, its own allies did not trust the country with a robust army. This led the government in Bonn to rely on the United States for its defense needs. Over time, this reliance on Uncle Sam has turned into a reflexive habit of mind. To this day, many Germans look down on Americans as gun-obsessed cowboys while conveniently forgetting that it is these cowboys and their guns that have kept the country safe for the last 80 years.

Merkel never shared that instinctive anti-Americanism. But she failed to recognize that Germany’s long holiday from history had come to an end. Even after Trump came to office, demanding that European nations spend more on their defense and calling the purpose of NATO into doubt, she did not decisively increase the defense budget. By the time she left office in 2021, the German army was infamous for barely having any working planes.

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Olaf Scholz, a centrist Social Democrat who served as Merkel’s Vice-Chancellor for four years and emulated her laconic style when he became her successor in December 2021, has honored this legacy of inaction. A few days after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Scholz briefly seemed to signal that he understood that Germany’s long-standing geostrategic posture had become unsustainable. Calling the war a “Zeitenwende” (roughly, an “epochal caesura”), he promised to invest in the German army and throw the country’s full support behind Ukraine.

Sadly, Scholz’s words were never followed by serious action. At every stage of the war, Germany dithered and dodged, doing far less for Ukraine than the United States in absolute terms or than Poland and the Baltic states in relative terms. Pandering to the traditionally Russiophile sentiment in his party, Scholz is now no longer even bothering to pay lip service to the idea of a Zeitenwende. In his uphill struggle for reelection, he vaunts his reluctance to aid Ukraine as part of his campaign rhetoric, recently going so far as to suggest that his conservative adversary would be unable to invest in German infrastructure because of his marginally more hawkish position. Today, Germany is no closer to being a guardian of Europe’s peace and stability than it was two decades ago.

In one respect, at least, Germany really has succeeded in balancing between East and West over the last decades: It has complemented its military dependence on the United States with energy dependence on Russia. The country’s leaders tend to justify their desire to cozy up to the Kremlin with their historical guilt over the number of Russian soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. (Somehow, they don’t appear to feel similar guilt towards Poles or Ukrainians who have suffered just as badly at German hands.) But the real reason is much simpler: They did not dare wean German industry off its addiction to cheap Russian gas.

To her credit, Merkel was far less naive about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s character or ambitions than many other German leaders. Having grown up in a Communist police state, she understood better than most that the spirit of the KGB did not leave Putin after Putin left the KGB. (Among other tours of duty, he spent a number of years stationed in East Germany, giving directions to the Stasi.) During a bilateral meeting in the Kremlin in 2006, Putin—who knew that Merkel was deathly afraid of dogs since being bitten by one a decade earlier—allowed his Labrador to greet and sniff Merkel at length. In her memoir, Merkel implies that this revealed a sadistic streak: “On my reading of Putin’s face, he seemed to take pleasure in the situation. Did he simply want to see how a person reacts when they find themselves in distress?”

But that only makes it all the more baffling that Merkel pursued policies which deepened Germany’s dependence on Russian gas. She ordered the shutdown of Germany’s nuclear reactors, supposedly for environmentalist reasons, making the country more addicted to imported fossil fuels. Well after the Kremlin had occupied Georgian territory in 2008 and Ukrainian territory in 2014, Merkel persisted in supporting Nord Stream 2, a pipeline that would pump gas directly from Russia to Germany. Costs for Germany’s energy-intensive industrial sector began to rise during her time in office, only to spike in 2022 after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine—threatening the viability of the country’s manufacturing businesses and pushing it into a recession.

This is another area in which Merkel bears the biggest responsibility by virtue of having been in office for so long, not by virtue of distinguishing herself from the rest of Germany’s political class. Gerhard Schröder, her Social Democratic predecessor, was so tight with Putin that he joined the board of Gazprom after leaving office. The Green Party has, despite its origins in the anti-Western “Peace Movement,” become the German political force most consistently critical of authoritarian powers like the Kremlin; but because it has not yet revised its dogmatic opposition to all forms of nuclear power, it too has been unable to develop a realistic plan for how to break Germany’s dependence on Russian gas.

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Germans have long prided themselves in being Exportweltmeister, the world’s leading exporter. This required German companies to find markets for their cars and other high-value manufactured goods. The most alluring of these markets has, for the past decades, been China. And so, a succession of German politicians would make enthusiastic pilgrimages to Beijing, with the more intrepid among them muttering a few high-minded words about human rights before striking trade deals designed to deepen bilateral ties.

This is another area in which both Merkel and her successors lacked either the foresight or the courage to change course. Even as Xi Jinping tightened his grip on power, Merkel continued to pay lip service to the convenient idea that trade with Western countries would serve to soften Communist rule. As late as 2020, she strongly advocated for an investment deal between Brussels and Beijing. While she claims that her childhood indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism helped her understand Xi’s authoritarian mindset, she ultimately insists that her penchant for realpolitik rightly took precedence: “There were tangible German interests,” she insists in Freedom. “Our economic cooperation [with China] guaranteed German jobs.”

Under Merkel, major German corporations such as Daimler and Volkswagen came to be ever more dependent on Chinese buyers. But far from helping to ensure German prosperity, as Merkel still seems to believe, that dependence gradually turned into an existential threat. As German manufacturers fell behind on the development of electric cars, Chinese start-ups leapfrogged their technology. Today, China exports more cars than it imports, posing a double danger to the financial viability of the German economy’s most important sector.

The postwar history of Germany has been a surprising success story. When the Federal Republic was founded four years after the end of World War II, the prospects for a successful democracy seemed extremely uncertain; the country was already divided between East and West; and much of it lay in ruins.

As it marks its 75th anniversary, the Federal Republic can take pride in remarkable accomplishments. Germany has fully embraced democracy and firmly anchored itself in the Western alliance. It has learned the lessons of the past to such an extent that its neighbors now fear its weakness more than its strength. And it has for many decades been the most successful major economy on the European continent.

But Germany’s ability to sustain that success is now in doubt. The companies which drove the country’s prosperity since the 1950s face the threat of retrenchment or even bankruptcy. The hapless coalition government that succeeded Merkel recently broke apart in acrimony. Extremists are rising in German politics. Putin is threatening Europe’s political order. Even Berlin’s ability to outsource its security needs to Washington may be coming to an end.

All of this calls for a radical reimagination of Germany’s model. To ensure that the country is able to extend its remarkable run of success, its leaders need to rethink its economic, cultural, and geopolitical strategy. But despite a lot of hand-wringing about the state of the country, virtually no one in Berlin seems to have taken the measure of the moment.

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That is yet another respect in which Merkel’s failings are representative of the wider failings of her country. In her memoir, she barely acknowledges any personal or political shortcomings. In her public appearances since its release, she has appeared piqued that she should need to field impertinent questions about her mistakes. Whether it comes to her softness on the Kremlin, her failure to modernize Germany’s industry, or her muddled response to the refugee crisis, she appears incapable of understanding the high price exacted by her decisions.

“To me,” Merkel writes in the epilogue to her memoir, “freedom means continuing to learn even after I have left politics.” And yet, Merkel still seems to hold onto the illusions that led her astray in the first place. When trying to explain away her failure to take on Russia in the memoir, for example, she bafflingly suggests that “nobody knows whether Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine on February 24th 2022 might have been avoided if the pandemic hadn’t happened and there would have been in-person rather than virtual meetings.”

Since 1945, the most important quality for German leaders has been to be reasonable, and perhaps a little boring. Konrad Adenauer, the country’s first postwar Chancellor, won a series of elections under the slogan “No Experiments.” From Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel and now Olaf Scholz, most subsequent leaders have stepped in his footsteps. They were decent, competent and, for the most part, utterly unimaginative.

For many decades, this has served the country well. But every good thing must eventually come to an end. And right now, Germany’s postwar model has reached its breaking point. What is required of the German political and intellectual class in this moment is courage and imagination; there’s worryingly little sign that it will be able to muster much of either.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Free Press.

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Alice Evans is a senior lecturer in international development at King's College London and the author of the forthcoming book The Great Gender Divergence.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Alice Evans discuss the influence of cultural and religious norms in promoting or stifling gender equality; how we can advocate for improvements in gender equality while minimizing the risks of backlash; and why fertility has plummeted around the world.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You're asking a big question in your current research, which is why some places end up being really gender equal and other places not at all.

What degree of difference are we talking about? What are some of the patterns here?

Alice Evans: So let's look at the descriptive data in terms of employment, leadership, attitudes, and gender-based violence. If we look at female share of labor income, there is huge heterogeneity. Much of Europe will earn 44% of total labor income, whereas in Sudan, Egypt, India, it is very, very small, single-digit figures.

The big difference is in female labor force participation. Across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, female employment is between 20 to 30%, which is well below the global average. If we look at leadership, again, there is massive heterogeneity; across Scandinavia there is a very strong share of female representation. In Latin America there are 11 legislative assemblies which actually mandate gender parity, and you've just seen two women fight it out for the presidency in Mexico.

There is also huge heterogeneity in terms of people's acceptance of men sharing care work, men's entitlement to a job, support for female leadership. There are so many different variables, none of which are perfect. But if we put them all together to create a jigsaw it shows what I call the “great gender divergence.” And just as so many economists and political scientists have tried to explain why the West is rich and democratic while other countries aren't, I'm asking exactly the same question about gender.

Mounk: So in some places, most women work. They have a relatively equal share of overall market wages and there's greater safety, etc. In other places, there's much bigger challenges around that. Why is that?

We're at a moment in which, in the social sciences, people often tend to give non-cultural explanations for things; one of the main things that people might think is that it’s perhaps because these societies are just at different levels of economic development. But you think that culture matters as well in explaining this outcome.

So what do you think explains why some parts of the world are so much more gender equal than others?

Evans: So first of all, let me clarify that I think that around 1900, much of the world was very patriarchal. It wasn't that there was this Western advantage, or that the West has always worked. Our Enlightenment, our scholars, our scientists, our parliaments, and our judiciary were incredibly patriarchal, a total sausage fest. But then there is a big disruption, and I do think economics and politics are important here. So over the 20th century, skill bias and technological change are ramping up demand for skilled labor. That happens across the world. These factories open up and women seize the economic opportunities they create. It's also mediated by technology: When women have contraceptives they can control their fertility, further their education and then build careers.

So job-creating economic growth is a major engine of gender equality. But it’s mediated by several further factors, including culture. In some communities across much of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, male honor depends on female seclusion: Men gain their status and social inclusion within their communities by guarding and protecting their female kin and maintaining very close-knit surveillance. And so that means that even as incomes rise, female employment stays well below the national average.

If you look at the Middle East and South Asia compared to other countries with exactly the same wealth, female employment is very low. There's this wonderful new randomized control trial that offers $300 a month to slum-dwelling women in Mumbai. Only 20% of women take those jobs. Why? Because their husbands say no. Because their husband’s status is contingent upon them being the breadwinner and women remaining at home.

Different communities attach different weights to what I call “honor versus income.” So there's this honor/income trade-off. Female employment will only rise when the income is sufficiently high to compensate for the loss of male honor. And that's precisely what happened in Asia.

Mounk: Social scientists who think that this is ultimately more about economic factors might respond to this by saying: “Well, look, perhaps culture just is a delayed response to economic change.” You go back, as you were saying, to Europe in the Middle Ages, and you have many of the same norms where male honor depends on control of women; where the idea of women would be unimaginable in important parts of the workforce.

But then it's because of economic change that you start to see cultural change in those places. So what's the model here? Is it that you need that economic and technological change in order for the cultural change to happen? Tell me a little bit more precisely where the interplay here is between technology and culture.

Evans: As part of my methodology, I study the cultural evolution of every single society in the world. So let's look at the Middle East, North Africa and Anatolia. In Turkey, the religious ulama was losing credibility over the 19th century because, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, the jadids in Central Asia were massively criticizing the mullahs: “They're holding us back, they're retarding scientific progress.” They really want to embrace a secularizing, liberalizing, westernizing process of reform because they think that religious dogma has failed. So you see across the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s leaders like Ataturk.

There's this really cool new technology called Google Arts and Culture; I look at all the images from Egypt's history from the pharaohs to the present day, and what I see when I'm looking at the 1920s and 1930s is adverts for women wearing bras, and holiday pictures and postcards with women in bikinis. This is a small elite—but that elite is increasingly keen to embrace secular ideas. You see that right across Tunisia, in Egypt, you see it in Turkey and in Iran—even in tiny little pockets of Afghanistan.

But that falters for two reasons. One, arguably, is that Egypt's economic stagnation meant that modernizing reforms lost legitimacy. But [these reforms] also triggered a religious backlash: Many Muslims in Egypt who are still very conservative and very religious mobilized in response. Right across Saudi Arabia, across Egypt, if you look at periodicals, you can see that religious people are mobilizing.

Every single culture has its unique cultural inheritance. There's always heterogeneity. So you'll always have progressives and conservatives pushing on either side. At one point the liberal elites in Egypt were pushing for more liberalism. But then that triggered a backlash—so ultimately the leaders of Egypt and other countries cloaked themselves in Islam in order to gain legitimacy with an increasing;y religious public. And then we see the rise of veiling. And that became widespread right across Egypt, for example.

Mounk: So a lot of what you've been saying is convincing. But help me think through the difference between the individual level and the collective level here.

So I absolutely buy that there can be a community in which people individually have a set of preferences, but collectively are not able to achieve or accomplish those. And part of that reason is about what Timur Kuran explained in his work, and his episode of this podcast, on preference falsification—secretly, you might have a bunch of people, for example, who don't want to wear the hijab. But that's not a revealed preference, and any one person who first takes off the hijab is going to be punished by the neighbors, by their community, treated badly and accused of bad things. So nobody takes it off.

But when you think of something like Kuran's work, there also is the possibility of a preference cascade. When the norms of the collective are not supported by the preferences of individuals, that state of affairs can last for a very long time. But it can also be broken rather quickly. There's something inherently unstable about that setup. So perhaps the young women in some of these societies are looking to Saudi Arabia. But others may be watching Netflix shows.

Are those societies going to be able to resist that kind of cultural change forever? You point to Saudi Arabia. And I know you've thought about that place and spent some time there. It is a place that is very repressive for women, and it is also a very dictatorial place. Certainly, Saudi Arabia hasn't converged with Western countries. But if you're being optimistic, you could say: “It seems to be in a process of evolution in a way that just wasn’t true five or 10 years ago.”

Evans: Absolutely. And let's definitely talk about Saudi Arabia, because back in the 1960s female employment in Saudi Arabia was around 5%, which was typical for the Arabian Peninsula. And now what we've seen, from maybe around 2017, is what I call a “trilemma,” in that they want to diversify the economy, to move away from oil, to branch into tourism, etc. They want to control and prevent religious dissent, but they don't want the conservatives to get too upset with the changes that are happening. They want to enable greater cultural liberalization and secularization, but they don't want the liberals to be too outspoken. So how do you maximize those three variables?

I definitely think of community cultural norms as part of a coordination problem, exactly as Timur Kuran is saying. By observing communities we get a sense of what is respected, esteemed or condemned.

I've been interviewing women and they were saying “No woman has ever left this village,” right? And so no woman would want to do that, because then people would start gossiping. So there's a real coordination problem and what the Saudi government has done is to overcome it through media. So Shahid MBC, which is the state-owned equivalent of Netflix, shows lots and lots of films of professional women—and not just showing those women but showing them being supported. So one of the films is about this conservative father feeling a bit uncomfortable with it all, but over the episode he becomes really, really supportive. Television is so enormously powerful because it creates these immersive realities that transport us—we laugh, giggle, cry, and empathize. And with great acting, it can feel really realistic. So whether it's a Hollywood or Saudi producer, they can make us shift our perceptions about what's really happening in the world. And then if we look at female employment—boom, it's doubled in recent years. Over the past 15 years, women going to cinemas, going to restaurants, owning property, and driving a car have all boomed. All these indicators of female mobility are massively on the up. So in this way, they overcame this coordination failure by basically creating ideological propaganda, which is similar to what happened in communism. And so definitely there is that possibility for movement within that unique cultural inheritance.

Now, do I think Saudi Arabia is going to become similar to Europe? No, but definitely there is always scope for wiggle room. Now, conservative Muslims across the world are very upset with what's happening in Saudi Arabia right now. For example, there are limits on how loud the call to prayer can be. Some people complain that Jeddah has become too commercialized, etc. So there is this very delicate balancing act.

Mounk: So there is this ongoing battle, and you can see modernization and then some of the conservative adversaries successfully pushing back against it.

If you're thinking intelligently about how to make change, how to make the world more gender equal, you need to think in two tracks, right? One is how you maximize movement towards some of those norms, but also how you ensure that that movement itself and the way you advocate for it doesn't feed into some of that backlash. I don't know the literature well enough to know whether or not it’s true, but I've seen some papers arguing that some of the good work done by NGOs in pushing for more gay rights in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has ended up being very damaging, because while what they were arguing for was, in itself, something I would agree with, it has led to this massive counterreaction and counter-mobilization by local populations and local elites. And that has led to much harsher persecution of sexual minorities than was there before this became a kind of more salient political issue.

Evans: I completely agree and I call this the “great gay divergence,” and this goes back to what I was saying that every country has its unique cultural inheritance (with progressives and conservatives), but if progressives push too hard and if they go too far beyond the median citizen then that's going to trigger this conservative patriarchal mobilization. So in Uganda today it is 10 years imprisonment for anyone affiliated with LGBT, and there have been similar legal moves in Kenya and Ghana. Absolutely, you can trigger backlash.

I think the media can be a really powerful tool. So for example there was this really nice analysis using LLMs looking at Bollywood and Hollywood, and they were showing that, overwhelmingly, Bollywood strips have tended to talk about honor and shame, and to say that male honor depends on female chastity. So there are so many narratives over the 1990s that, you know, a woman is abducted and raped and then the state is incapable and the brother has to defend her honor. So the media can reinforce people's fears. And we now see another technological challenge—that as much of the world increasingly has smartphone technology, this enables everyone to self-select into their own echo-chambers. I might use my phone to check out the latest news on the Financial Times, that's what I find exciting and interesting. But many other people will be in totally different filter bubbles in which they're repeatedly praising each other for that particular ideology. And that is what we're now seeing in South Korea, for example. So even though women are surging into the workforce, even though it's democratic, even though there's lots of economic growth, women are increasingly going into female echo-chambers which reinforce progressive gender ideologies. Women are becoming increasingly critical of all those patriarchal, Confucian ideologies. But men are not. Men are in a totally different echo-chamber. There was one news story that on a Telegram chat 220,000 members were sharing deep-fake pornography, and male communities will be rewarding and praising each other for humiliating women: “Great shot, brother!” It's a way of humiliating and degrading women.

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These male communities will be championing and cheering each other on, and signaling that in this peer community that is totally accepted. And then what happens is that as we get these fault lines, people might only see the most progressive example or the most extremist example from the other camps. There's that wonderful US report from More in Common, where they say it's the extremes of either end who are most vocal right now, and it’s those people from the either end that will get quoted and trigger animosity from the other side. So to go back to your example of backlash there was a Korean feminist group, an extremist group that is not representative, that uses this symbol mocking men for having tiny members. And so that was just one extremist example, but that triggered patriarchal backlash and that feeds into this idea that feminists are aggressive, that feminists are out to get us, that feminists are hostile, etc. So across the world, feminists don't have a great reputation. They're often seen as hostile, but this really triggers this backlash.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Alice discuss solutions for the global fertility crisis. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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Recently, I started two sister Substacks which translate my essays and interviews into French and German. But while the English original already has over 60,000 subscribers, its international cousins are starting out from scratch.

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Imagine this scenario.

A country in the European Union is about to elect a new president. Its political scene has long been dominated by two political parties widely considered to be deeply corrupt. In the first round of the election, two outsider candidates unexpectedly top the polls: one, a 52-year old woman, is a pro-European mayor from a small town in the provinces. The other, a 62-year old man, is a far-right social media personality with evident sympathies for the Kremlin. The traditional parties are apoplectic, and there’s well-founded concern about what the far-right candidate might do in office if he wins. But given how different the two top candidates are from each other, voters in the second round of the presidential elections will have a meaningful choice about the future direction of their country.

Then, with some voters overseas already casting their ballots and only two days to go until polls are due to close in the run-off, the country’s constitutional court nullifies the outcome of the first round. Its judges do not claim that there has been any irregularity in the way the vote had been counted. Nor do they say that voters have been intimidated or that candidates have been unable to campaign freely. They merely imply that recent revelations made by the security services—that Russian agents engaged in cyber attacks and improperly funded advertising for the far-right candidate on TikTok—explain his meteoric rise.

The election, the judges announce, will need to be restarted from scratch. Because of the delay, the outgoing president will remain in office long beyond the date on which his mandate was originally scheduled to lapse.

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Would you expect this to be a big story? And how do you think the self-declared guardians of democracy would react?

Well, as you may have guessed, this scenario is not at all imaginary. It is the remarkable chain of events that, largely ignored by the international public, has just played out in Romania, an EU member state with a population of nineteen million. And yet, these events failed to draw much international attention; worse, the institutions and organizations that claim to support democracy have, for the most part, cheered on the court’s decision.

“By acting as it did,” claims The Financial Times in an article by its editorial board, “the constitutional court upheld the rule of law surrounding the electoral process.” The U.S. State Department expressed the same sentiment in more flowery language. “The United States stands with the Romanian people as they face an unprecedented situation regarding the integrity of their elections … The United States reaffirms our confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence.”

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But the judgment by Romania’s constitutional court, and the blithe acceptance of it among people who claim to be fighting for the preservation of democracy, is a big mistake. If you want to rein in extremist candidates, there simply isn’t some clever way around actually convincing voters that there is a better, more moderate alternative. If those who claim to stand for democratic values invoke spurious pretexts to cancel the outcome of an election they find to be shocking, they are no longer democracy’s defenders; they have become its gravediggers.

The constitutional court’s justification for canceling the first round of the election is shockingly thin. It held that “the electoral process … was marred throughout its duration by multiple irregularities and breaches of electoral law.” But rather than discussing these irregularities in detail, it remains oddly vague. “The right of voters to form an opinion includes the right to be correctly informed before making a decision,” the judgment reads at one point; but this was “violated as voters were misinformed during an electoral campaign that favored one candidate.” Does that provide strong enough reason to cancel an election after all the ballots have already been cast and counted?

Let’s take a step back.

There is a long tradition of authoritarian powers trying to influence the outcome of democratic elections in other countries. The Soviet Union did so throughout the Cold War, covertly financing powerful communist parties in countries from Greece to Italy to Spain. Over recent years, Russia has revived this tradition, albeit in a more ideologically flexible manner. Now, extremist parties on both the far-right and the far-left can hope for an infusion of cash from the Kremlin if they prove to be reliable spokespeople for Russian interests.

There is also ample evidence that Russia has started to peddle its influence in more tech-savvy ways. The best studies of the 2016 presidential elections in the United States found that tweets and other social media posts pushed by Russian bots made up a tiny fraction of the content seen by American voters. It is very unlikely that they swayed the outcome of the election. But it probably wasn’t for lack of trying. There is good reason to think that the Kremlin did try to interfere in that election—and that it has become more sophisticated in how to exert its influence on social media since.

In the case of Romania, declassified intelligence reports and public admissions by senior executives at TikTok do provide enough evidence to suggest that foreign influence operations played a role. In the wake of the elections, for example, the Chinese social media platform took down a cluster of accounts that had, its executives acknowledged, engaged in unmarked political advertising for Călin Georgescu, the far-right candidate. Even the strongest defenders of free speech—and I proudly count myself among them—need to recognize that we can’t allow foreign powers to get candidates who favor their interests elected by flouting local laws about campaign finance.

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The Romanian case, then, is a timely reminder that Western democracies need to get serious about containing foreign influence operations. Dictatorships should not be able to fund political parties in democracies. In countries that have traditionally restricted campaign spending, social media platforms need to ensure equal treatment. And, yes, people who have broken existing laws should be prosecuted.

But while energetic action against foreign influence is needed, none of these arguments can justify ignoring the expressed will of millions of voters. In a democracy, voters deserve a minimum modicum of respect. Courts can step in to ensure that the laws of the land are obeyed during a campaign. In extraordinary circumstances, such as when votes are being tallied in an unfair manner, they must even retain the ability to order new elections. But to conclude that voters were unable to form an informed opinion because one candidate’s supporters were engaged in disinformation campaigns on TikTok is the height of hubris. It presumes not only that the court is the ultimate arbiter of truth or falsehoods in the realm of political opinion; worse, it suggests that only an irrationally deluded voter would have cast their ballot in the way they did.

In the age of social media, every election will feature some accounts spreading false rumors, and some foreign actors trying to sway the minds of voters. If we normalize the idea that unelected judges can cancel the outcome of free elections on such flimsy grounds, the political establishment will be tempted to preserve the status quo every time an election takes a shocking turn.

The most important reasons to oppose the court’s decision are (like the ones I have given so far) moral in nature. But even on purely prudential grounds it is less clever than it might at first appear. For it is highly questionable whether the kind of gamesmanship to which the Romanian constitutional court resorted can keep extremists from power.

Up until now, Georgescu’s oft-repeated claim that there a nefarious conspiracy is doing everything it can to keep him from power looked hyperbolic to most Romanians. With Georgescu only receiving 23 percent of first-round voters, his ability to win a head-to-head run-off was also far from assured. In the wake of that constitutional court decision, his claims to being a political martyr—one that the political establishment is willing to shut out by any means and at any cost—is looking a lot more plausible. In the end, the court’s decision may turn out to delay rather than to avert his victory, and give him a much more crushing mandate when he does.

In fact, such gamesmanship may be the real reason why Georgescu won the first round of the election in the first place. What little international media coverage there has been of his rise largely blamed “TikTok algorithms” for his sudden ascendance. But part of the explanation is more prosaic: Another far-right candidate was doing well in the polls until she was disqualified by the constitutional court. Once she was no longer on the ballot, a lot of her supporters looked around for an alternative—and coalesced around Georgescu.

Sometimes, the outcome of elections really is illegitimate. Both in July’s presidential elections in Venezuela and in October’s parliamentary elections in Georgia, there was strong evidence of straight-up fraud. When the votes of citizens are not counted fairly, there is no reason to pay deference to the supposed results.

In both countries, courageous opposition movements promptly took to the streets to protest their disenfranchisement. In the face of brutal attacks, the citizens of Georgia are still waging their righteous battle today. The cynical voices in the United States who have never met a dictator they do not like are dead wrong when they suspect an America-led color revolution anytime ordinary citizens take to the street to fight for its rights.

But the standard for when to discount the outcome of elections must be very high. This is true in two senses. First, the feature which supposedly rendered an election illegitimate needs to be core to the process. If the votes aren’t counted fairly, that counts; if some candidate was favored by a social media algorithm, that simply isn’t enough.

Second, the evidence for the supposed irregularity needs to be strong. Rumor or vague allegations are not enough; nor, in most cases, are declassified documents from the intelligence community whose sources cannot be easily traced. Especially when we are talking about courts stepping in to overrule the voice of voters after the fact, there can be no space for uncertainty.

Neither of these conditions was met in Romania. And that turns the court’s decision, and the international support for it, into a scary precedent. In an age in which the extremists are rising, those who see themselves as defenders of existing institutions will be increasingly tempted to resort to antidemocratic means. Already, politicians in Germany are discussing the possibility of banning the Alternative for Germany, and prosecutors in France have requested that Marine Le Pen be excluded from presidential elections coming up in 2027 if she is found guilty of embezzling EU funds.

But giving in to that temptation is morally wrong and politically stupid. In the long-run, the only way to beat extremists is at the ballot box. Clever ways to sidestep that imperative are as democratically illegitimate as they are short-sighted.

I’m once again opening this article up for everyone to comment. As ever, please be civil. I love the community we’re building here. Thank you.

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2. Thompson’s death has started a big debate about the state of healthcare in America. There is a lingering sense of bad taste in that sequence of events. But admonishments that “now is not the time” to talk about this or that topic never work. And the medical system is a genuinely important topic, not just because it consumes 17 percent of America’s GDP, but also because it touches on our most primal fears. So now is, I suppose, as good a time as any to share my own perspective on the American medical system in general, and the system of private insurance that stands at its center in particular.

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3. There is something uniquely frustrating about the American health insurance system. I am a fluent English speaker with a PhD degree, high-quality insurance, and the financial reserves to cover a surprise medical bill in a worst case scenario. I have, so far, also been lucky enough not to need major medical care. And yet, the hours I have spent on the phone with my insurance company are by some margin the most infuriating bureaucratic experiences I have had since moving to the United States. The difficulty of getting clear answers to simple questions about what medical treatments are covered and how much they might cost is mind-boggling. I cannot begin to imagine how much more scary and humiliating all of that must feel if you don’t speak English fluently or lack the confidence to advocate for yourself, if a surprise bill could compromise your ability to make rent or if you are desperately seeking approval for a life-saving treatment. Allowing your fury to justify murder is a moral and political dead end; but the existence of that fury is easy to understand.

4. Insurers are not the only players with a major profit motive in the healthcare system; often, doctors are just as guilty of deliberately putting their patients into difficult positions designed to extract profits from them. A trivial example: When I had a wisdom tooth removed earlier this year, my dental practice discussed the costs with me upfront, even providing me with an accurate estimate of what my insurance would cover. But to my surprise, on the day of the procedure the dental surgeon urged an additional treatment, not covered by insurance, that would cost over $1,000. When I asked why the procedure was necessary, she vaguely hinted at the risk of nerve damage which could disfigure my face, and affected a look of disappointment that I would second-guess her advice. I asked her for a minute to consider and called my uncle, a dentist in Sweden, who assured me that the treatment was completely unnecessary. If my uncle hadn’t picked up, I probably would have agreed to it.

5. Healthcare is, at heart, a service industry. If you want a haircut that takes an hour, either you or somebody acting on your behalf will, among other expenditures, need to cover a typical hourly salary for someone whose job it is to cut hair. Similarly, if you need the attention of a medical professional for about an hour, either you or somebody acting on your behalf (such as your insurance company) will, among other expenditures, need to cover a typical hourly salary for

   somebody whose job it is to heal the sick. Hence, one of the key determinants of the affordability of healthcare is the salary that medical professionals typically command. And salaries for medical professionals in the United States are exceptionally high. According to a recent report on the international compensation of doctors, for example, an average American physician makes

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If you are already a paying subscriber to this Substack or Persuasion, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Richard, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

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Set Up Podcast

Richard Reeves is the founder and president of the American Institute of Boys and Men. He is the author of Dream Hoarders and, most recently, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (which was recently included by Barack Obama on his summer reading list).

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Richard Reeves discuss whether young men propelled Donald Trump to victory in the 2024 election; how we can supply boys and men with new sources of meaning; and the enduring relevance of John Stuart Mill.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: So I'm really excited to talk about your broader research agenda regarding the status of boys and men in our society today. But the natural starting point, I think, is to talk about the election. There's been a lot of talk about the idea that the American election was somehow decided by young men moving to the right, that perhaps all of this is fueled by a kind of men's rights, via influences like Andrew Tate.

There may be something to that, but I think the actual story is a little bit more complicated. How do you think gender played into this election?

Richard Reeves: The first thing to say is that the surprise was not that we saw men, especially young men, moving to the right. That would have been pretty well predicted by the polls leading up to the election. The surprise actually was that young women also moved slightly to the right. The expected gender gap was going to be men, especially young men, moving right, and women, especially young women, moving left, probably motivated by abortion and other issues. And that would be this big gender gap.

Well, actually, there was a big gender gap, but that was just because women didn't move right quite as much as men did, which was not really the gender gap that the left certainly had in mind. But I think it's statistically clear that there was a move.

Mounk: I saw some slightly different exit polls and it looked like the gender gap had actually reduced since 2020. It sounds like you're thinking probably on the whole it has slightly grown.

Reeves: So I think the overall gender gap is probably pretty stable, maybe even narrowed a little bit from 2020 to 2024. And that's because you just saw this overall move. You saw pretty much every demographic group with a couple of exceptions moving towards the Republicans compared to 2020. So against that context, the gender gap was pretty stable and not that different to historic trends. It's when you look beneath the hood at different demographic groups that it gets more interesting. We did see a growing gender gap among young voters, voters under 30. We did see a bigger gender gap among Latino voters or Hispanic voters, with men moving even more quickly to the right than Hispanic women. But we didn't see it, for example, among white college educated voters, older voters, et cetera. And so depending on which demographic you looked at, there was a slightly different gender story. But I think it's certainly true, not to overstate that there was this kind of huge gender gap, but to underline the fact that that's because the expected move of women, and particularly of young women to the left, didn't transpire. In fact, if anything, it was a slight move to the right. But there was nonetheless a strong move to the right among certain groups of men, including young men and Hispanic men.

We'll see what happens with young men going forward, but when you see such a big move, when you see young men kind of breaking so hard to the right, that is unusual in that age demographic. And that's something that I know a lot of people on the left are very concerned about.

Mounk: So I think there's three possible explanations for this. So the first one is to say that men used to have superior social status to women, they used to have all the privileges and advantages, and those are now being taken away from them and they're rebelling against that by moving to the right. It's kind of the equivalent of the explanation that really was quite dominant in political science about white people in 2016.

The second explanation is that it's not exactly that, that if you're a Latino man and—recently in your high school, perhaps in a college environment, there was a lot of emphasis on a particular left-identitarian vision that puts hierarchies of oppression at the center—and the assumption for a long time would be that you'd think, “Well, as a Latino, I'm oppressed, and so therefore I'm going to vote with a coalition of the oppressed.” But actually, perhaps in many contexts, you are also told that you're an oppressor on the basis of being a man. And so a lot of these people who have these conflicted identities ended up saying, “I'm more annoyed by the fact that I'm targeted as a man than I am identifying with the status of an oppressed Latino. And so I'm going to vote with the oppressors rather than the oppressed,” or something like that.

Perhaps the third interpretation is that gender is perhaps a kind of confounding factor here: What's really going on is that Democrats have become the party of the well-educated and, to some extent, the affluent; they won voters earning over $100,000 income a year and lost voters below that. They did much better among college-educated people, and you look at the current college population in the United States, and 60% of them are women, right? So it may just be that men didn't vote for Trump because they're men, and women didn't vote for Kamala Harris because they're women—it's that men voted for Trump when they weren't college-educated, when they weren't optimistic about the future, and women voted for Harris when they were college-educated, when they were optimistic about the future, and it's just that more women now fall into that category.

Reeves: Yeah, I really like the way you've laid it out, Yascha. The third, you might think of that as the mechanical effect, which if there's an education split or an economic split, and more men are on one side of that split, less college-educated than women, then just mechanically, you're going to see more men voting for the Republicans. This is just a straightforward empirical question, which is controlling for education status. And once we've got stable data, you could always just do an empirical analysis, right? I think it would be a nice and simple thing for my institute to work on. I'll tell you right now that my pretty strong sense is that it will explain some of the gap, but not most of it and probably not even half of it. And then I think that brings us to which of the other two might be playing a part there and my sense of this is that it wasn't largely the first. Your first category is the backlash reaction: “I'm mad as hell about the fact that the patriarchy is disappearing. I used to have status just because I'm a man. I don't have it anymore. And so I'm reacting against that.” That would be a reactionary impulse. And I'm not saying there's none of that, but when I look at the attitudes, for example, of young men towards gender equality, they continue to get more liberal. Young men are even more supportive of gender equality today than they were eight years ago and certainly than 20 years ago. And so it's just too simple a story to tell. It wasn't a sexism election. I think that would be a mistake.

I think the second one gets closer to my view. I don't know this, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if we found that it was the younger of those men who moved most strongly to the right. And those are very young men. Some of those, they were 10 when Donald Trump came in. They were in middle school when “toxic masculinity” became part of the discourse. I think that we might see some of that kind of reaction, but it's not a reaction against the rise of women. It's a reaction against being constantly told that you don't have problems, you are the problem: mansplaining, patriarchy, toxic masculinity. So I do think they're not over the idea of gender equality, but they are over the idea of being told that they're at fault, that they're the problem, that their very identity is somehow problematic. They're kind of over it. And I really think that if the Democrats draw the false conclusion that sexism played a large part in people's voting behavior, then they'll spend a lot longer than four years in the political wilderness. Because it's also quite clear that people react pretty badly to being told that because they voted a particular way, that can only be because they've got these hateful misogynistic views. They'll blame the voter.

I don't think most of the people voting were voting on the basis of these questions. I think it was more of a more broad set of economic concerns. But I do think that overlaps with gender in the sense that a lot of men feel like they're struggling right now in the economy. They're struggling to get their footing in the labor market. They're struggling to bring home the kind of wage they want. They're just having a bit of a tough time of it. And that means that they are very open to economic arguments about being better off. But more broadly, I think this is more of a story of neglect than anything else. Young men are not actually seeking, by and large, a new masculinist identity politics, a men's rights movement, etc. Of course, there are some fringe figures doing that. But that's not what they're doing. I do think they are rejecting a form of identity politics that pathologizes them.

Mounk: And that's important because, as in the case of other kinds of identity groups, the analysis of why Democrats are losing is going to influence how you think they can address the problem. If you're thinking that the problem with white voters is that “when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” and they're just not willing to live in a society that isn't racist, well, then you're going to give up on them and focus on non-white voters. And I think in some ways that's what the Democratic Party has tried to do, with the result of driving a lot of non-white voters into the hands of Republicans, ironically.

If your analysis of the reasons for the gender gap is, “Well, these are all people who are addled from watching Andrew Tate and just don't want to accept female equality,” then you're going to be led to the conclusion that compromise is impossible, and that you're just going to have to build a coalition that is mostly centered around women, or the few men who aren't sexist in that kind of way. Whereas if you recognize that, as you're saying, men have actually continued to move towards embracing ideals of gender equality, and you can certainly reach for a vision that assumes that we want a society of gender equality and stands up for that, but without making them feel targeted in these kinds of ways, that would allow for a much more productive politics.

Reeves: Yes. You recognize there are some gendered inequalities now going in both directions and you address them. So we talked about some of these before, but things like the male suicide crisis, the struggles of boys in schools, the difficulty of finding alternatives to college—so more vocational learning, etc., more straightforward addressing of those problems, I think will downweight gender as an identity. I think, actually, that the neglect of some of the real problems that boys and men are having has combined with, at worst, a pathologization of them, and has actually created conditions in which we're probably seeing more of the men's rights kind of reaction stuff than we would have otherwise seen.

I think it's in some ways quite heartening that the overwhelming majority of men, including young men, are not falling for that. They're not falling for the zero-sum reactionary stuff. They do continue to want their sisters and their girlfriends to have equal rights. They are increasingly supportive of gender equality. It's just they want to be included, to use that terminology, and not in a patronising way, not in a “be a better ally” way. I think a big mistake the Democrats made towards the end of the campaign, especially, was they realised they weren't getting men, and so what they tried to do was try and guilt trip or shame or blame men into voting for them: “If you're a good ally, you vote for us. If you're not sexist, deep down, you vote for us.” And that I think was spectacularly unsuccessful because what it said to men is: “You should vote for us because you love the women in your life.” And that's a disastrous kind of message. It's not that the men don't love the women in their life, it's just that they also have their own issues. And that was something that I think that political messaging just didn't get across at all because the Democrats were pretty convinced they were going to win, effectively, as the women's party. And, privately, a couple of senior Democrats even said to me, “Well, we're pretty confident that for every young man we lose, we're going to pick up at least one young woman—and, by the way, she's going to turn out to vote and he probably won't.”

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Mounk: So how do we substantively fix this problem? When you're talking about the politics of it, sort of stopping to lecture them about male privilege certainly seems like the right idea—when somebody is on the ground, you should probably stop kicking them. But that’s not going to fix the structural problem that we're talking about. And obviously some of these changes, I assume, are rooted in these much more long-standing transformations of the economy. Because of globalization and automation, because of the shift towards the service sector and other kinds of things, manufacturing work is more sparse and commands comparatively lower wages than it did 30 or 40 years ago. Now, perhaps we can introduce vocational schools that upskill the American labor force. And perhaps there's geopolitical and geostrategic reasons for why we should do some amount of nearshoring in sensitive industries, and that might increase some of that. But none of that is going to bring back the world of the 1970s, in which you graduate high school, you're a reliable worker, you work hard in a manufacturing job, and you're probably, by comparison to other people in that society, earning a really significant income.

So what's the vision here? Is it that we need to somehow find a way to create the kinds of jobs that the fathers and the grandfathers of those men have traditionally done? Is it that we need to find better ways of integrating men into the sectors of the economy that are growing? Is it that we need to find meaning for them outside of work to a more considerable extent? Perhaps we also need to find different structures of meaning for men so that their status is not just dependent on their income or on having that kind of work contribution. What's the kind of scalable solution here?

Reeves: Can I say yes to all of the above? That was a great list. I think we should do pretty much all of those things. What we can't do is conjure back up a vanished economy. And we certainly don't want to conjure back up a world where men's status and position was dependent on women's dependence on them. We don't want to recreate the economic inequalities that the women's movement quite rightly has been unraveling and has made huge progress on. The shift in the economic relations between men and women over the last 40 years is astonishing: In 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man. so 13% of women would have been in the top half of the male wage distribution. Today, it's 40% of women that earn more than the median man. Now, the important thing about that is it's not equality. The male and female wage distributions do not look exactly the same. There's still a gap, but 40% is a different world to 13%. And it's the world that we've been fighting for.

Mounk: And one of the interesting sub-facts here is that if you look at demographics which make a little bit more money than white people in general, you observe, for example, the average Asian woman in the United States now making more than the average white man.

Reeves: That's right. And also that white women actually earn a lot more than black men now, which was not true in 1979. In 1979, white women were lagging a long way behind black men. Now, they've overtaken black men. And so that's where, if you want to use intersectionality, that's where you would apply it. And you'd actually look at these different identities and, I think to some extent, celebrate the fact that it's harder to know in advance what the patterns of inequality are going to be. But actually, it’s an open empirical question. That's a sign of progress.

But to come back to your original question about solutions, I'll say something about policy that I'm not sure I believe, but I'm going to try out, which is I think in this area that actually policy is an important signal. As a general proposition, I don't think public policy is very often that good a signaling device, but if I'm right, and a lot of this is the sense of a lack of sensitivity to the problems of men, then I think just having some policies that show that we're going to do this thing not despite the fact that it's going to help men, but because it will help men, because we've noticed that men are struggling, would help. Examples of that could be to make the education system more boy-friendly. You've mentioned vocational training, but one of the things I'm very interested in is more male teachers. And I've noticed recently that everybody from Josh Hawley on the right to the American Psychological Association on the left agree that the declining share of male teachers is a bad thing. These are good role models. Male teachers tend to be coaches. They don’t tell you how to be male, they can just show you. And I think that's a better thing. And the American Psychological Association has just noticed these huge gender gaps in education and saying, “Maybe a few male teachers is not a bad idea.” And so I think you could say that would be a really good policy to pursue in and of itself, but it would also be a signal that you've noticed that men aren't doing great, that boys aren't doing great. And, by the way, we need more teachers. So why not try to get men? And then I'll add a couple of others just for illustration: more apprenticeships, move away from the massive subsidies to elite colleges, for example, and use some of those savings to put into trade schools and, in particular, apprenticeships. And you don't do that despite the fact they seem to be very male-oriented—you do them because they're male-oriented. They just seem to be better educational pathways on average for men, which is great.

Picking up your point about the growth areas of the economy, it is quite true we've shifted to more of a service sector economy. We have a growing need for jobs in the service sector, including in health and education and mental health. And actually those professions are becoming more gendered over time, more women in them.

And in just the same way that we didn't just say we need more women in STEM and do nothing about it, we actually have had huge programs, policies, investments, philanthropy to try and increase the share of women in STEM. We now need similar efforts to increase the share of men in those growth parts of the economy. And so I don't think there's any contradiction between continuing to do work to, say, get more women into engineering and now having similar work to get more men into areas like education, for example, or mental health, because that's where the jobs are coming from, and also to decode the idea that these are “women's jobs.” There is this idea a bit on the left that to try and do something to make these jobs seem more male-friendly is to sort of give in to patriarchal notions, to give in to men's fragility or their sense of themselves. I just think that's naive. I think in just the same way that we had to work quite hard to persuade women that engineering and economics could be quite female-friendly, we need to do the same to make guys feel comfortable going into nursing or teaching or mental health. And I don't see any problem with that, honestly. And so I've criticized the Biden administration for having an initiative to get a million more women into construction, not because I think that's a bad idea, but because there's no equivalent initiative to get men into teaching or into healthcare.

Now, we can't put all our eggs in the basket of economic power for men anymore. And I'm going to risk sounding maybe incredibly conservative when I say this, but I think that men need to know that the tribe needs them, and the way in which the tribe will need them is going to vary hugely over time and place. But to feel unneeded is quite literally fatal, and certainly disorienting. And we've just got to find ways, a bit through public policy but much more generally, to supply men with a broader range of sources of meaning than the labor market can now provide them, which doesn't mean giving up on the labor market. That's a really difficult conversation to have right now, but it's the one we have to enter into.

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Mounk: That's very interesting. But let me ask you a broader question.

So on the positive side, the space to talk about these issues is much bigger and broader than it was a number of years ago. Let's say that you continue to be effective with your institute and other like-minded people are able to put together some of the programs you're hoping for, there's more vocational programs, perhaps there's some special programs to try and persuade men to go into teaching. Perhaps we find some better ways for men to find meaning outside of their work. At the same time, some of the basic underlying trends look like they're going to continue. Of course, it's always a mistake to assume that trends continue in a linear way. It may be that we're about to hit an inflection point in any case, that, all things considered, there's going to be fewer rather than more manufacturing jobs per capita in the United States 20 or 30 years from now. I assume that the importance of the kind of formal education that women now seem to have an advantage in is going to increase rather than decrease. How do you think things are going to shake out in 25 years?

Reeves: Well, that's a really challenging and great question. And I tend to be optimistic about these things. I think that's one of the things that makes me a liberal. That's one of our great blessings, and our great curse, to be optimistic. But I think optimism is in some ways something we need a bit more of in our society generally, because it's a self-fulfilling feeling, right? You can't create a better society unless you feel like society can be made better.

If you assume, as I would too, that the economy is going to continue in the direction which means that jobs that are just automatically more male-friendly are going to be in shorter and shorter supply, we have to culturally adapt to that and find ways for men to go into other kinds of jobs without having to cease to be men—which is, think, an important thing. We can't feminize men just because the labor market's changing. We actually need to help men adapt to those roles in a way that makes them feel like they're an appropriate role for men. I just think that's important that we do that, but also to broaden out these places and sources of meaning for men in society. And so I think if in 25 years we haven't deepened and expanded and supported the role of fathers, for example, that will be very bad news, because that's one of the ways in which men can continue to feel that they are needed and have meaning, with a different kind of institutional fatherhood. And we're already seeing that men are doing a lot more fathering than they did even 25 years ago. But I think 25 years from now they'll do even more. And these other chances for them to play a role in their community, which you alluded to a moment ago, around coaching, volunteering, et cetera—maybe this is a provocative point, but I've really come to believe that actually we need some quite specific roles for men in social institutions. I think that male associative activity is more institutionalized on the average than female is, that the average women are just a bit better at association and therefore don't need as much institutional scaffolding to make that association take place.

It's very interesting to me that, at least in the short run, when once you take away the need for something to be done by men, it very quickly ends up being done by women. It's the difference between saying “we need someone” and “we need you.” And at least having some sort of gendered aspect to that turns out potentially be quite important.

Now, I'm aware how all this sounds. It sounds like if you're listening to this, perhaps if you're more, if you're a progressive and you're rolling your eyes right now and saying, “Well, seriously, we have to create special roles for men in order for them to actually do anything?”Maybe they should just do them anyway. Why do we have to carve out male specific roles? Are men really not going to get off the sofa unless we give them specific tasks?” I understand that frustration, but at least for now, when I look at what's happening, I actually do think we need to find ways to make a specific offer to men. Maybe take coaching as an example. Whatever it is, we need to signal to them right now that, in this period of great transition, we actually need you.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Richard discuss the life and philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and the post-liberals who critique him. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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Over the course of the last decade, a seductive idea has conquered the discourse: the notion that the sudden surge in political instability in democracies like the United States has been due to “elite overproduction” and the subsequent formation of a “surplus elite.”

In the description of Peter Turchin, the Russian-American beetle-expert-cum-political-forecaster who popularized these terms, the overproduction of elites consists in “the presence of more elites and elite aspirants than the society can provide positions for.” The rise of a class of people who aspire to elite status only to see their expectations dashed, he argues, is “inherently destabilizing.”

America does indeed seem to be going through a period of prolonged turmoil. (Think the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the summer of 2020 and the assault on the Capitol, plus of course the election of Donald Trump.) And so Turchin’s idea is suddenly everywhere. A few years ago, Graeme Wood, an excellent reporter who usually has a sure nose for bullshit, gave Turchin a respectful hearing in the pages of The Atlantic. Since then, his books have attracted praise from eminent historians like Niall Ferguson, economists like Angus Deaton, and even military leaders like James Stavridis. (“Peter Turchin,” writes the four-star admiral, “provides a powerful synthesis of the historical forces that have brought American society to the dangerous ledge upon which it now teeters.”)

But is the idea of surplus elites actually true, useful—or even coherent?

The Paradox of Rising Expectations

The term Turchin uses is relatively new. So is its sudden surge in popularity. But the underlying idea long predates his work.

In fact, the intuition that political systems may become unstable when they prove unable to meet the rising expectations of their population is very old. Alexis de Tocqueville hinted at an early version of it when, in trying to explain the roots of the French Revolution, he noted that revolutions often take place because improved conditions lead citizens to make demands that governments prove unable to meet: “The regime that a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform.”

The most compelling modern formulation of the paradox of rising expectations, specifically focused on the way in which modernization would create a new class of aspirants to high social and material status, was given by Samuel Huntington in his seminal 1968 book Political Order in Changing Societies. As Huntington pointed out, modernization creates the preconditions for democracy; but if the process of modernization takes place too rapidly, societies end up with a large number of newly educated people whose expectations for a middle-class life cannot be met—significantly increasing the risk of political instability.1

In the first societies to industrialize, the process of modernization was very slow. In Western Europe, for example, it took centuries of gradual progress to raise the portion of the population that knew how to read and write from a small fraction to over half of the total. This made it possible to integrate newly educated citizens into the job market in a gradual manner. (Even then, of course, the process of modernization went hand-in-hand with plenty of political instability.)

In many countries that were rapidly developing after World War II, those same transformations took place over the course of a couple of short decades, with the share of the educated population rising at unprecedented speed. Take South Korea. Over the course of a single generation, literacy rates in the country jumped from 22 percent in 1945 to 88 percent in 1970. The number of university graduates multiplied many-fold. But since Korea’s economy was still heavily based on agriculture and manufacturing, the supply of high-skilled jobs remained small. The country’s law schools, Huntington notes, “produced about eighteen times as many graduates in 1960 as the field could absorb.” Most college graduates could not find a job that was in any way commensurate with their education or their hopes for a better life.

South Korea is an extreme case. But a similar expectations gap has reared its head in many different contexts, from India in the 1970s to Egypt in the 2000s. Again and again, this extreme mismatch really has proven politically destabilizing. As Huntington pithily put the point:

[T]he higher the level of education of the unemployed, alienated, or otherwise dissatisfied person, the more extreme the destabilizing behavior which results. Alienated university graduates prepare revolutions; alienated technical or secondary school graduates plan coups; alienated primary school leavers engage in more frequent but less significant forms of political unrest.

This is the compelling intuition behind Turchin’s talk of “elite overproduction” and a “surplus elite”—one that has, depending on how you count, been known for decades or even centuries. So why the renewed interest in this idea? The terms Turchin has popularized are one part of the reason.2 But the principal reason lies in his claim that the idea of a surplus elite can be applied not just to developing countries like the South Korea of the postwar period but also to some of the richest places on Earth—helping to explain why countries like the United States have been so unstable of late. Is that true though? Does the overproduction of elites stand behind the rise of Donald Trump and the general chaos in which much of the West now finds itself engulfed?

Astrology for Politics Nerds

Trying to make sense of Turchin’s writings makes you feel like you’ve been staring at an astrological chart for too long. His approach—which, in a reference to the muse of history, he dubs Cliodynamics—is full of grandiose pronouncements which are designed to look scientific but actually present the world in such broad generalities that they are simply unfalsifiable. A widely-cited 2013 paper called “Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability,” for example, compares four main logical components, each of which is depicted as having a causal relationship with all three of the others: the state, population, elites, and instability.

What at first glance feels frustratingly opaque turns out, on further inspection, to be absurdly underspecified. Turchin purports to proffer an original explanation for why countries go through cycles of instability. But his theory’s key outcome variable is so vague as to be effectively meaningless. According to the predictions of his model, America’s two great eras of instability span from the 1850s to the 1910s and from the 1970s to the present day. But these two eras are so long and variegated that their blanket classification as eras of instability feels arbitrary. Were the 1980s really more unstable than the 1960s, for example?3

The same problem plagues Turchin’s explanatory variables, the factors he adduces for key outcomes like the degree of political stability in a country. His use of concepts like legitimacy or the prevalence of social optimism is the worst form of pseudo-positivism: an attempt to dress qualitative concepts up in quantitative clothes that is based on data so thin that it verges on pure conjecture.4

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For our purposes, the most important unanswered question is what exactly Turchin means by the overproduction of elites. What makes somebody an aspirant to elite status? And what does it take for someone to attain such elite status? These concepts should in principle be easier to quantify than other explanatory factors like the prevalence of social optimism. And yet Turchin barely answers these questions. To the extent he does, he entangles himself in hopeless contradictions.

At some points, Turchin talks as though the best measure of elite status is simply income: according to his “simulation” of the antebellum South, for example, he claims that, taking income growth as the relevant metric, the number of “elite members” roughly tripled every decade between 1840 and 1870. On this interpretation of the elite, joining its ranks requires elevated material standing. But when focusing on later time periods, Turchin adopts a completely different definition of the elite: he now restricts elite status to those who have placed themselves at the top of a status hierarchy by attaining rare positions of honor or influence like elected office. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out in an appropriately scathing review of Turchin’s latest book, he “is able to detect elite overproduction in so many historical eras because he has a flexible definition of ‘elite.’ Who qualifies as an elite today? The category sometimes includes the top 1 percent of the income distribution, the top 10 percent, or any college-educated professional.”

One way to start scrutinizing Turchin’s theory, then, is to recognize that, by changing what he means by the elite, he effectively equivocates between two rather different hypotheses:

The Broad Elite Hypothesis: Elites are defined by high income or wealth. America is currently experiencing a period of elevated instability because the number of people who aspire to elite status is much larger than the number of people who can achieve these hallmarks of material prosperity.

The Narrow Elite Hypothesis: Elites are defined by their elevated social status, as conferred by inherently rival “positional goods”5 such as elected office. America is currently experiencing a period of elevated instability because the number of people who aspire to elite status is much larger than the number of people who can occupy these kinds of special positions.

Is either of these hypotheses plausible?

College-Educated Americans Are Doing Fine Pretty Damn Well

Let’s start by examining the Broad Elite Hypothesis, which applies a less demanding definition of who qualifies as an aspiring member of the elite. In this mode, Turchin often focuses on all Americans who have gone to college. The population of college-educated Americans now comprises over 100 million people. Among that large number, there will of course be individual outliers, from billionaires to people who are homeless. But how affluent are typical members of this broad class? Have their expectations of material affluence been dashed, like those of so many South Korean college graduates were in the 1950s and 1960s?

To start, let’s remind ourselves that the United States is one of the richest societies in the history of the world, and one that grants unusually large economic privileges to those who have completed a college degree. Median household income in the United States is $80,610. This makes the average American much richer than the average person in Japan, France or even Germany; indeed, residents of the poorest state, West Virginia, now out-earn those of the United Kingdom. Median household income for college-educated Americans is even higher: $117,600 for Americans with a BA (or equivalent), and $172,100 for Americans with a professional degree.

Unlike some other countries that have been able to achieve unprecedented wealth over the course of the last century, the American economy also continues to be extremely dynamic. At present, the unemployment rate in the country stands at 4.1 percent. Among college-educated Americans, it is even lower.

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Since nothing irks journalists and social scientists as much as good news, any wrinkles in this story receive outsized attention. Writing in The New York Times, for example, Peter Coy recently told members of the Class of 2024 that “there aren’t enough college-level jobs out there for all of you.” A year after graduation, he warned them, “fifty-two percent of college grads are underemployed,” working in jobs that don’t require the college degree they earned.

Since around half of working-age Americans now have a college degree of some sort, it is unsurprising that graduating from university is no longer a sure entry ticket into unusual wealth or status. And it is also true that some sectors of the economy that for the past decade created especially cushy jobs for recent graduates from top colleges, like tech and consulting, over-hired during the pandemic and are now being much more selective. But Coy’s pessimism is nevertheless so misleading as to amount to fear-mongering.

Around the world, a depressing number of young people are unemployed. In North African countries like Morocco, the youth unemployment rate for some demographics can reach 50 percent. Even in China, youth unemployment hovers around 20 percent. In the United States, by contrast, around 5 percent of recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 are unemployed.

Both now and in the past, some young people take a while to find their professional path. As a result, a significant portion of very recent college grads is underemployed. But this too is neither new nor permanent. According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans are no more likely to be underemployed now than they were three decades ago—and Americans who have graduated from college continue to have better chances of finding a job that is commensurate with their qualifications than those who did not go to college.

Life isn’t easy. Even among affluent college graduates, many feel squeezed by inflation and student debt, by skyrocketing costs for health and childcare. This is not supposed to be some naive paean to the American Dream. But Turchin is claiming that America is more unstable than it was in previous periods because of the overproduction of elites. And if we define the elite, in broad terms, as anyone who has completed an undergraduate education, there is simply vanishingly little evidence that American college graduates are less likely to have their expectations met now than in the past.

The Broad Elite Hypothesis is flat out wrong.

There Have Always Been Too Many Aspiring Actors and Poets

That leaves the Narrow Elite Hypothesis.

Let’s say that the real source of political instability is not the broad category of Americans who hope for a comfortable life but rather the much narrower category of Americans who aspire to some kind of exceptional social status. These are people who dream of writing the Great American Novel or becoming A-list actors, who aspire to be sports stars or perhaps college professors. Do we have a problem of “elite overproduction” in that sense—and, if so, is that the root of our political instability?

A lot of the reason why some writers and academics have found the idea of a “surplus elite” intuitively appealing is that they are disproportionately likely to know people who fit this description. In Brooklyn alone, thousands of people aspire to make their name as the voice of their generation; but almost by definition, there can only be a few of those (and the declining importance of literary fiction isn’t helping their prospects). Similarly, there are many more young people who aspire to be professors than there are job openings for entry-level academics.

Indeed, the tale of an extremely online history postdoc who was upset that he could not get a tenure-track job inspired one recent defense of the idea of elite overproduction. As fellow Substacker Noah Smith has argued, the historian is the perfect illustration for the thesis that “lots of careers for educated elites—humanities and social science academia, law, journalism, and so on—started becoming a lot scarcer. … This inevitably led to a bunch of frustrated strivers with big expectations and no way to fulfill them. And that mismatch between expectation and opportunity, I hypothesize, fueled some of the unrest of the 2010s.”

It is certainly true that it is much harder to become a history professor now than it was in the past. Until the Great Recession, the number of job ads for tenure-track positions in history used to match reasonably closely the number of newly awarded PhD degrees in history. Since then, the number of jobs has fallen off a cliff; meanwhile, the number of newly awarded degrees continues to be relatively high by historical standards.

Even so, there are three fundamental reasons why I’m not buying the thesis, either as stated by Turchin or as summarized (rather more lucidly) by Smith.

First, virtually all of the people who fail to attain their dream jobs can secure perfectly decent employment in some other line of work. I don’t want to understate how devastating it can be to see your dreams dashed. And I am acutely aware that American universities prey on the unwillingness of many people to give up on their dreams, keeping them around as severely underpaid adjuncts without prospects for a real career. But this just doesn’t make their situation analogous to those law graduates in the South Korea of the 1960s who faced unemployment or had to go work in a factory as unskilled laborers. In today’s America, virtually every aspiring writer or professor could, within five years, earn well above median wage as a nonprofit worker, an ad executive, or an assistant dean for student life. If they “sold out” and went to business school, they might even be in a position to endow a named professorship a few decades hence!6

Second, it is simply not clear that there is something new about any of this. There has always been a surplus of people who wanted to succeed in high-status professions such as the arts or academia. Have you watched La bohème? Or read one of the dozens of counterfactual histories imagining what would have happened if only Adolf Hitler had gotten into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts? In fact, even that seemingly compelling chart about aspiring academics makes the same point: At its beginning, in the 1970s, the disproportion between job ads and newly minted PhDs was about as bad as it is now.7

Finally, there is an odd mismatch between the class of people whose dreams of artistic or academic success has been dashed and the class of people who are at the root of our current political instability. If you look purely at the leaders of Occupy Wall Street or the activists who animated protests in the summer of 2020, the Narrow Elite Hypothesis may look plausible. But for all of the importance of those movements, they have ultimately turned out to be the sideshow. The real political realignment of this moment has been animated by a very different set of people. The people who compose what Turchin would call the new “counter-elite,” from Steve Bannon to Kash Patel, have precious little in common with that history postdoc who is upset that he hasn’t landed a tenure-track job. The same is true most of the Americans who have newly embraced Trump: for the most part, they are working-class voters who are fed up with the smugness of the elite, not aspiring members of the elite who are frustrated that they couldn’t find jobs as lawyers or academics.

A Final Meaning of Surplus Elite

Once Turchin’s theory is clearly spelled out, it becomes clear that its plausibility has, all along, rested on an equivocation between two different hypotheses.

The Broad Elite Hypothesis is right to posit a causal connection between an overproduction of people who aspire to material wealth and political instability (a connection that has long ago been pointed out by the likes of Tocqueville and Huntington). But while this theory may remain relevant for understanding the politics of contemporary India or (perhaps) China, it is highly implausible that this helps to explain why the United States is going through a period of instability right now.

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The Narrow Elite Hypothesis, meanwhile, seizes on a real phenomenon that is very salient if (like me) you know a lot of aspiring actors, writers and academics. But there is simply nothing new about the fact that more people aspire to the most glamorous and prestigious positions in society than can possibly attain them.

Ultimately, all that is left of Turchin’s theory is a couple of catchy neologisms. But that, oddly, may be enough to ensure its survival. In fact, in the wake of the imprudent hiring spree that Silicon Valley companies like Google and professional firms like McKinsey went on during the pandemic, the idea of a “surplus elite” has increasingly come to connote a completely different phenomenon. As The Times of London recently wrote, it now “seems to refer to any white-collar worker who probably wouldn’t be missed were they fired. Or worse, things would actually improve once they, and their useless meetings and memos, were removed.”

On LinkedIn, a self-described tech founder expands on this idea:

Surplus elites are workers who’ve taken advantage of the knowledge economy to climb into positions that pay them far too much for their actual skillsets. They’ve wormed their way into middle management at massive companies that grew so fast they didn’t have time to measure whether these people were producing anything valuable.

There may be something to that notion. But what’s striking about it is that it is basically the opposite of what the concept of a surplus elites was originally supposed to mean. Turchin worried that people whose skills or qualifications would at different times have allowed them to climb into the elite were being left out in the cold, potentially turning them into disgruntled revolutionaries. Today, tech founders in Silicon Valley worry that we have accorded too high a status to people who don’t have any real reason to belong to the elite, stifling innovation and enforcing political conformity.

It in many ways remains puzzling why America, and many other Western countries, are going through a period of acute political instability at a time of relative affluence and prosperity. This makes it tempting to give credence to sweeping pseudo-scientific theories like the one on which Turchin has built his renown. But sadly, his arguments don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. For a real explanation, we’ll have to look elsewhere.

With many thanks to Anders Knospe for the invaluable research assistance he provided for this piece.

And please do support my work—and get all my writing, plus ad-free access to full episodes of the podcast—by becoming a paying subscriber today.

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Many progressives continue to deny that the left’s embrace of identitarianism helped Donald Trump win the election. That is a key reason why, as I argued last week, it is unlikely that Democrats will let go of wokeness anytime soon.

But even among those who do accept the damage that identitarian rhetoric and policies have done to the Democratic brand, a fierce debate has broken out. Moderates and radicals are pointing fingers, with each claiming that the other is the real reason why the party has proven so susceptible to these ideas.

One side claims that it is radicals like the members of the Squad who have introduced wokeness to the Democratic Party. Like James Carville, they locate the origins of the problem in the “faculty lounge politics” of radical college professors and extreme activists.

Others retort that it is “corporate Democrats” like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris who have appropriated wokeness for their own purposes. Aaron Regunberg, for example, has insisted that “Dumbass forms of identity politics didn’t come from the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party.” Tyler Austin Harper struck the same chord: “Woke shit [that] centrists now say they hate,” he claims, “was first amplified by centrists attempting to paint Bernie as racially insensitive and insufficiently intersectional.”

It seems to me that a humble conceptual tool can help to shed some light on this debate. Social scientists use the 2x2, which shows how a difference among two independent dimensions creates four distinct quadrants, so often that their fondness for it has become a running joke. But social scientists resort to 2x2s so often because they really can be clarifying. And what “The Wokeness 2x2” reveals is that there are four distinct camps within the left.

Left-wing politicians need to make two different choices: They either adopt identitarian attitudes on cultural issues which make how we treat people explicitly depend on the group into which they were born or stick to a more universalist (and often more class-conscious) framework for how to overcome discrimination and historical injustice. Separately, they either embrace the benefits of the market economy, arguing for meliorist policies like an expanded welfare state, or they oppose capitalism in a more fundamental way, perhaps going so far as to embrace the label of being a “socialist.” That results in four conceptual possibilities.

No living-and-breathing politician fits into a neat box, so labels for each of these camps are inescapably going to be somewhat simplistic. And yet, it seems to me that all four of these quadrants describe major political figures with real influence in the Democratic coalition:

• Old-fashioned moderates: These are politicians that are both politically and culturally moderate. Bill Clinton is the obvious example. Others who arguably fit the bill include Seth Moulton or Jon Tester or (depending on how you interpret his presidency) Barack Obama.

• Economic radicals: These are economic populists who often feud with moderate Democrats on economic questions but tend to prioritize questions of class over those of race. Bernie Sanders is an obvious example (at least if you focus on his 2016 campaign and discount his subsequent embrace of more identitarian aides and talking points). Though they are more economically moderate than Sanders, you could add politicians with a populist touch like Sherrod Brown and John Fetterman to the list.

• Woke moderates: These are establishment politicians who are close to the “corporate wing” of the Democratic Party but frequently use identity-based appeals or vocabulary to further their agenda. Kamala Harris is an obvious example. But you might add others like Gavin Newsome or Catherine Cortez Masto to the mix.

• Woke radicals: These are politicians who are radical on both the cultural and the economic dimensions. AOC remains the obvious example (though she has recently shown signs of moderating). Other members of the Squad, like Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar, also fit the bill.

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This shows that the split about wokeness transcends the somewhat simplistic divide between moderates and radicals. There is resistance to wokeness both among moderates like Bill Clinton and among radicals like Bernie Sanders. Conversely, there are proponents of wokeness both among moderates like Kamala Harris and among radicals like AOC.

The fact that some moderate as well as some radical Democrats have embraced wokeness helps to clarify the terms of the debate. But it does not answer the substantive question. So… please help me settle the debate.

Who is more to blame for the rise of wokeness in the Democratic Party? Was it the woke radicals who succeeded in turning these fringe ideas mainstream? Was it the cynical embrace of these ideas by woke moderates that made them so dominant? Or do both wings of the party share equal responsibility?

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If you are already a paying subscriber to this Substack or Persuasion, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Cass, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

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Set Up Podcast

Cass Sunstein is an American legal scholar and the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University. Sunstein was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Barack Obama, and is considered to be the most widely cited legal scholar in the United States. Sunstein is the author, with Richard Thaler, of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, The World According to Star Wars, and Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide.

In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Cass Sunstein discuss his “law of group polarization” and how it contributes to today’s factionalism; how echo chambers work (and why social media makes them worse); and whether meeting the challenge of misinformation requires new government regulations.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You're an incredibly prolific author who's influenced me in many ways, but your latest book is on a subject that I'm also very interested in, which is free speech and particularly the role that free speech should play on campus.

This is obviously a timely issue. What do you think that smart people are getting wrong about that subject right now?

Cass Sunstein: Well, I think that one mistake is that people think that universities are covered by the same principles, regardless of whether they're public or private. And as a legal matter, public universities are governed by the First Amendment and private universities just aren't. There's also a lot of talk about incitement without a lot of clarity about what that particularly entails. So if I say something like, “If you don't buy my book there's going to be a revolution,” that's kind of hopelessly useless talk on the part of an author and that would not be regulable as incitement.

Mounk: Let's go through this. Clearly, public universities in the United States are public institutions and therefore bound by the First Amendment. So there's very tight limits on what they can do to regulate the speech of members of the university. Private universities in principle are not bound by the First Amendment. They can make quite restrictive rules on speech and some of them, such as religious institutions, regularly do so. Nevertheless, many have very far-reaching academic freedom because they think that this is the core purpose of their institution.

Do you think that's a good or a bad idea? Even if private institutions aren't bound by the First Amendment, should they effectively bind themselves by some equivalent to the First Amendment through the kind of internal rules they adopt?

Sunstein: That's a really great idea. So let's say Harvard or MIT or Boston University says “we're going to follow the First Amendment,” that's terrific. And that's a really good start, and it might be a really good end. I applaud those universities that have said they will voluntarily follow First Amendment principles.

I’ve spent a lot of time at the University of Chicago, which is full of economically oriented people, including economists. And I learned that when you're really stuck, there are two good things to think about: the cost of decisions and the cost of errors. When you're stuck, you want a decision that doesn't impose a nightmare on the human mind, meaning you need to reduce the cost of decisions. So if you impose high decisional burdens on yourself or an institution, that's typically not a good thing to do. It can involve paralysis, can involve exhaustion, it can involve a thousand and one terrible things. If you say we're going to follow the First Amendment, the cost of decisions goes way down. You have a framework, and it's often just an assortment of rules, and where it's not rules, it's profoundly orienting, and it prevents what Oscar Wilde said about socialism: The problem with socialism is that it would take too many evenings. And whether or not that's true of socialism, building a system of, let's say, academic freedom or appropriate principles of freedom of speech from the ground up is—that's a lot of evenings there. The second point is that the First Amendment is an admirably well-suited set of principles for at least most universities. So it's not only reducing the burden of decisions, it's reducing the number and size of mistakes. So if you adopt the First Amendment, you have some principles that are super attractive for at least the vast majority of educational institutions on reflection. You can regulate fraud. You can regulate criminal conspiracy and criminal solicitation. You can regulate direct threats. All of these are regulable under the First Amendment. But if you're discriminating on the basis of viewpoint, saying people can't speak because they have one view on, let's say, what's happening in the Middle East, that's not allowed. And that's really good for educational institutions not to discriminate against people because of their viewpoint. So costs of decisions go down. The costs of errors also go down. To build a framework that's well suited to your private university that is better than the First Amendment: good luck with that.

Now, to your point, there are reasonable arguments that go the other way, and we can build up from that by thinking about, say, the Naval Academy or West Point, which are training soldiers. Should they follow the First Amendment? The answer to that is no. Or take Notre Dame or Brandeis: institutions with a religious identity might think, well, we have a particular mission here and it's associated with our heritage. And that would justify some departures from the First Amendment, but not a lot of them. If you're a private university that's not military or religiously affiliated in some kind of culturally central way, there are some cases that will either pose the puzzle whether universities should be allowed under the First Amendment to depart from what governments can do. Sometimes the answer to that is definitely yes. But also, as they say, that way lies madness. If you press those questions too hard, you start having decisional burdens which will overwhelm the system and you start leading to conclusions that are errors, meaning you're going to be regulating speech that you really ought not to, or you're going to be confusing yourself about whether to regulate speech you really ought to regulate.

Mounk: People sometimes get wrong what the First Amendment entails for the kind of restrictions on conduct you can have on campus, whether that relates to incitement or other kinds of behaviors. In one case at the law school of Berkeley University, which involves actors who presumably should know a little bit about the law, students argued that when the university told them they can't disrupt a lecture and stop it from going ahead, that in itself constituted a restriction of their freedom of speech, their freedom to protest this lecture. So help us clear up some of these confusions.

At what point could the administration say that intimidation or incitement is crossing a legal boundary, and that, despite their belief in a very far-reaching conception of the First Amendment, they are entitled to act?

Sunstein: Let's take three initial cases. Suppose someone drives a car into a building saying that this is their way of protesting climate change: “the use of automobiles is associated with destruction, and what we're showing you is what climate change is doing because of the use of gas-powered cars.” The prohibition on driving cars into a building isn't targeting speech except incidentally. It's called an incidental restriction on free speech, charmingly, and that's not protected by the First Amendment. So let's take incidental restrictions as a category of restrictions that are typically upheld—now, there has to be a reason for them. If it's kind of gratuitous, then it wouldn't be upheld, but now you're protecting a building from destruction. Okay, suppose it said that you can't trespass on certain property, that is, people can't come here and build tents. Let's say it's an anti-trespass law or it's maintaining open spaces—that's plausibly best characterized as a content-neutral restriction on speech. That's almost certainly OK, because the protection is designed to safeguard an interest that's legitimate. People can go here to and fro. And also the restriction on speech is maintaining lots of channels by which people can let their views be known. And content-neutral restrictions, when they're upheld, always do that.

Now let's suppose someone comes to campus and says that Donald Trump was the greatest president ever, or Joe Biden has been the greatest president ever, and people shout them down on various grounds. The prohibition on shouting down, if it exists, is a content-neutral restriction, and it has legitimate goals, which is to allow speakers to speak. And so the First Amendment doesn't stand in the way of that content-neutral restriction.

Now let's talk about incitements. Suppose someone says there's a book about free speech on campus, and if you don't get that book, there's really going to be hell to pay because we're going to take over a building. The Supreme Court has said that the category of incitement for First Amendment purposes includes speech that's directed to incite and likely to incite imminent lawless action. Now, that's a mouthful, but it means there has to be an intention to incite imminent lawless action and it has to be likely to incite imminent lawless action. So if you say things like “We take over buildings now,” that's a candidate for being regulable, but you have to show it's likely to incite imminent lawless action.

Now, if you make people feel scared or humiliated, that's not a basis for regulation. If you make people feel unsafe, that's not a basis for regulation. So if someone says something like “Slavery was great” or “Hitler was right on everything,” that's not regulable. If it's part of something that's directed to incite and likely to incite lawless action then it would be, but by itself it doesn't seem like that.

Mounk: I want to pivot a little bit, but I think actually the themes I'm about to touch on connect back to free speech in an interesting way. I'm going to pose a puzzle to the audience and to you, Cass, though I suspect you know the answer.

Imagine that you have a group deliberating on what kind of damages a company should have to pay for a faulty product that resulted in harm to a child. And let's say that everybody in this group has agreed that the company should pay substantial damages before they deliberate as a group. They come up with sums between $500,000 and a million dollars.

What kind of sum are they likely to settle upon after they deliberate together?

Sunstein: Well, I would have predicted the group would end up around the median or average of group members, but the data actually shows that the group tends to go to extremes and may well end up at the most extreme point of any individual in the group and will be more extreme than the median or average member. So deliberating juries awarding punishment dollars tend to be more extreme, just meaning a higher number, than the median member before they started to talk.

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Mounk: Yeah, so it might even be more than any individual wanted at the beginning. You dubbed this the law of group polarization. And why is it such an important insight about the ways that groups behave?

Sunstein: This is one of my favorite areas at the intersection of political life, democracy, and law. And it's connected with the rise of authoritarianism and extremism of multiple kinds. So group polarization means groups typically, not always, but typically end up at a more extreme point than their pre-deliberation tendencies. If you have a group of people who tend to think it's important to have guns, then after they talk to each other they'll likely conclude that it's really, really important to have guns. If you have a group of people who think that Hitler seems pretty good and we should probably elect him in Germany in the 1930s, then after they talk to each other they'll be, on average, super enthusiastic for Hitler. So the noteworthy thing is that groups typically end up going to extremes. They become more unified, more confident, and they go whoosh. And this is observed in a very large number of experiments. It's observed in the real world. And it happens all over the world.

Mounk: Now, I think that's an interesting way connected to another term that I believe you coined or at least you helped to popularize, which is that of echo chambers. On social media and the age of the internet, we have a lot of people assembling who are like-minded. And this can be broadly along partisan lines. It can also be about specific issues: If you were a vegan before and it was part of your identity, but in most of your social life you aren't around many vegans, that has a moderating influence on your views. And if, suddenly, you're in some kind of online activism board where you're just talking to other vegans, you're not only in an echo chamber, but because of the law of group polarization, you're then likely to have an ever stronger and less compromising commitment to veganism.

Do you think that the combination of these two ideas, the law of group polarization and the rise of echo chambers in our online world, helps to explain some of the rancour, some of the anger, some of partisan polarization and the dysfunction of our politics today?

Sunstein: So I was lucky enough to work in the White House for four years and at some of the, let's say, least productive meetings in the White House, you have a group of people where the average person would think, “Let's do this,” and as they spoke with one another, they would become extremely firmly committed to that and they'd become more extreme. Now, that would usually be fixed, but in any White House that's a risk. So now let's talk about politics. If you're a group of people who tend to think, let's say, that one presidential candidate is good, and the other is not so good (let's bracket the question of whether they're right), as they talk to each other, they'll hear lots of arguments in favor of the goodness of the one they prefer, and not many in the other direction. And as they talk to each other, they will become more extreme, not because there's anything weird about them, but because they're hearing arguments in support of the conclusion to which they're drawn. And that's how echo chambers work. So I like dogs very much. If I'm talking to people like me, then by the end we're going to like dogs extremely much, and if we don't like cats that much (we wish them well, but we don't like them that much), it is likely that the dog enthusiasm will skyrocket and the cat enthusiasm, let's say, will go down the tubes. And then pretty soon we have a very polarized community.

Mounk: I want to connect this back to the concern of free speech because clearly one of the things that has happened over the last years is that a bunch of people have said the public sphere really isn't doing its job. And it allows very extreme views to fester. It allows views that may just be fundamentally wrong to fester. It might allow for the spread of conspiracy theories. And that has fundamentally transformed the kind of political and social dynamic we're in. And so therefore, all of this requires us to either, putting it politely, completely reconceptualize what the First Amendment means or, to put it more bluntly, to adopt restrictions on free speech that are much more common in democracies outside of the United States.

You clearly have provided many of the analytical tools for understanding this moment, and yet I take it that you don't draw that conclusion. Make the case against that. How is it that we can sustain a healthy polity despite those challenges, and what is a better response to these problems than a curtailment of the First Amendment?

Sunstein: So this is fantastically on the money, so to speak. And it's clearly the case that the argument that the system of free speech will lead, through the marketplace of ideas, to the truth is under a lot of empirical pressure. So what do we do about that?

Okay, let's adopt three categories of response. One is to do nothing, on the ground that the cure is worse than the disease. That’s going to be just too dangerous a thing. So as terrible as things are now, any effort to solve it would make things worse. And we could spell out why that might be a plausible view. I actually don't share that view.

Let's say a second position is we need the authorities to take hold of the situation: We're a democracy after all, and democratic restrictions on a speech market which has gotten out of control is actually better than the out of control situation we're already observing—I think that is not correct, though to spell it out would take a lot of detail. Let me, in favor of rejecting the radical approach, suggest a form of free speech incrementalism, speaking now as a person who's not wedded to existing categories but is willing to rethink them. And let's just have two examples of falsehoods. Libel is broadly protected by the First Amendment—I don't think that's the right answer for now. So if someone says, negligently, something that is libelous of another person (it could be a political figure, an actor, or your neighbor), I say the idea that the First Amendment protects that isn't clearly right—to put it more bluntly, it’s wrong. And the spiraling damage awards do chill speech excessively. So if someone's asked to pay $5 million because of a libel, then we’re going to have too much self-silencing. But if someone has to pay a dollar and retract, that's okay, I think. So to rethink libel law is a really good idea.

Deep fakes—and take this as a metaphor for misinformation as well as a thing—are posing new threats to the system of free expression. And to say you label your deepfake as such, that may be legitimate, and it might be not enough. So to require certain kinds of deep fakes to be taken down might be a really good idea. I think for false statements of fact in general, we need a project of rethinking. Now there's a difference between a harmless false statement of fact, like “Tom Brady isn't the greatest quarterback of all time.” That's a false statement of fact. Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time, but that's not a particularly harmful false statement. If you say that the current political leader is stupid, and let's say it's just not true. The person isn't by any measure stupid, but we need a lot of space for that. But if there's something that is knowingly false and harmful, like “cigarettes cause longevity” or “the current political leader is a cocaine addict.” Now there's a discussion to be had about whether current understandings of the First Amendment are up to the task. And I think the basic answer is no. So we need to rethink them, not to censor more, but maybe to revive long-standing understandings of the right balance to be struck, which maybe have information for us for confronting new problems.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Cass discuss the intricacies of free speech law and restrictions on free speech, as it regards military academies, religious colleges, and other types of institutions. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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This year, I am grateful for friends and family, for my team at Persuasion and the small joys that make life worth living, and of course for the peace and prosperity with which many of us are blessed even as so many others around the world—in our own time, and throughout history—have suffered war or poverty.

One more very special giving of thanks is due: to all of you. Over 60,000 subscribers now choose to get my essays and podcasts directly into their inbox. Over the last month alone, over 700,000 people have read my articles on this platform. Being able to share my thoughts and observations with you is an honor. It makes writing, in any case one of my favorite things on Earth, all the more fun and meaningful.

It has now been about four months since I launched this Substack. Given its success, I hope to devote most of my creative energy to it for the foreseeable future. I’m able to do that thanks to your financial support. So if you enjoy what I do but are not yet a paying subscriber, please become one today. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m offering 25% off for the first year. (And if you genuinely can’t afford to pay, please just respond to this email, and I’ll be happy to send you a gift subscription.)

Thanksgiving offer!

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When I had only lived in the United States for a couple of months, I met a new acquaintance for coffee. We had a nice conversation about literature and grad school, about New York City and smoked fish. As I was taking my leave, she off-handedly asked me what my plans were for Thanksgiving.

“Oh,” I said, not quite sure what to say. “I don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving.”

“What do you mean, you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving?” she asked, barely trying to hide her incredulity.

“I’ve never been in the States for the holiday before,” I offered, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “I… haven’t really made any plans.”

“Oh, that’s simple, then,” she declared. “You can’t be on your own for Thanksgiving!”

A week later, I was at her parent’s house in upstate New York, sitting between her grandfather and a friend of her brother’s who wasn’t able to make it home for the holidays. In all, about twenty five people had gathered, including members of the nuclear family, some more distant relatives, and about a dozen friends.

I had a wonderful time. The company was excellent. The drinks were plentiful. The food was delicious—even though, to this day, I remain glad that I only need to eat turkey once a year.

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There is something to the rhythm of a Thanksgiving dinner that creates and fosters connection. The trickle of people arriving throughout the late morning. The anticipation for the meal as the smell of the roast makes a house feel homely. The hours spent talking to whoever happens to sit next to you at the dinner table. And finally, perhaps the most important part, the low-pressure sociability mediated by food coma and a sports game playing on the TV.

That day was the start of my conversion. Ignorant about the nature or the purpose of the holiday when I first arrived on American shores, I have since embraced Thanksgiving as my favorite holiday. And as I reflected on what it is about Thanksgiving that is so special to me over the course of the years, I gradually came to recognize that I see it as an embodiment of a distinctly American sense of community: one that cherishes the strong ties we didn’t choose while embracing the ones, strong or weak, that we do.

Christmas tends to be an exclusive affair. Most Americans celebrate it within the nuclear family. While you might invite a child’s significant other or a lonely great-aunt to join the family fold, its invitees are mostly restricted to the people depicted on the main branch of one family tree.

New Year’s Eve tends to be a promiscuous affair (metaphorically, and sometimes literally). Many Americans spend it with friends and acquaintances, celebrating at a big house party or giant outdoor event, in New York’s Times Square or on the Strip in Las Vegas.

There is beauty in each of these traditions. It is important to have a few days a year that are focused on our primary family bonds. And how can anyone complain about an excuse to go to a good party? Even so, the spirit of Thanksgiving sets it apart in a way that gives the holiday a charm all its own.

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Thanksgiving is a day focused on family. Part of what most people give thanks for every November is the close bonds they share with the people they have gathered around one table. And yet it isn’t meant to be an exclusive affair. My friend’s conviction that no one should be on their own for Thanksgiving is a small window into a wider mindset. Thanksgiving, from its mythical origins to its contemporary practices, is rooted in the idea of opening your heart and your home to anyone in need of hospitality, no matter how different they may seem.

That, to me, is deeply American—and not only on the fourth Thursday in November. There are few countries in the world in which you can go from being a distant acquaintance to becoming a genuine member of the community as quickly as in the United States. At our best, we are a country of strong bonds—one that is ever willing to build on those bonds to welcome those who have not yet had an opportunity on these shores to form meaningful ties of their own.

Over the next four years, there will be a lot of debate about what it means to be an American. Our nation once again feels perilously divided. Some Americans think of “the other side” as hateful and intolerant. Other Americans think of “the other side” as unpatriotic and traitorous. In the abstract realms of culture and politics, millions are quick to condemn and vilify half the country.

Yet the great majority of us are about to break bread with, or even to invite into our own homes, representatives of that other America. And however grating we might at times find the opinions of Uncle Bill or Niece Lilly, for the most part we recognize that they are good people we are proud to call our own.

This Thanksgiving, many of us may be tempted to air our grievances. But the fictional holiday of Festivus, with its own mythical roots in that other great American tradition, Seinfeld, is still about a month away. So let us instead focus on the many things for which Americans have reason to be grateful: Our personal blessings and our family ties. Our freedoms and our prosperity. And, perhaps more than any of these, the joy we can take in breaking bread with our neighbors and loved ones—whether we have known them for five days or five decades, and whether we see eye-to-eye on politics and religion or have profoundly different visions of what it means to pursue happiness.

To access the full episode, become a paying subscriber today! And please send us questions for future installments at goodfightpod@gmail.com.

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Set Up Podcast

The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Welcome to the second monthly installment of the mailbag in which you ask questions that I try to answer as best I can. If you have questions to ask me for next month's mailbag, please send us an email at goodfightpod@gmail.com. 

We have a bunch of questions about interesting general intellectual topics and a bunch of questions, understandably, about the incoming Donald Trump administration. 

Sophie asks, what should journalists be doing now that Trump has been reelected? How are you planning to cover the next four years? 

Yascha: Boy, do I have thoughts about this question. The first thing that I want to say, and some of you will have seen me write about this on my Substack, is that journalists need to return to their traditional role conception. In an understandable way, journalists, around 2016, started to think that it was their job to save democracy, because the threat to democracy is real. But that has led them down the garden path in a number of important respects. The first is that they vastly overestimated the extent to which they could influence their audience. Many reporters started to think that their job in each news article was to frame what they were covering in such a way as to maximize the chances that democracy will survive, which in their mind meant maximizing the chances that the readers would never vote for Donald Trump. But readers are much more intelligent than journalists tend to assume. And they do not like being preached to. So readers either did the opposite of what those reporters wanted them to do, or they simply switched the channel, changed the online sources they were consuming, and canceled their subscriptions. It is one of the reasons why there's an ongoing decline in trust in the media. 

The other thing that happened is that many journalists delayed the debates that Democrats needed to have. Two obvious examples are the fact that various European diplomats have told me in the last weeks that it was well-known in European capitals that Joe Biden was suffering from significant mental decline years ago, because he would show up to meetings not knowing where he was, because he would repeat himself in the same meeting two or three times until he was ushered away by some of his staff. If the mainstream media had reckoned with this fact in a much more explicit way, we could have had a genuine primary in the spring of 2024. We could have ended up with either Kamala being a stronger candidate by having to compete in that primary or an alternative candidate that would have been stronger than her. And secondly, once she was elevated to the nomination without a real primary, there was this whole moment when the media was pretending there was an organic upsurge of enthusiasm like for Obama in 2008 and that she was on track to win the election. That's one of the things that led Democrats to adopt a low-risk or no-risk strategy—for example, having her decline to appear on podcasts like Joe Rogan's. In both of these respects, the very framing that was meant to help Democrats ended up harming them. Journalists should return to a much older role conception of reporting the news straight, being skeptical of everybody, and asking them pesky questions, even if they seem to be on “their side.” 

More broadly though, I've been reflecting in my capacity as the editor of Persuasion about how we collectively should be covering the incoming Trump administration. And in conversation with my team, we came up with three primary principles of what we're going to be doing. The first principle is that we're going to be covering the Trump administration in the way that journalists should with a basically critical mindset that is open to positive surprises. We will try to focus on the really important things the administration is doing, rather than getting drawn into the outrage over the latest stupid tweet that Donald Trump is sure to send. We will evaluate the extent to which the actions of the Trump administration undermine the key democratic rules and norms about which I deeply care, and undermine the values of a liberal tradition that Persuasion was founded to fight for. When they are damaging to those values, we will say so very, very clearly. When, as in the case of free speech, the administration might in certain respects do something that is positive for those values, we will also hold ourselves to saying that clearly. Secondly, it is really evident at this point that we desperately need to renew the liberal tradition; that the way in which liberal principles have been applied to society and the way in which they often have been betrayed in mainstream institutions has lost the majority of the American population; that if we want liberal values to continue to be the lodestar of American politics in the 21st century, we need to reinvent this tradition for a different political era. We have been doing a lot of that work at Persuasion over the last years, and we will double down on that work in years to come. And finally, it is unseemly in these political circumstances to say, “I told you so,” but we did tell you so. We did, for example, warn about the heavy electoral cost that various forms of left-identitarianism would have on the Democratic Party. We did push back against that ideology on both strategic and on principled grounds. And we will continue to do that work in the coming years with as clear and forthright a voice as everything else we try to do. 

Ruben asks: I am trying to make sense of how to think about the nomination of R.F.K. Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He seems to hold many positions with which I disagree and that appear irresponsible. At the same time, I have lost a lot of trust in public health authorities over the last years and I'm intrigued to see that many of my liberal and even progressive friends actually embrace the positions that RFK holds. How should we think about whether or not RFK is going to be dangerous as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Yascha: This is an excellent question and I certainly echo the sentiment that public health authorities have given us good reason to lose faith in them, and to be more critical about some of the things that pass for conventional wisdom in that profession over the last years. And yet, I'm worried about RFK's nomination, and for reasons that are a little bit different from what most people might think. 

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If you are already a paying subscriber to this Substack or Persuasion, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Melissa, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! …

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There are many reasons Democrats lost. They suffered from an unpopular incumbent, were punished for the high inflation of the last years, and fielded an uninspiring candidate who never managed to put forward a clear governing agenda. But the most fundamental reason why so many voting groups that had long been supposed to buoy blue fortunes have turned red—and the one that is most likely to dog Democrats’ chances in upcoming electoral cycles, when they no longer bear the burden of incumbency—lies in the fact that they are seen as being far outside the cultural mainstream.

Democrats now speak with the inflections and the vocabulary of the coastal, college-educated upper crust of the American meritocracy. This is rapidly alienating a multiracial coalition consisting of everyone for whom there is no space in that upper crust—plus those who resent the constant self-monitoring and self-censorship that is required to remain a member of it.

To overcome the damage to their increasingly toxic brand, Democrats need to change how they talk and what they say. This includes jettisoning some of the most unpopular elements of the left’s identitarian thinking, popularly known as “woke,” that they took on over the past decade—the emphasis on equity and DEI, the vocabulary of BIPOC and Latinx. But it goes much further than that. Democrats need to convince Americans that they are willing to speak the truth even when that truth shocks the activist groups that make up a big part of their base; that they sympathize with ordinary citizens who are fed up with crime and chaos rather than with the petty criminals who disturb public order; and that they have figured out how to stand up for inclusion without violating common sense.

Will the American left be able to effect such a profound self-transformation?

It is tempting to believe the left is finally turning away from wokeness. Back in September, for example, The Economist reported a modest decline in the frequency with which terms like “intersectionality” and “microaggression” were mentioned in mainstream media or scholarly articles. The magazine duly concluded that we had passed “peak woke.”

Now, the open disavowal of some identitarian positions to which Democrats seemed deeply committed until a couple of weeks ago has seemed to validate that prediction. Since Trump’s victory, elected officials like Gilberto Hinojosa, the outgoing chair of the Texas Democratic Party, and Rep. Seth Moulton, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts, have sensibly urged Democrats to ditch their most unpopular positions on cultural questions. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton acknowledged last week. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Many Democrats I have spoken to in the last few days are hopeful that the vibe shift on the left will prove real. According to New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.” Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville seems to share the same opinion. Democrats, he told Dowd, are fleeing identitarian positions “like the devil runs away from holy water.” 

But I am skeptical that this is how things will ultimately turn out.

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Ivan Krastev is a political scientist, the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Krastev is the author of After Europe and, with Stephen Holmes, of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss the advent of the Trump era in American politics; why liberals need to eschew their nostalgia for an older form of politics that now appears irretrievably lost; and how America's retreat will transform European culture.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We're starting to see some of the appointments that Trump is making on his foreign policy team. What do you expect the impact of Trump's election to be on the world?

Ivan Krastev: In my view, it's a turning point. This is not an election which simply surprised somebody. This is not simply that a new president is coming. First of all, you have somebody who comes and he comes with quite a clear mandate and he basically controls Congress, controls the Senate and has won the popular vote, which is quite important on the symbolic side. So this is one of the turning point elections, like with Roosevelt, with Reagan. Even after Trump, a certain foreign policy consensus on certain areas is going to survive. I have in mind both migration and industrial policy; already, you see this consensus after Trump and with Biden’s competition with China, but also the totally different way America sees itself in the world. And I don't believe this is going to be an isolationist president. None of the persons that he's putting in charge, not Marco Rubio, not others—they are everything else but liberal internationalists. They are people who basically believe in American power being used very selectively. And, in a certain way, their major position is that they care only about Americans and American interests and that others should care about themselves.

And this is not just Trump from today, this is Trump from 2016, also—he basically sees America as the hostage of the American-led world. He sees his foreign policy as the America liberation movement, liberating America from certain types of commitments, from certain types of ideological cliches and so on. This is the radical difference in the way he sees the world. It's not that America does not want to dominate, but he claims that in the period when we have been claiming that we dominated, in fact we have been hostage to our allies even more than to our enemies.

Mounk: So what does that look like? Let's say that you're right that this really becomes the new paradigm and that people elaborate on that in the next years. What does that look like? And I'm thinking in particular about the fact that there's an interesting structural constraint here. I mean, there's always been some tension in Transatlantic relations, and part of it was always that the United States had an outsized role, that it was just much bigger, more powerful, more militarily potent than any single other country within the Western Alliance. But structurally, this has actually shifted more and more because the United States is now much richer compared to Europe than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. America is continuing to have demographic growth while most of the European Union is seeing demographic decline.

America’s domination of this alliance for these structural reasons is just deepening and increasing. And that, of course, both leads Europeans to feel even more like they're a kind of vassal to the United States, particularly with a president now re-elected who is very unpopular in Europe. But I think it also helps to explain why Americans are saying, well, look, we're the ones who carry all the weight in this relationship. Because even if all of you spend the same amount of money on the military in GDP terms as we do, we would still have to provide 50%. And so if you're trying to sustain American dominance, but you want to stop being hostage to America's allies and the structural realities, what does that look like? How do you square that circle?

Krastev: I believe that he has very strong instincts that many things are changing. By the way, the first changes are just demographic. In the 1950s, when the classical idea of NATO was born, America was very much composed either of people who came from Europe or people who had been to Europe recently because of World War II. In a certain way, this was not simply a kind of an abstract strategic interest. Imagine New York from the late 1940s, early 1950s: you have the exiles from Nazi Germany, Europeans; you have European or East European exiles from communism; you have the American liberals. And this is where, for example, all this Cold War liberalism had been cooked up. And this was the ideology that was keeping the alliance together. 

Now, most of the people in the Trump cabinet when it comes to foreign policy are coming from Florida, they're coming from Miami, and this is not accidental because you have a totally new worldview based, first, on the new role of the Latino voters in American elections. But secondly, in Miami, you're going to see basically all the refugees from progressive governments. When you're losing elections in Latin America, be it Bolsonaro or somebody else, you don't go to New York, you go to Miami. And this type of American also sees Europe differently because, during the Cold War, Europe was the central stage and now the central stage is Asia. So in a strategic point of view, Europe is neither so important culturally for the United States, nor strategically to the United States. So from this point of view, Trump has a point, but then Europe has a choice to make. Is Europe, if we're going to increase our military budgets, going to spend all these budgets on buying American weapons? Or is Europe going to be interested in trying to create its own defense industry? And for the moment, of course, Europe is very shattered by what is happening.

Mounk: Your last major book is The Light That Failed, which is a brilliant reckoning, as the subtitle says, with why the promise of liberalism hasn't fully been realized, particularly in Central Europe, and why countries that looked like they were embracing liberalism after the fall of communism have recently turned away.

If you were to write a new edition of that book that is purely based on the United States, one of the ways to interpret Donald Trump's victory might be the idea that some of the basic appeal of liberal norms and values have failed. And perhaps there's a way of saying that actually a lot of the establishment on the left gave up on some of the core liberal norms and that part of the appeal of Trump was, at least on certain points, his promise, whether or not we want to believe it, that he would try and restore those liberal norms. 

How do you think Trump's victory reflects on the standing of liberalism within the United States?

Krastev: Listen, there were three important things about, in my view, the end of the Cold War, which is still kind of under-discussed after all these years of discussion. One is that there were these major assumptions in 1989 that the world is going to change, but the West is going to remain the same. And suddenly in 1989, one of the things that happened is that time was translated into space: during the Cold War, the communists had their own version of the future; and there was a liberal version. And then came 1989, and the communists ideologically disarmed themselves. But what happened is suddenly movement in space became movement in time: As a Bulgarian going to Germany, I was not simply moving to another place, I was moving to my future. The future of the non-Western world was the West, while the West basically was going to follow its development, which is not going to be very different from what it is at the same time. In a certain way, the first thing that Trump really got right was telling the Americans the end of the Cold War transformed us no less than the East. And in a certain way, you believe that you are a victor, but are you really a victor? Is China not the biggest victor of the opening? And this is the moment where, in my view, every major political regime goes into fundamental crisis, not when the losers revolt, but when the winner starts to feel themselves as losers.

This is what Trump told the Americans. The second interesting story in my view is, by the way, now when we revisit 1989, It's paradoxical to see how much richer the year was. We remember only the fall of the Berlin Wall. But in 1989, other ideologies also believed that something very important happened. Talk to the Islamists. And they're going to tell you that what happened in Kabul in 1989 was the first time when political Islam defeated the superpower, when the Soviets basically were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan. And by the way, in 2019, the independent Levada Center was doing an opinion poll in Russia. And there was a question, what is the most important event that happened in 1989? And you have all the usuals—Polish elections, Tiananmen, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the majority of the Russians said the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan. And then you have Tiananmen, which, when you perceive it from the mid-1990s, was the failure of democratization in China. But it was a temporary failure. Now the Chinese are celebrating it as showing the resilience and the strength of the communist system versus the West and particularly in decoupling capitalism from democracy. And by the way, 1989 was also the year in which Elon Musk left South Africa, and the year in which Milosevic made his most important political speech in Kosovo creating a new standard of post-Cold War nationalism.

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Mounk: It sounds like you're pitching me on a book that you should write called “1989.”

Help me understand what lasting changes Trump might bring to the United States and to the role that liberal worldview plays in the United States. Beyond the issue of immigration, how different will America look 10 or 20 years from now? You're saying, and I had the same instinct and wrote the same thing on the night of the election, that this election really is the beginning of the Trump era. But when you look at past eras, when you look at Reagan, look at FDR, you look at Theodore Roosevelt, they changed some things, and many things remained the same. What are the things that are going to change? What are the things that are going to remain the same?

Krastev: For Europeans these days, understanding America is more difficult than it was 30 years ago. They have gone in slightly different directions demographically and politically. Nevertheless, there are many commonalities. What we know from places like Poland or Hungary is that it is one thing for populist leaders to be elected, but it is totally different for the populist leaders to be elected for a second time after being in opposition. Kaczynski, who came to power in 2015, is very different from the Kaczynski of 2004. And by the way, Tusk, who defeated Kaczynski in 2007, was very different from the Tusk who defeated Kaczynski in 2024. One thing that you cannot do anymore is to basically fight Trump by claiming that you're the party of normalcy. Normality doesn't matter anymore because a new normality is emerging. And in my view, this was quite interesting to see to what extent some magic words like fascism and so on didn't work at the end of this campaign.

And by the way, the people claimed that they believe that democracy is under threat in Pennsylvania—most of them voted for Trump and not against him. 

Mounk: I saw that poll as well. It was very striking. Just to make one obvious link to what you were saying earlier. You were saying that these elections should make us reinterpret 1989. In a much more straightforward and obvious way, this election should make us reinterpret 2016. It was possible to think of 2016 as an aberration. Now it's no longer possible to think of it as an aberration.

Krastev: Absolutely. In 2016, it was a surprise. The opposition, the Democratic Party, cannot resist Trump in the way they resisted him in 2016. And not simply because back then he didn't have his own movement, back then it was not very clear what his mandate was, back then he didn't have his agenda. But obviously they are entering a totally different period.

And in a certain way, this kind of a change is very much a pressure on them to change themselves. And this is also what is coming, what I was saying in Europe. The other thing that is going to change, and in my view is quite interesting, is that particularly in the case of the United States, there will be a very strong pressure on the institutions. Because he comes as a revolutionary power, and he basically is very mistrustful of the American institutions. He wants to tear off the masks. So from this point of view, the way he talks about the institution is not very different from the way the different revolutionary parties on the left and on the right talk about institutions. And one of the institutions that was most resilient to him during 2016-2020, of course, was the military. We're going to see a lot of changes in the army, change of personnel and so on. And this is a major change. So from this point of view, America is going to have, of course, a softer version of the Eastern European 1989. This is a change of the elites. This is a change in the way you're making your career. Certain things that, until yesterday were an advantage for you, you start to see as disadvantages. Suddenly, you're going to see that there is much more agreement between Democrats and Republicans on certain policies than they used to have yesterday. 

Like you, I do believe it's a new era. Just before the elections, I was rereading the old Huntington book written at the end of the 1970s, The Promise of Disharmony. And this was his reflection basically on what happened in America in the 1970s. And his major argument was: American politics is not based on the polarization between left and right, American politics is very much structured around the American promise and the failure of this promise to be realized. Listen, some of the attacks on the American political system this time does not come necessarily from the promise of the American dream. The American dream was challenged both on the left and on the right. And I believe this is kind of a new situation. And this is why some of the old cliches, some of the old strategies of yesterday are not going to work. There are going to be major questions also about the new divides that came up this election, particularly the educational and gender divide. This is a new political world, in my view, which is going to come with a new political generation and with new explanations.

Mounk: I've been struck for the first week since the election by how orderly the transition appears to be. He is clearly much better organized than the last time around and has a much more coherent plan of what he wants to do with power. And so I think he's going to be much more capable of pushing his agenda. I think he has a much better sense of where limits on his power lie which he bristles against, either because there are people in the federal bureaucracy or in the military who he feels aren't sufficiently loyal to his political agenda.

Now, at the same time I do think that there is a difference between Hungary and the United States, in particular, which is that American democracy is much older, that the country is much richer, which means that its corporations and its media outlets are much less dependent on government subventions, that there is a very long tradition of civilian control over the military (I suppose that's also true in Hungary, but it's a distinction with regard to many other democracies that proved to be quite vulnerable, like Turkey). But there's a vastly greater number of veto points that, even though Trump now controls the House and the Senate and has sympathetic judges on the Supreme Court (in certain ways), it is not at all clear, for example, that they're going to abolish the filibuster—there are some Republican senators who are quite locally opposed to that. We've seen the majority of the Supreme Court disagree with Trump on important things like the lawsuits over the 2020 election. 

So how does that similarity of a more organized Trump, more determined to subvert controls of his power, stack up?

Krastev: No, no, you're totally right. First, after 2016, the encounter between Trump and power was like blind dating. He didn't know exactly what he wanted and the power didn't know exactly who he was. But to believe that the United States is going to transform to Hungary really totally challenges some very obvious things. America is a federal state with a very decentralized power.

Hungary is a society which is ethnically extremely homogeneous, on a totally different scale. Orbán also had, as a result of the electoral system, a constitutional majority. He has written a new constitution. It's totally different. But that does not mean that you can make Hungary out of the United States. The nature of the economy is different. The nature of the role of the world is different. Even if the United States goes very wrong, even if the United States becomes an autocratic state, it's going to be very different from Hungary. So one of the things basically is to try to surf between this idea that it can never happen here, which I don't believe. I do believe it can happen anywhere.

The problem we face today is not that we have more autocratic regimes than democracies. The real problem is that it's not easy these days to distinguish between democracy and authoritarian regimes. We talk about India, we talk about Turkey, we can talk about the United States. You remember this famous definition of the judge who said about pornography: “I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.” With authoritarianism these days it’s just the opposite: We can easily define it, but we cannot be sure that we are going to recognize it when we see it. And in my view, this is quite important because in order to understand Trump, and particularly if you want basically to resist Trump, you should be very specific. You should not be resisting some kind of universal authoritarian trend, but you should be very much rooted in American society and what is happening in this society’s institutional setup.

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Mounk: We've seen not just an astonishing class inversion in which the Democrats won the vote of people making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year and probably lost voters who make less than that, but also an astonishing inversion over the course of the less than two decades in who's the establishment. Part of the attraction of Trump and his movement is that they were the outsiders railing against the center. And part of the weakness of Democrats from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris is that they are seen as representatives of an elite that is deeply resented. That's a fundamental cultural shift that is really interesting. How and why did that happen? And how long will that remain the case? I mean, if we are at the beginning of a Trump era (I think it’s still a big question mark) and his movement basically dominates American electoral politics for the next 10 or 20 years, presumably, at some point, the old elite is out, and, by definition of being out, will start reconstituting itself. 

One thing that I wrote when I was trying to make sense of how Persuasion should cover the next four years of Trump's presidency is to say that perhaps, in a broader sense, we philosophical liberals should recognize that we're no longer the establishment. We've been on the back foot. We've been trying to defend the status quo, or at least what's good about it. And for some good reasons. But of course, being part of the establishment also makes you overly cautious, makes you try to apologize for things or try to defend things that perhaps are indefensible, makes you insufficiently irreverent, a little bit judgmental, wanting to tell people how to talk and how not to talk. 

Is it time for those of us who believe in philosophical liberalism to consciously assume the role of the outsider, of the irreverent forces assailing the center, or on the contrary, do we need to try and stabilize the institutions to shore up the order that is now being attacked from inside the White House?

Krastev: Listen, when it comes to practical politics, normally you do both, but intellectually, and your question was how we should frame the time that we're going. Listen, if everything goes according to the constitution, Trump is going to be in power for four years. By the way, this also makes him very different from Orbán or Kaczynski, where in our system, at least theoretically and legally, they can stay as long as they want because we do not have term limits on prime ministers. 

But my idea is that there is nothing worse in politics than defending the status quo that does not work, that does not exist. I do believe that there is a major difference between defending values and defending the status quo. And quite often when people defend the status quo, they pretend that they simply defend values. Democracy is an experimental society. Democracy was changing all the time. So from this point of view, the major mistake is to try basically to defend democracy in the way you defend the fortress. Listen, there are going to be changes. And some of the changes that he's going to make are going to be, in my view, very dangerous and they're going to be unwelcome. Also, there's going to be some changes that probably in the long term we're going to see as opening possibilities that we didn't have today. But we should try to see ourselves as a party of change. But just saying that you're the party of change, it's also what kind of change?

Biden was not simply somebody who bet on normalcy. He bet on something much more radical. He said COVID is almost like the Great Depression or World War II. This can change society. This can bring back the idea of the big government. People really have a demand for the state that cares. And he spent incredible money and he basically went with a major public investment. And just before he collapsed in the debate, people were talking about him as one of the most transformative presidents after Roosevelt. The question is why these policies did not work at least politically in these elections? Why not simply Harris, but the Biden transformation, was not supported by the voters? And secondly, the same about foreign policy. He bet on a “democracy versus authoritarianism” foreign policy. And by the way, he stuffed his administration, in my view, with some of the most gifted diplomats and foreign policy thinkers that America had, and at least Democratic Party had. It's not every time that you're going to have somebody like Bill Burns or Jake Sullivan. So it's not the fact that you have mediocre people or didn't have a project. What was basically misunderstood was the response of the people.

What has changed in American society that probably many of us got wrong? And from this point of view, just saying all liberals should go back to the radicalism of the 1920s, or do what Roosevelt did, is not going to work. I do believe that you should be the party of change, but first you should try to imagine a change that is different than simply going back. And in the way I'm afraid of nostalgic right-wing politics, I'm also afraid of nostalgic left-wing politics. In a certain way, you should try to see society as a new one and with new types of conflicts and with, in certain ways, new promises. And I could be very wrong on this, but just as people like to talk about the return of history, I do believe that the idea of the future has returned, and the future is not perceived as an opportunity anymore, but as a threat. So the clash between left and right is the clash between two extinction rebellions. On the left, very much about climate, a universalist one; on the right, it is very much about demography. On the left it is the “last man,” on the right it is the last white man, or the last American. And in my view, this understanding, this totally new politics is going to answer the question of what it means to be the party of change in the Trump era. Because if you're right, and I have the feeling that you're right, if there is a Trump era, it is going to survive and exist even when Democrats are back in power for a certain period of time in the way the Roosevelt era didn't end with the Roosevelt government, and the Reagan era didn't stop with Clinton, but was, in a certain way, confirmed by it.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ivan discuss what a sensible policy toward China might look like for the United States and Europe. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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Back in 2006, I was doing an internship at the International Herald Tribune, in Paris. The work was mostly menial. I would photocopy mock-ups of pages for the next day’s edition and sometimes enter short descriptions of articles into an internal management system. My biggest accomplishment was unscrewing a flickering neon light bulb that was making it hard for editors to concentrate—a simple act which earned me the undying hostility of the French janitor, who had refused to help since his shift was ending in fifteen minutes, and did not believe that anyone else should have the right to ameliorate the situation in his stead.

The other memorable moment was the time I was sent home to change. Without thinking about it, I had put on a T-shirt a friend had given me during the presidential campaign a few years earlier: a depiction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream bearing the inscription “Bush Again?” I doubt the T-shirt offended anyone at the office. In fact, I imagine that the great majority of staffers at the IHT shared the sentiment. But the leaders of the newsroom took very seriously their duty both to be neutral and to be seen to be neutral. In those days before modern social media, the risk of anyone learning about my questionable sartorial choice may have been low; even so, it was one they were not prepared to take.

This nicely sums up the bygone attitude of journalists. As a group, they have always skewed left, and perhaps always will. But they also had a strong conception of their role and the professional standards it entails: Their job was to be fair arbiters, reporting without fear or favor. This involved posing tough questions to everyone and about everything. And to accomplish that, they needed to cultivate a strong bullshit detector, starting from the premise that anyone they talk to has their own story to spin. To be sure, journalism, even in its halcyon days, never fully lived up to these aspirations; but the existence of these aspirations did do a lot to curtail the profession’s partisan lean and preserve some modicum of trust in mainstream news outlets.

All of that went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

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The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.

I have some sympathy for this new self-conception. Democracy really is embattled around the world. And as citizens, we really do have a civic obligation to do what we can to shore up principles like free speech and the rule of law. Democracies need citizens to be engaged—and if some citizens need to adopt an inflated sense of their likely efficacy to keep them going, then let them enjoy their delusion.

But while all of us, including journalists, may have a civic obligation to fight for the preservation of our political system in our role as citizens, it is a category mistake to assume that journalists should place that aspiration at the center of their professional identity. Democracies depend on having a few widely trusted news outlets that can objectively inform the public about current affairs. The trust which citizens have traditionally placed in these outlets was premised on a belief that their journalists are at least striving to present events in an even-handed manner. The moment they recognize that this is no longer the case, that trust is shattered—and any hope of building political life on a basis of shared facts vanishes.

In light of the last four years, I’d go one step further. The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.

The Cognitive Cost of Partisanship

Over the last months, I have heard from multiple European diplomats that the extent of Joe Biden’s struggles has long been well-known. In meetings with a number of senior statesmen, Biden repeated the same anecdotes, or seemed unsure about his own whereabouts, as early as 2021. Is it really plausible that American journalists were unable to learn something that has been known in capitals across Europe for so long—something that, as it happens, tens of millions of American voters have long cited as a serious concern in opinion polls?

No. The obvious truth of it is that, for the most part, journalists simply did not want to go there. Part of that reluctance may have been rooted in an understandable (if misplaced) sense of propriety. But another part of it was rooted in the unspoken suspicion that open consideration of this topic would somehow wind up helping Donald Trump.

As it happens, the reluctance to level with readers ultimately accomplished the opposite of what was intended. It allowed Biden to stay in the race long enough to make the entire Democratic establishment complicit in covering up the true state of his mental health. And it made it virtually impossible to stage an open primary to choose his successor.

This brings us to yet another way in which the consensus in the mainstream press ultimately harmed Democrats. It should long have been obvious that Harris was a weak candidate. Though she entered the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination with a lot of enthusiasm and a large financial war chest, she ran a disastrous campaign, and quickly fell to the single digits in polls. In the end, she was forced to drop out before a single vote had been cast in her favor.

Biden revived Harris’ fortunes by restricting his search for a running mate on demographic grounds, all but guaranteeing her elevation to the vice presidency. But given a golden opportunity to reintroduce herself to the American people, Harris flailed. Despite a relentless and unprecedented rhetorical emphasis on the “Biden-Harris Administration,” she developed little initiative of her own and alienated most of her staff. Charged with helping to reduce the number of illegal migrants coming into the country, she refused to travel to the southern border, likely for fear of upsetting parts of the progressive base. For most of the period until Biden bowed out, Harris was significantly less popular than him.

As long as Harris was merely a potential presidential contender, all of that was sayable in the mainstream media. The moment she was elevated to the Democratic nomination, it suddenly became taboo to point out these facts. And when Harris benefited from an unsurprising (but short-lived) surge in enthusiasm upon becoming the official nominee, the critical faculties of mainstream journalists went out of the window altogether. She was now said to be running a flawless campaign, harnessing a groundswell of enthusiasm unknown since the days of Barack Obama—all of which (despite the polls being so tight) seemed to put her on a sure path towards victory.

By the final stretch of the campaign, this confidence had become widely adopted, especially in progressive circles. Democratic strategists were feeling bullish. On Twitter and MSNBC, on NPR and in The New York Times, they were proclaiming that internal polling showed Kamala Harris well ahead; that early vote tallies favored the party; that all the signs pointed towards massive turnout; and that late-deciding voters were breaking blue.

I suspected that some of these strategists may have been acting, well, strategically. Voters want to pick a winner. It makes sense for campaigns to project confidence on the final stretch. So I texted some trusted friends who are deeply ensconced in the Democratic world. All of them assured me that their public pronouncements were rooted in private conviction. Yes, they conceded, they had proven overly confident in 2016. But no way were they making that same mistake again. Kamala was on a sure path to victory. She might even win Iowa!

In retrospect, the cost of these lies layered upon delusions is painfully clear. If the Harris campaign had reckoned with the fact that she was not on the way to winning the election, they could have taken some rhetorical risks and encouraged her to appear on a much wider range of shows and podcasts. Instead, lulled into a false sense of complacency, they played it “safe.”

The irony is palpable. At each step, the mainstream media was careful not to emphasize facts which might make it harder for Democrats to beat Trump. But at each step, this created a bubble of “elite misinformation” that made it impossible for Democrats to make the hard strategic choices they needed to win the election. The cognitive costs of partisanship in the media are high—in this case, arguably sufficiently high to have gotten Trump reelected.

Why Attempts to Save Democracy Are Likely to Backfire

Even if self-driving cars get to a level of safety which far outpaces that of human drivers, they will at times produce accidents that most human drivers would have been able to avert. And yet, as defenders of the technology will be quick to point out, adopting self-driving cars makes sense if it reduces the overall death toll.

Similarly, the defenders of “moral clarity” in journalism may say that attempts to influence their readers can sometimes go awry, either because mainstream outlets happen to be wrong about something, or because readers are particularly reluctant to accept some specific dose of truth. But that, they may say, is no reason to eschew the self-conscious goal of saving democracy if such an aspiration is likely to do good under most circumstances.

I am deeply skeptical that we should write off the sequence of events that led to Trump’s reelection as such an unfortunate and uncharacteristic mishap, and that’s for two reasons. 

The first is that journalists vastly overestimate their ability to influence their readers. Ordinary people are able to sense when journalists frame every news story in the hopes of leading them to some predetermined conclusion. And rather than falling for that conclusion, many of them take that as a reason to stop trusting—or reading and watching—mainstream journalism.

This has likely always been the case. Even in the halcyon days when The New York Times was (somewhat) trusted across the aisle and Americans got most of their news from CBS and NBC, the views of ordinary citizens differed widely from the consensus among the professional class. Notably, researchers trying to show that conspiracy theories have been on the rise of late have come to the conclusion that Americans have long believed in them at surprisingly steady rates. 

But it is especially true now, in the age of YouTube, podcasts, and social media. Journalists who obsess over whether to say that Trump is lying or whether to call him a fascist—as well as the many commentators on social media who spend their days backseat quarterbacking such decisions—assume that their choices will have a big impact on the views of citizens. Sadly, that assumption is unwarranted.

The second reason why I believe that the self-conscious goal of trying to save democracy is likely to backfire is that it is extremely hard to predict the long-term consequences of telling supposedly noble lies. At the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials stressed that ordinary people could not effectively protect themselves against Covid by wearing simple medical masks, a talking point that was duly and uncritically amplified by mainstream journalists. There is good reason to suspect that both public health officials and journalists took this line in part because many hospitals were running out of personal protective equipment at the time, putting doctors and nurses at risk, and impeding their ability to care for patients.

Like defending democracy, the goal of making sure that medical workers don’t run out of masks in the midst of a pandemic is perfectly sensible in and of itself. But as in the case of defending democracy, it turns out that prioritizing that goal over speaking the plain truth can easily backfire. 

In the case of Covid-era masking, the noble lie had three unintended consequences. First, public health officials were too focused on making sure that existing masks got into the right hands and insufficiently focused on producing more masks. Rather than telling people that masks didn’t work, they should have called upon businesses to find ingenious ways to produce more masks—something that started happening once public health guidelines were reversed, and it became clear that the demand for masks would remain high for the foreseeable future. Second, the initial guidance according to which masks did not work made it much harder for public health officials to convince people to mask up once access to the equipment was no longer a problem. And finally, this highly salient case of flip-flopping in the early stages of the pandemic lastingly undermined public trust in the health authorities, likely impeding the uptake of vaccines once those became available.

With a little empathy, it’s easy to see how public health officials could have gotten this call so disastrously wrong. In the early stages of a pandemic, information is limited and the stakes are high. The perceived need to lead the public to the right course of action, even if it means being less than forthright, must be immense. But politics is no less complicated and unpredictable than a pandemic. And as in public health, so too in a functioning democracy one of the most important preconditions for long-run success is giving the public good grounds to trust the information they are given. The reason why it’s so important to prioritize the plain truth over activist goals isn’t that I don’t share those goals or believe them to be nefarious; it’s that, unless we are on guard against our own self-aggrandizing tendencies, the very fact that these goals are so appealing will keep seducing us into screwing up.

The Wider Epistemological Crisis of the American Mainstream

Over the past years, mainstream newspapers have written endless articles about the threat posed by “misinformation.” There can be no doubt that lots of false or frivolous claims now gain enormous traction on social media. Countering these falsehoods is an important and legitimate goal of responsible journalists.

But the truth of it is that the American mainstream itself now suffers from a serious epistemological crisis. If you were a faithful reader of The New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, you were less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election. You were also less likely to recognize that school closures would exact a big toll on students’ educational outcomes and mental health or to realize that a lot of Latinos were embracing the Republican Party. And you would, even now, be less likely than most voters to recognize how utterly simplistic it is to believe that America can meaningfully be divided into two opposing blocks of “whites” and “people of color.” 

Americans have lost trust in many of their institutions in good part because, despite their assurances to be the arbiters of truth and science, legacy news outlets and establishment institutions fundamentally misconstrue and misunderstand basic aspects of American life. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs go well beyond the decision by many journalists to flatter themselves into thinking that their task was to save democracy. But the first step towards fixing the problem is for journalists to re-embrace the humdrum conception of their own work that served them comparatively well in the past: to cultivate a healthy distrust of everyone, including those you may secretly believe to be on the right side of history, and report the news without fear or favor.

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I really loved all the thoughtful responses you gave when I asked you, a couple of months ago, why American kids need to be in bed by 8pm. So we are once again opening this thread up for comment from everyone. But, to state the obvious, this topic could easily get a lot more heated. So here’s a friendly reminder: Be nice to each other. Engage in good faith. You can express robust disagreement in polite terms. If I get the sense that you’re stinking the place up, you’ll get banned—sorry.

And please do support my work—and get all my writing, plus ad-free access to full episodes of the podcast—by becoming a paying subscriber today.

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Donald Trump has won a decisive victory. It is now clear that 2016 was not an aberration. Among Democrats, the blame game has already begun.

Some fault the economy for Kamala Harris’ defeat. Others point the finger at Democratic positions on cultural issues. Others still, replaying the greatest cable news hits from 2016, have concluded that the American electorate must be racist or sexist or homophobic (or all of the above).

On the night of the election, I shared my own assessment for why Democrats, and the broader institutional ecosystem with which they are now closely associated, have become so deeply unpopular. I will write a lot more on the topic in the days and weeks to come, so please stay tuned. But it strikes me that there is a missing question in the debate, one which commentators—including me—might be avoiding in part because they have a less developed answer to it.

According to polls, Donald Trump is not especially popular. Most Americans continue to believe that both he and the party he has shaped in his own image are too extreme. As Frank Fukuyama pointed out in our podcast a few days ago, there is also a genuine possibility that his administration will overreach in key respects, once again proving true the thermostatic theory of American politics according to which public opinion tends to move away from the sitting president.

BUT: It is also clear that Trump has a genuine appeal of his own. When he first entered politics, many political scientists explained him away as a representative of an aging, white electorate resentful about cultural and demographic change. And yet he owes Tuesday’s victory to his ability to attract new voter groups to the Republican Party—from Hispanics to union members to young men.

Even as Florida’s population has become far more diverse, for example, the state has undergone a remarkable evolution from the country’s most closely contested swing state to deep red territory. And while a lot of commentators have tried to explain this away by pointing to the presence of politically conservative refugees from Castro’s Cuba or Maduro’s Venezuela, the simple truth is that Hispanics have also swung to Trump in the overwhelmingly Mexican-American districts of southern Texas or the heavily Puerto Rican neighborhoods of New York City.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts on how Kamala lost. But I’d be even more grateful if you can help me answer the inverse question: Why did Trump win?

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One more thing.

A lot of people are beating up on election forecasters like Nate Silver for failing to predict Trump’s victory. Pollsters should indeed ask themselves how they could underestimate Trump’s share of the vote for the third time in a row. But any attentive reader of the more sophisticated forecasters in the game should have known that Tuesday’s outcome was one of the likely scenarios. As Silver emphasized throughout, polls have historically been off by an average of about three points—and given how close the race looked in many swing states, a three point miss in one or another direction would likely hand a clear victory to either Harris or Trump.

That is pretty much exactly what happened. And so anyone who now claims that forecasters did not consider Tuesday’s results a realistic possibility has failed a simple test of reading comprehension.

Need some evidence? Look at my post from last Sunday. I did not have a strong feeling about who would win, and basically wrote up what I learned from Silver and other forecasters. And yet, as one of the five worlds we might end up in, I published a map that is very close to the final result. (The only difference is New Hampshire, which might in my imagination have fallen to Trump in the event of a real blowout.)

Screenshot here:

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If you are already a paying subscriber to this Substack or Persuasion, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Freya, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

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Freya India is the author of the Substack GIRLS. She is also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt’s Substack After Babel. 

In this week’s conversation, Yascha and Freya discuss the great sense of social isolation and anxiety felt by so many young people; why the life lived online is a shoddy substitute for the real thing; and how the difficulties ascribed to social media addiction among young people often can be traced to a broader desire for wisdom and meaning.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You're a young writer based in Britain. I've been enjoying your writing on Substack and you now work with my good friend Jon Haidt as well. 

Jon has been making the argument—on this podcast and in many, many other forums—that there's something really concerning about social media, in terms of things like the rates of mental illness for young people, and young women in particular. But you're able to speak to this in a much more personal way about what it feels like living in a generation that from the beginning was immersed in social media. 

Going beyond the statistics, what do you think the problem with social media is to your generation? Why do you feel that that is so fundamentally shaping, and misshaping, how young people lead their lives today?

Freya India: As you say, Jon really opened the conversation to talk about this. He really provided the research and statistics, the foundation for people to come along and give their personal stories. So I'm hugely grateful to him for doing that. I think statistics can be powerful, but they don't convey the emotion of growing up in this era and the unique challenges young people are facing. I wanted in my writing to emphasize the pain of social media, especially as you're growing up as an adolescent girl and handling all of the stresses, the inner angst of adolescence, and then what this does to amplify it. 

I think the biggest kind of sentiment I want to get across in terms of what social media is doing is this sense of loss, that my generation has lost something. Love has completely changed. Friendship has completely changed. Social media creates the illusion that you're in touch with people; you see people posting their Instagram stories, you see their relationship updates and it provides people with this sense that they're connecting and they're interacting even though, really, it's somewhat of an illusion. And people didn't anticipate the extent to which people would forfeit the real world for these online connections, especially young people who haven't really grown up with a real sense of community. A lot of them haven't grown up with real deep friendships. They haven't known the alternative. And so when you provide them with these online communities, online friends, it might seem like a great thing. But, unfortunately, they compare that to the real world, which is full of friction, of rejection, and the social anxiety that comes from that. The online world seems much more compelling. I think we underestimated the extent to which people would choose that over reality.

Mounk: So tell me why it induces that form of isolation. I know that there are striking statistics that the average 16 or 17 year old just spends much less time hanging out with their friends than they did even in my generation, and even more so compared to Jon's generation. One thing in particular that always strikes me is the demise of the phone call, which is not nearly as good as hanging out in person, but it's a lot better than sending texts or looking at each other's pictures on Instagram. 

How is it that the existence of these social media apps has changed the dynamics in such a way that hanging out in person has been crowded out?

India: I think it is actually a choice they're making but it's more subconscious. I think what's actually happening is in previous generations if you felt lonely, that loneliness would be a signal and you would feel it and it would force you to go and do something about it. Whereas now I think young people feel loneliness, they feel this need to go and connect socially and they can just kill it. They can numb it by watching a YouTube video or scrolling through Instagram, or keeping up with the influences they follow, and they can simulate this social interaction. So we've got young people who are eating dinner with YouTubers. The YouTubers are eating their meals and talking about their relationship drama and their personal life and they're simulating friendship. That's going on on Instagram, it's going on on YouTube. They have all of these kinds of platforms providing this fake connection.

As I said, what that does is it numbs the loneliness. So the loneliness is not strong enough for you to then feel like you need to go out and again, take on the kind of energy and effort that that requires to go and meet a friend. So I think for young people now, they have the fake social connection, which is extremely convenient and accessible. They have an ambient sense of kind of loneliness and disconnection, but it isn't so much that it forces them to go out.

I think that's the real problem of social media: especially lately, you see all of these new apps that are going to solve the loneliness epidemic or the metaverse is going to solve it or, and you know, these are promises to solve loneliness that come on a screen or are downloaded from an app store. And all they're doing is just distracting us from doing something about the problem, which is going out and hanging out with each other. So I think that's the real problem here.

Mounk: This sense of loneliness might act as an indicator that you need human connection, but if you can just numb it in a way that acts as a sort of simulation of meaningful human connection, then you might never feel that absence enough to really act on it—until, perhaps, you have some mental health problems, which might act as another barrier. 

How have you experienced this kind of rise in social anxiety? Do you think that that is a genuine generational difference?

India: Yeah, it's funny because I always think about how there's all these young people who say they have social anxiety and I really believe that they do. But they'll be comfortable talking about it on TikTok. So if you go on TikTok, “#socialanxiety” has billions of views and there's young people saying to the camera how scared they are of talking to people. They're filming themselves trying to make a phone call and they're shaking. They can't answer the door to a delivery person because they're that anxious, but they're recording it. It's become kind of a status symbol and it's even stranger that they're comfortable talking to people they don't know online, potentially millions of people, but they're not comfortable making eye contact with someone in the street. So there's something really tragic going on there. 

I think a big part of it is young people have grown up on social media, in worlds that they can very much control: If you're going to flirt with someone, you can just send an Instagram DM. You can rehearse it. You can make sure it's perfect. You can agonize over it. You can check it with ChatGPT to make sure it sounds normal. So when it comes to making a phone call and that's live, there's a lot of anxiety, because we've grown up with a lot of control and predictability over these things. And we can also block people on social media. We have all these ways of manipulating the interaction. And then when it comes to real life, it feels terrifying because we've been raised with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation. 

I'll just casually mention an example of a TikTok I've seen or something, and older generations will look at me like it's crazy. On some of the mental health TikToks online, there's predominantly young women sharing things like live streaming their panic attacks or revealing these really deep dark traumas while they're doing their makeup. And it's kind of normal to me because I've grown up with people being this vulnerable online and you know young people scroll through this kind of thing like it's mindless content. But you mention it to older generations and they can't really conceive of sharing something that personal with so many strangers. For young people it's happened very, very gradually. I remember when I was maybe 13, 14, the first kind of cohort of YouTube influencers were talking about their mental health and they would just say things like, “By the way, guys, I have anxiety. It's nothing to worry about.” And that felt like a healthy message. But over the years, I've just seen it escalate and escalate where it's gone from being more vulnerable with your audience to monetizing that, maybe trying to sell your audience a therapy discount code. We're used to this level of disclosure and I don't think many young people see that as worrying, or a sign that you might be lonely. It’s just what existence is. You exist and you also perform it to an audience at the same time.

Mounk: I want to distinguish for a moment between two different phenomena: one is the tail end of those kinds of influences, the people who have had some amount of success with this, who have it either as a career or as just a significant portion of what they do with their lives. And I think for obvious reasons, that can be very pernicious, particularly in a space like mental health. 

Putting aside the influencers for whom this really is a very large part of their lives, what does the interaction of social media now look like for the average person in your social circle, in your generation, who presumably does have a TikTok or Instagram account. For the average person, what does that experience look like and why should we worry about that average person as opposed to the more extreme cases?

India: Well, I think the trouble is the average person is scrolling through those extreme cases all day, every day—not to say that all young women are live streaming their panic attacks, but a live stream of a panic attack on TikTok is getting billions of views. My concern is they're scrolling through the most extreme content because the algorithm is obviously feeding them what gets the most engagement, so they tend to see the most extreme discussions of mental health, the most extreme beauty images. Whatever vulnerability they have, they're probably being exposed to the most extreme content around that. So I think for the average young girl, her experience of social media is increasingly becoming scrolling through influencers who are looking to sell her something, adverts from companies and people who are incentivized to transport girls to the most dark and extreme end of some of their fears and insecurities. So if you're just a normal young girl, for example, who doesn't like how she looks, maybe you don't like your lips and you're on Instagram, your experience is becoming less and less scrolling through posts from family and friends. It's now becoming the most extreme influencers who've had the most amount of lip filler who are live streaming themselves going to get lip filler, giving tips of where to get lip filler. Then you're getting ads based on that. If you hover over something for half a second because it makes you feel insecure, you look at it slightly longer and the algorithm will log that and serve you more of it. I call out the extreme influences because I think they're warping the world view of ordinary girls and young women and telling them that this is normal.

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Mounk: I want to get to what we might want to do about that as a society, but to start off with, what are you doing about it, personally? Are you off social media completely? What kind of advice would you give people for what consequences to draw from this in their personal lives?

India: I'm not on social media (as in, nothing about my personal life). So I only have Twitter and Substack. And I make the firm distinction between commodifying your personal life and commodifying your work. I think if you're a young person and you're creative, social media is great and it's an excellent way to share your work with the world. But it's a very fine line between selling what you're working on and selling yourself. 

I don't share any personal updates. I don't take any selfies. I don't engage in any of that because that's all been terrible for my mental health, but I will share my work and then just kind of leave it. But increasingly I'm thinking that even that is kind of an illusion as well, that you have to be on social media to be a writer. I think Substack is becoming a little bit more like social media now, but you can get away with not posting or tweeting your articles. I think if you really care about the craft and you put work into that, maybe you don't necessarily need to be plugging yourself on social media as much as we might think you need to. I've definitely changed my opinion, though, because even just a year or so ago I would say there's some girls who can scroll through Instagram and feel fine, so they should be allowed to stay on it. I'm not telling anyone to get off. But I think the longer I've been writing about these things the more now I'm much more firmly on the side of the only answer is to delete it.

Mounk: One way of thinking about this is that the social media platforms are filling a need that other elements of our lives are not. Perhaps part of it is that we're not pursuing those needs in these other ways because social media sort of substitutes for them, right? But I increasingly get the sense in your writing that you're starting to think about a lack of moral direction and a lack of orientation for how to live in the broader culture. 

How do you think those two things relate? Is it that somehow people in your generation have less moral guidance, less of a sense of a meaningful pursuit or career that then leads them to also crave this simulacrum of human connection? Which way around is the causality going? Is it the rise of social media that makes people desist from those pursuits? And what might that mean for how to build a healthier society?

India: I definitely think this is a much bigger problem. There's a lot of cultural forces and trends that were kicking into gear decades before social media, which kind of primed this generation to be the perfect victims for it, I think. I tend to look at social media trends and then try and think about what it is that young people are looking for in this trend. For example, I was looking recently at the amount of young people trying to get relationship advice online. They're watching influencers, dating gurus and relationship experts, and they're learning about how to set boundaries, and they're learning all of this therapy speak. This kind of relationship content gets millions of views, it's extremely popular. But when you kind of strip back what's happening there, young people are looking for wisdom, they're looking for guidance on how to have a relationship. They're craving some kind of structure for how to orient themselves in their lives. And so I think all of the trends that young people get obsessed with online, you can trace it back to some kind of need that's not being met here. 

Older generations now tend not to give advice about relationships. I get the sense that most older family members kind of step back and they want their children to grow up and meet someone and make that decision themselves, but it's quite anxiety-inducing to do that. And so you see all of these kinds of young adults online desperately looking for advice, is this a red flag? Should I avoid this? What's acceptable and unacceptable in a relationship? And I went through all of these kinds of online forums of young adults getting so muddled and confused online. And I think they're looking for adult guidance. And now I see that everywhere. I see a very lonely generation who are opening up on TikTok, live streaming their panic attacks to get sympathy and attention, which tells me they don't have people in their lives giving them sympathy and attention. So something's happening to friendship, something's happening to family. That all started before social media but have made this generation the perfect consumers for it.

Mounk: I think this sort of thing comes up every time people talk about Jordan Peterson. And I've made this point, I think, once or twice before in the podcast: it feels to me that his success is our fault. And what I mean by that is that he stepped into a huge void, perhaps particularly in his case, for young men who didn't have much orientation from their families or their cultural context. There wasn't really anybody offering them advice about what a worthwhile life is and how they should live and so on. And I have some misgivings about the particular advice he gives and his particular persona, but he was somebody who was willing to step into that void. And so rather than blaming him for stepping into that void in a way that we might have some bones to pick with, we should be asking ourselves why nobody else is willing to play that role. Perhaps the best explanation for why people don't want to do that is that they have the sense that the moment they start giving advice, it can easily become lecturing, or hectoring, or oddly old-fashioned.

How do you think we can fill that space? Is it just giving permission to family members to actually talk to each other in a different way? Is there also public writing of a different form we need? And how do we make sure that this advice hews to some of the basic and reasonably timeless truths about the importance of having strong relationships? 

India: Yeah, it's funny, we call it lecturing and moralizing now, but I think we used to call it wisdom. We used to really respect the kind of wisdom our ancestors left for us and what the older people in society were telling us. Now, it's flipped: I feel like adults want to be their kids' best friend. They want to be cool. They don't want to seem extremely out of touch. They either try to talk like young adults do and just agree with everything they say, or they don't get involved. They just kind of step back and say, “I don't know this world.” But as you said, I think the guidance we're looking for is age-old wisdom, a lot of the time. And I think adults need to be more empowered and confident to say it, because these are lessons people learn as they grow older. Of course, everyone's going to have different opinions, but things like the value of relationships, the value of connecting with people—there aren't many people who disagree with that. But you have a lot of teenagers and young adults now who are saying, “I don't want a relationship. I'm never going to get married. I don't want to have children. I'm not even going to have that conversation. I don't see any benefit to it. I see it as completely inconvenient and irrational.” And those can be valid choices, but I think sometimes they're informed by this complete lack of guidance and complete lack of positive examples from adults in your life. And we now think it is kind of obsolete because we're in this new world, but it's not obsolete. It's actually needed more now than ever.

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Mounk: What's your response to people who would listen to all of this and think “that's all really interesting and seems persuasive. But then when you step back and you look at what people were saying 25, 50, or 75 years ago, there's always these concerns about the youth. And there's always been concerns, in particular, about how children are growing up”?

How do you respond to people who listen to all of this and say, “Look, know, perhaps what we're talking about is just the modern, contemporary form of problems that people have had before. Perhaps people talk a lot more now about mental health, so even some people who don't have genuine mental health challenges speak in that register. But there's always been a lot of people who've been depressed. There's always been a lot of people who felt some amount of social anxiety. There's always been a lot of people who've had trouble finding a partner or who felt that life lacked meaning.” How do you respond to them?

India: Well, I agree with that, in part. I do think a lot of this is age-old anxieties, especially adolescent anxieties. But my main point is that these anxieties that have always existed are now being directly targeted and exploited by companies and industries and amplified to a level which they previously weren't and are now unmanageable because they're extremely personalized. So if you're a 15 year old girl with those age-old anxieties about how you look and you feel insecure and you feel lonely, now you have companies that can monitor your behavior online, they can log those insecurities and then use them against you. They can sell them to advertisers who can then target you.

I would just point them in the direction of Jonathan Haidt's work, at the actual statistics, which are harrowing. He did a piece recently showing that across the five Anglosphere nations, suicide rates for girls and young women are the highest on record. And you look at the jumps in self-harm, in eating disorders, girls kind of starving themselves into the hospital—these aren’t trivial numbers. There is something going on since 2010 which is different and that's what all my work ties back to. A lot of it is age-old anxieties but again they're being exacerbated to a point now where I think the average young girl just cannot cope. That's what worries me. There are billion dollar industries going after them now.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Freya discuss whether there is a gender gap in how young people manage the difficulties associated with social media. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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If you are already a paying subscriber to this Substack or Persuasion, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Frank, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

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Set Up Podcast

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, author, and the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Among Fukuyama’s notable works are The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss how Trump’s 2024 victory repudiates the racial grievance theory of 2016; what a second Trump administration will mean for the rule of law at home and abroad; and the lessons the Democratic Party must learn from its defeat.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Francis Fukuyama, thank you so much for taking the time to process what happened last night together.

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, I'm very happy to. I spent the evening with my students watching the results as they came in. A lot of them are non-American and so I had to do some explaining about how peculiar the American institution of a national election is, but it meant that I didn't get that much sleep and it was depressing, very depressing, in the end.

I did have a bottle of Venezuelan rum that I was going to open up if Kamala had won. And I had convinced myself based on some of the things that colleagues had said to make me optimistic. But it turned out that this was a complete raising of expectations that made the deflation even more painful, and the bottle of rum is still there.

Mounk: Well, you're a good man for not indulging in the bottle of rum to try and process what happened. 

Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States. He's the second president since Glover Cleveland to be elected in two nonconsecutive terms and take double real estate in the strange numbering of American presidents. He's the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years. He will likely have a trifecta of the government, having control of the House and the Senate. And of course, he also has a Supreme Court that is reasonably sympathetic, at least, to his social and cultural program. What does all of that mean for America and for the world?

Fukuyama: Well, I think that it has a much deeper significance than certainly a lot of Democrats were thinking. In 2016, he was elected to the surprise of everybody. And I think that many people, myself included, thought that this was kind of a fluke: that he had not won the popular vote and Hillary was a particularly bad candidate. And there were a lot of reasons that Democrats could give themselves for why that happened.

There was also an expectation that once he became a one-term president and Biden was elected that the world would kind of snap back to something like what it was before 2016. But now it's not just the fact that Trump succeeded in getting reelected. He didn't squeak his way in. He really won a pretty resounding victory. He defeated Kamala Harris in all of the swing states that were up for grabs. They got the Senate. They're very likely, as you said, to get the House as well. They already control the Supreme Court. So conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order. 

It reminds me a little bit of the 1980 election. I wasn't a particular fan of Ronald Reagan, but he changed the tenor of the time in ways that I didn't expect at the moment of his election. Just to give you one example: I remember when I was a student, Adam Smith was not considered a serious writer and very few political theory people actually tried to study Adam Smith and read his books seriously. After Reagan was elected, all the academics actually got on board with that. It gave a legitimacy to a market economics that really had not existed when I was in college in the early seventies. Then, if you had said, “I want to go to business school,” most of my friends would look down on that person and say “you're just greedy” and so forth. And then after his election, it was okay to go to business school. And in fact people went to business school in droves. 

So I think that there's going to be a change in the tone of a lot of American society that will go deeper than just whatever policies Trump tries to enact. But this time around, I'm not quite sure what the leading ideas that guide this are, other than kind of resentment at the educated elites and this sort of thing. But that doesn't really define a positive set of ideas towards which we are moving. And so that's the kind of puzzle that I have right now.

Mounk: I made a somewhat similar argument in my Substack column the morning after the election, which is that this is the beginning of the Trump era. This is a slightly question-begging title because, of course, in many ways we've been obsessed with Trump for 10 years. But I think until the day of the election, it was still possible to hope that Trump would enter the history books as a kind of strange footnote. There was this strange aberration of an election in 2016, and suddenly, you had this figure that really cleaved the political system for 10 years. But he lost the midterms in 2018. He lost his bid for reelection in 2020. The Republican Party didn't do very well in 2022. And then, lo and behold, he managed to win the Republican primary again in 2024. He has earned a much more lasting place in history books, though it’s always difficult to make those predictions. He is going to dominate not just a brief moment, but a political era. It was getting harder to imagine the Republican Party would simply revert to what it was before, but now it is quite clear that Trump owns the party for another four years and very likely that he'll be able to have a major say in who becomes his successor in 2028. 

I'm wondering, Frank, about how we should reflect on this as political scientists. In 2016, one quite dominant interpretation of Trump's victory was that it was racial resentment which was driving it—that the voters for Trump really were whites who were resentful about the status that they had enjoyed in society and that was being undermined, and that this was kind of a last gasp. That was the last moment where they could arithmetically make their stand. And so Trump was an instantiation of a tyranny of a minority, and he could only really win by exploiting various ways in which non-white voters are supposedly excluded from the polls and so on. And all of this was comforting because it implied that this was a last-ditch attempt. But it is now clear that this is not just about white resentment, because Trump actually did very well among non-white voters, did very strongly in Florida—which has been a majority-minority state for a long time—and particularly expanded his share of the vote among Latinos. This doesn't feel like the last stand of a dying electorate, at all, since he actually has managed to diversify the Republican electorate in a broad way. And doesn't seem like the tyranny of a minority, because—though tyranny it may turn into—it would be the tyranny of the majority, since it looks like he's clearly on track, as we're recording this, to win the popular vote.

So, do political scientists have to really rethink the story of the last 10 years?

Fukuyama: Yeah, definitely. I really never believed the racial resentment story because it never really corresponded to my observation of what Trump was. 

In my book on liberalism, I said that liberalism was damaged by two distortions: one was neoliberalism—this worship of markets, Milton Friedman, and the belief that everything is just a matter of efficiency. And the other distortion is what you might call “woke liberalism,” which is basically identity politics. Both of those things, I think, played an important role in the Trump victory—the repudiation of both of those forms of liberalism. And in a strange way, the fact that Trump got so many black and Hispanic voters on his side was a return to class, or it was a case where class was trumping identity politics, because the people that voted for him were basically working-class blacks and working-class Hispanics, and not educated ones. So the assumption that a lot of people on the left made that minority groups would be attracted to identity politics has been pretty decisively refuted. 

The one aspect that is still out there has to do with gender. And that was quite interesting in this election because a lot of the support in those racial and ethnic minority groups was coming from men. They didn't mind that much the anti-immigrant rhetoric. The racial part I think was not that important. I think the gender part was very prominent. In my humble opinion, there's been this massive social change that hasn't really been talked about sufficiently; as a result of the transition to an information economy, you've had this massive move of hundreds of millions of women into the labor force over the last 40 years, which has completely changed the dynamics within families. Especially with working-class families, there are a lot of families that are supported primarily by the wife's income or the girlfriend's income. And that's led to this real sense of anxiety. 

Kamala Harris spent all of her time trying to mobilize women around abortion—I would say that that's an issue that most and especially young men really don't care about. And I think that may have played some role in stoking this kind of resentment. So in a way, I think gender has become more important than race as one of the things that divides the country and around which polarization occurs. But I completely agree with you that this old interpretation about the centrality of race is just not right.

I wonder whether you're going to get a kind of reaction to Trump. Because if you just play out in your mind his economic policies, they could lead to one of the biggest economic disasters that this country has ever experienced. He's talked about replacing the income tax with tariffs. He doesn't seem to have any concept of how economically damaging that's going to be. I suspect that the way this will play out is that the moment that he declares a certain level of tariffs against German cars or French wines or whatever, that this time around there's going to be big retaliation. But more importantly, it's going to re-stoke inflation. Inflation is going to go back up to levels that we didn't even see during the post-COVID period. 

Trump is very attuned to not doing things that make him look bad. And so that means he's either going to have to drop that particular issue or, rather, what I can imagine is that he'll fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You don't want the government reporting that inflation and unemployment have gone up. But it could be that it leads to a global recession that then deepens into a real depression. What I don't get is these Silicon Valley oligarchs that understand the way economies work—how can they stomach a guy that is promising that kind of economic strategy? I think it's because they don't take it seriously. But maybe you have to actually go through a learning process where you try some of these radical ideas and they really lead to disaster. And then you begin to wake people up to the fact that this is not something that is generally going to help any ordinary person. The only trouble is you have to go through four years of this sort of thing before that learning process really kicks in.

Mounk: Yeah, I think my fundamental model of American politics at the moment—and this election hasn't really changed that—is that both Democrats and Republicans are way out of the American cultural mainstream. They're both way off from where most voters are. And that means that Democrats are in danger of overreaching in ways that they get punished for. But so are Donald Trump and the Republicans. And now that Trump is coming in with a lot of power and a big mandate, he is going to run the risk in purely electoral terms.

I think that's even true of one of his most popular issues: Immigration was clearly one of the things that most unambiguously helped Trump in this campaign. But when you look at Americans' views of immigration, they're rather subtle. Americans value immigrants and value the things that immigrants have brought to America. Most of them believe not just that the present levels of ethnic diversity, which obviously much increased from the past, but further increasing ethnic diversity is a good thing. Only about 15% of Americans think that would be a bad thing. At the same time, Americans are, for understandable reasons, very keen to get control of the southern border and to make sure that the level of illegal immigration is drastically reduced. 

Now, the problem, of course, is that when you have very lax policies and high levels of illegal immigration, people say, “clamp down, we want to close the border,” and the moment you start doing the things you actually need to do to clamp down, they start to say, “well, hang on a second, I didn't want this kid to die. I didn't want those kids to be separated from their parents. I didn't want this particular member of the community, who's been here for 25 years and who seems like a very good and reasonable person, to suddenly be taken and sent back to where they came from.” And so I think even on that issue, which was a winning issue of Trump's and which he clearly has a popular mandate—currently opinion polls clearly show that this is true even among the majority of Latinos—he may quite quickly lose public support, nevertheless.

Fukuyama: Well, another problem with that enforcement policy was that the employers won't like it. I mean, they need that low-skill labor, and they don't want to have to police whether someone is in the country legally or not. But the thing is that the policy that Trump has been laying out in this election cycle is so much more extreme than what you just described. Better border enforcement is something that I and many other Trump critics would be very happy with. But he's talking about rounding up 11 million people, putting them in camps, taking them out of their neighborhoods. It's so far beyond any kind of reasonable expectation administratively. We simply don't have the capacity to do anything remotely on that scale. Morally, the idea that you'd go into a neighborhood and basically arrest people that had been in the country for 15, 20 years whose children were all American citizens and put them in a camp somewhere, it's just kind of mind-boggling.

Again, I think that once you confront the reality of what it means to actually carry out the sort of thing that Trump claims he wants, people are going to wake up to the fact that this is a pretty extreme policy—they wanted border enforcement, but they don't want concentration camps.

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Mounk: Let's get to the heart of the matter. How dangerous is Donald Trump going to be for America's democratic institutions over the course of the last four years? How should we think about assessing the extent of that danger?

Fukuyama: Well, I think the primary threat is to the rule of law. He's been very clear in the last few months and weeks that he's really out for revenge. He wants to take revenge on all the people that he believes have been prosecuting him and or persecuting him. And I think that this is where Schedule F really matters because, in his first term, he couldn't get his own Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton, even though he wanted them to. But he understands that that was a weakness of his first term. And I think he's going to put people in key positions in the Justice Department that will enable them to open up investigations. 

Let me just give you one concrete example. The head of the IRS is subject to what they call “for cause dismissal,” meaning that he's got to commit some crime or some really overt offense before you can fire him. Schedule F is going to get rid of that. There are hundreds of these “for cause” positions throughout the government. So if Trump can fire the head of the IRS, and put a loyalist in there, then you could open up a tax audit against a journalist or head of an NGO or the NGO itself, that will be incredibly harassing and will tie the organization or the individual up in all sorts of legal fees. So, you're not talking about a Putin-style putting everybody in a gulag, but you are giving the executive incredible power against individuals and against organizations. And I think that that'll be kind of one of the primary lines of attack.

The whole discussion about fascism I thought was a little bit misplaced because that conjures up pictures of concentration camps and then a sort of action on a scale that I don't think we're going to ever see. In terms of replicating Viktor Orbán's behavior in Hungary over the past 15 years, however, I think that's extremely predictable, actually. And I think that that's what the Trump administration is going to look like: this kind of steady, slow erosion of one check and balance against executive power after another. And he’s also angrier in a way that he wasn't in 2016.

Mounk: You made the comparison to Orbán. And I think that in terms of how to understand Donald Trump, that's absolutely right. I think we both agree that we should think of him, roughly speaking, as an authoritarian populist who's comparable to people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, or Narendra Modi in India, rather than to try and compare him to past historical figures under the label of fascism. 

Now, it is much easier to capture power in a small country with unified political power than a large country with a deeply federally distributed political power. It's much easier to do so in a relatively small economy in which most businesses and media enterprises are reliant on government spending or funding, and so on, than it is in a large, wealthy country in which enterprises are more independent, and in which media companies like The New York Times have millions of subscribers that allow them to work somewhat independently of financial pressures put upon them by the federal government.

Yes, the stress test applied by Trump to these institutions is going to be much harder than it was in 2016. But aren't American institutions also likely to be more resilient than those of Hungary, for example? And if that's the case, and if we have, as I put in a recent article, a very strong force meeting a kind of immovable object, how is this going to play out?

Fukuyama: I think you do have to look at specific institutional rules. For example, I think that the strongest institution was actually the judiciary in Trump's first term. And the reason for that is that we have lifetime appointments of judges. And it's very difficult to change the federal judiciary. He did it in some cases, with retirements and deaths and so forth. But that's something that you can't do. Whereas I think in some countries you basically could retire the entire court within a year. They did that in El Salvador, for example. Bukele got rid of all of the judges in one fell swoop. And it would be much harder to get away with something like that in the United States. That's why I think most of the judiciary didn't go along with the election denialism back in the 2020 election. So, yeah, I think you're right that things are stronger. 

But there are also these other weird characteristics of our system right now. What do you make of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who all of a sudden decides that he's going to become a political actor? One of the things that I've found really appalling about this election cycle is that a billionaire can just decide to spend hundreds of millions of dollars supporting one particular candidate. In Europe you just don't have that situation. There are individual European countries where you're not even allowed to advertise on television during an election cycle. It's kind of appalling that you can have these private actors that can amass the kind of power that they have and then extend that power into politics.

Mounk: We haven't really touched on the international dimension of all of this yet. Trump is clearly impatient with the Ukraine war and impatient with the support the United States is giving to Ukraine. But is he going to go and try and negotiate some kind of tough deal with Vladimir Putin where he's looking out for the interests of the United States? Or is he going to simply bargain Ukraine away for some other real or perceived benefit that he thinks might be in the interest of the US? I find it hard to tell. 

In relation to China, he obviously is generally taking quite a tough stance. At the same time, he said things about Taiwan that undermine confidence that he cares at all about protecting the island's current status. I find it really hard to foretell both what actions he's going to take, and how other countries are going to read them. What's your best attempt at a projection here?

Fukuyama: I think there's less uncertainty about Ukraine. A lot of the Republican Party really doesn't like Ukraine and they think we're on the wrong side of that conflict, as evidenced in the six-month cutoff of all weapons to Ukraine by the House Republicans. And so I think that Trump can probably get a short-term deal with Putin that will freeze the war, so he can come away from it saying, “Look, I promised to stop the war and I did it,” but it will be deeply bad for Ukraine. If they don't have some kind of a NATO guarantee, any ceasefire is really going to just lead to their eventual national demise because the Russians will simply start fighting again the moment they feel that they've rebuilt their forces sufficiently. I think that that's pretty clearly what he intends to do. I think that he also is probably not going to overtly try to pull out of NATO, but he doesn't have to. All he has to do is send signals that he's actually not going to carry through on an Article 5 guarantee, and that's enough to basically weaken the credibility of the alliance, which is really what NATO is all about.

One of the enduring characteristics of Trump in foreign policy is he does not want to use American military force and he does not want to be a president that's going to get America involved in another war, in particular a war with China. Biden's been trying to do this dance where he suggests that yes, we would be willing to fight over Taiwan, and that that will be enough to deter China. I think that a lot of foreign players can see that Trump does not really want to get into a war, that he keeps talking about the danger of World War III and that he's not going to put us in a position to get into World War III. And I think that in a way, this paper tiger dimension of him will be increasingly apparent to people. So he'll talk tough about China. But if he can pull off a deal with them, I think that he would do it at Taiwan's expense. That's the most likely course that he's going to follow. 

The other thing is that I suspect he will not raise any objections to anything that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do in the Middle East. And that's actually something that Trump's got to be careful about, because they're much more likely to get directly involved if the fight between Israel and Iran escalates into a full-scale war. I don't really see exactly how Trump is going to deal with those competing considerations.

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Mounk: On foreign policy, I think there's two ways of thinking about the risk that Trump poses. One is that it is likely to have clearly predictable bad effects, right? It is likely to weaken NATO in such a way that Russia is further emboldened in Europe. 

The other is a kind of tail-end risk. The problem is that Trump is so unpredictable that perhaps 90% of the time you run his second presidency and things may somehow turn out to be fine, perhaps in part because there's something to the madman theory of foreign relations, in which other countries are going to be wary of trying the United States because they generally don't know how Trump might react. But perhaps the other 10% of the time it goes really, really badly wrong. 

Do you think that the danger we're dealing with is both of those? Is it more the former? Is it more the latter?

Fukuyama: People have suggested that his unpredictability might actually be an asset the way Richard Nixon deliberately used unpredictability as a way of getting to a settlement in the Vietnam War. I don't think it works that way with Trump. Nixon had the credibility that he was willing to escalate, and he did escalate in the last few years before the collapse of South Vietnam. The risk of the uncertainty about Trump is whether he will actually do anything. And you could see people being tempted by the belief that he is so averse to using military force that they can actually get away with stuff. 

Mounk: What should those who are worried about Donald Trump do in the next year? I have to say that I am a little bit concerned that Democrats will basically rerun the script of 2016 to 2020— that they will bring out the “#resistance” again, and cast not just Donald Trump as a dangerous politician, but also all of his supporters as terrible people. And that they will fail to introspect about the reasons that they have not been able to build a much broader electoral coalition. 

All of that might suffice for a few years. For the reasons you outlined earlier, Trump might very well overstep and perhaps that's enough for Democrats to win back the House in 2026, perhaps even to win back the Senate, which might prove more difficult. But it's not clear to me that that will be at all enough to put a lasting end to the Trump era which dawned yesterday.

Fukuyama: Part of it is what Kamala Harris should have done during her brief campaign, and it actually should have started under Biden. The two big issues really that drove people away from the Democratic Party were the border and identity politics. And especially with identity politics, that's something that didn't have to cost any money—having a Sister Souljah moment where you say definitely “I'm not in favor of gender transitions of a twelve-year-old” and make the case about why that's wrong and dangerous and then actually admit that it was a big mistake for Biden not to have tightened control over the border. (Having done it at the last minute meant that nobody believed that he was serious about that.) Just say openly “yeah, that was a mistake and we're not going to make that mistake again if we come back into power.” So that would be at least a start.

Mounk: I have a simpler and cleaner Sister Souljah moment that I suggested Kamala Harris take at the time and that I still regret she didn't. When her candidacy was very quickly elevated, it became clear within 24 hours that she would in fact be the Democratic Party nominee without a real primary process. And all of her supporters started organizing, following the instincts and the practices in their political professional milieu, by race and gender—culminating in the call for White Dudes for Kamala. It was a little bit more self-ironic and a little bit less grating than I imagined it to be, but what a wonderful opportunity this would have been for Kamala Harris to go out and say, “I'm so excited. There's so much support for me. Thank you, everybody who's organizing. But I really would rather that my followers do not organize themselves by race and gender. Let's have calls where everybody does this together.” What a nice way—without alienating anybody in particular, without calling anybody out in a hostile way—to demonstrate “this is not the kind of candidate I want to be.”

Fukuyama: I agree completely. And like I said, border enforcement actually is a serious policy that takes investment and so forth. But this kind of break with foolish identity politics is really costless. It's just making a statement.

And it's too bad that she didn't do that because it really has driven a lot of the opposition. One thing that's pretty clear is that Trump's favorability ratings still are pretty low and they were below Harris's just as an individual. And so I think a lot of the vote for Trump was actually a vote against the Democrats and the fact that they hadn't made these kinds of decisive breaks against things that people don't like about the Democratic Party.

One other thing that I think could be done is an area that I've been focusing on a lot in the last few years, which is building things. One of the things that the left in the United States is famous for is believing that you get legitimacy by adding procedures and regulations that get in the way of actually accomplishing anything. It takes us almost 10 years to get the permitting done for transmission lines to get alternative electricity from Texas and Oklahoma to California. And if you want to solve the housing crisis, especially here in California, you just have got to cut through all of the ridiculous red tape that exists before you can do anything, the way Josh Shapiro did in Pennsylvania when he rebuilt I-95 after it had had that big accident a year or so ago. If a Democrat stood up and said “we have way too many environmental regulations, we really need to cut through all this nonsense and really get things done and go back to building things again,” I think that would also be a very positive message, but it was a route not taken in this campaign.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Frank discuss the left’s fixation on identity politics, and the role it may have played in ceding its cultural advantage—as typified by shows like 30 Rock and The Office—to Donald Trump. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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Barring some extraordinarily unlikely twist, Donald Trump has won. Here are my first reflections, written on no sleep and a lot of caffeine, on what that means for the new political era we are about to enter. Thanks for reading and for supporting our work. It’ll be a long four years.

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For the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most famous and influential man on the planet. But he had too many failures and too many electoral defeats to his name to be able to claim that he dominated a whole political era. That changed overnight.

Trump is now going to be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th President of the United States. He is very likely to win full control of Congress. He is even likely to win the popular vote—making him only the second Republican to do so in a third of a century. All of this will allow Trump to impose his will on the nation to a much greater extent than he did during his first term in office.

Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confidently pronounced that he represented the final, Pyrrhic victory of a declining electorate—the last, desperate stand of the old, white man.

But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and 2024 puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. Though some cable news hosts may be tempted to replay their old hits in months to come, only a few diehards will believe Trump to be the Manchurian Candidate this time around. Perhaps most interestingly, it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.

How could this possibly have happened?

It is time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

I have, at this point, been going around warning the world about the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump for about a decade. And I continue to believe that these politicians, from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and from Narendra Modi in India to Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, pose a serious threat to democracy. 

American institutions are much stronger than many observers have come to believe. But Trump, much more experienced than he was at the outset of his first term in office and emboldened by a much more resounding victory, will test American democracy in a more serious way. Over the next four years, we will, as I argued in these pages in the week before the election, see a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. 

And yet, it is time to admit that, in purely electoral terms, the argument that democracy is on the ballot simply does not seem to work. The reason for that is not just that people care more about pocketbook issues like inflation or that incumbents have in general had a bad run of late. It’s that they don’t trust Democrats on the issue of democracy much more than they do Republicans. According to one exit poll in Pennsylvania, three out of four voters in the state believe that democracy in the United States is threatened; among those who do, it was Trump, not Harris, who had the edge.

This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade, a fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: Citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return anytime soon.

The extent to which most people now mistrust mainstream institutions is in many ways disproportionate. Despite Trump’s apocalyptic description of its current state, America remains one of the most affluent and successful societies in the history of humanity. And while ideological excesses have significantly weakened American institutions over the course of the last years, these institutions do remain capable of impressive work: For every ridiculous article about racism in the knitting community that The New York Times publishes, for example, it also puts out several sober reports about important world events.

And yet, we must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.

This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign. While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.

Donald Trump is far outside the American cultural mainstream. (Yes, I believe that to be true even after reckoning with his unexpectedly strong showing tonight.) But the problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream. 

Harris’ campaign had many opportunities to address that problem. She could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the official nominee. She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities. She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to the most popular podcast in the country. But she did not do any of that.

I don’t know whether Harris’ failure to mitigate Democrats’ glaring political weaknesses was due to fear and indecision or due to ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality. But I do know that the price that she—and the rest of the world—is paying for that failure goes by the name of Donald J. Trump.

Trump has, since his entry into politics, been the spearhead of a populist international. And so his ability to come back from the political dead, likely reconquering the White House even after his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election had seemingly rendered him radioactive, should serve as a loud warning to moderate forces in other parts of the world.

Brazilians recently managed to oust Jair Bolsonaro. Poles last year managed to send Law and Justice to the opposition benches. It would be tempting to conclude that this closes the chapter on those political forces. But from the Peronists in Argentina to the Fujimoris in Peru, populists have, again and again, proven to be much more adept at returning to power than contemporaries assumed.

This makes it all the more important for citizens of other countries to resist the temptation to sit in judgment of Americans over the coming days. I can already observe in international media, especially in Europe, a tendency to blame Trump’s likely reelection on every conceivable stereotype about Americans. It is, hundreds of commentators around the continent will likely write, because Americans are racist and sexist and bigoted that Trump looks set to take office again.

But while each populist incarnates some of the particular qualities of their specific national context, it should by now be amply evident that every country is vulnerable to this form of political appeal. French and German elites have done a somewhat better job of protecting their countries’ institutions from the ideological capture that has contributed to the profound breakdown in trust in the American establishment. But many of the same trends are well underway in those countries as well. And sooner or later, voters who deeply distrust their own institutions are likely to vote for an anti-establishment bullfighter of their own.

Until yesterday, it was still possible to hope that Trump would be remembered as a historical blip, an outsider who somehow managed to turn a few elections into a contest over his ideas and his personality, before finally exiting the political scene in disgrace. Today, it seems much more likely that he has cemented his standing as the figurehead of a political movement that will lastingly transform the politics of the United States—and, perhaps, much of the democratic world.

Trump will almost certainly attack some of the constitutional checks on his power over the course of the next four years. He may very well sell out key American allies in Central Europe and the Far East. Democrats should absolutely stand up to him when he does. Protecting the system of checks and balances that has allowed America to weather previous periods of deep partisan polarization must be a particular priority. And if Trump should overplay his hand, as well he may, he could quickly lose the support of those swing voters who just gave him such a resounding showing.

But Democrats would be making a big mistake if they simply reverted to the #resistance playbook which has failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Donald Trump or his movement in the past. What they need to do if they want to ensure that the Trump era lasts fifteen rather than thirty or even fifty years is much harder than that: They need to build a political coalition that is broad enough to win durable and sizable majorities against Trump as well as other politicians of his ilk. And that will prove impossible without a serious reckoning with the ways in which they, and the wider ecosystem for which they stand, have lost the trust of most Americans.