Why did I cry for my yellow Lab but not my mom?

Challengers has plenty of moody intrigue, and it doesn’t skimp on the sports, either.

Running a marathon has become a milestone for a growing number of young adults.

Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as Furnald Lawn on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle IslandPrivacy struck me as a peculiar goal for an outdoor protest at a prominent university. But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a cease-fire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive.Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons. She raises her phone to start recording video. One of the intruders speaks up to ask why they are being pushed out.The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and 100 protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!”As the crowd draws closer, Schwalb and her friends pivot and leave. Even the next morning, she’s baffled at how they were targeted. Save for a friend who wore a Star of David necklace, none wore identifying clothing. “Maybe,” she says, “they smelled the Zionists on us.”As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”Of late, at least one rabbi has suggested that Jewish students depart the campus for their own safety. Columbia President Minouche Shafik acknowledged in a statement earlier today that at her university there “have been too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior.” To avoid trouble, she advised classes to go virtual today, and said, “Our preference is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.”Tensions have in fact kept ratcheting up. Last week, Shafik called in the New York City police force to clear an earlier iteration of the tent city and to arrest students for trespassing. The university suspended more than 100 of these protesters, accusing them, according to the Columbia Spectator, of “disruptive behavior, violation of law, violation of University policy, failure to comply, vandalism or damage to property, and unauthorized access or egress.”Even some Jewish students and faculty unsympathetic to the protesters say the president’s move was an accelerant to the crisis, producing misdemeanor martyrs to the pro-Palestinian cause. A large group of faculty members walked out this afternoon to express their opposition to the arrests and suspensions.As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass.[Theo Baker: The war at Stanford]During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that included not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions. I then stood in a press zone and waited for Layla Saliba, a social-work graduate student who served as a spokesperson for the protest. A Palestinian American, she said she has lost family in the fighting in Gaza. She talked at length and with nuance. Hers, however, was a near-singular voice. As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly non-liberated when it came to talking with a reporter.Leaders take pains to insist that, for all the chants of “from the river to sea” and promises to revisit the 1948 founding of Israel, they are only anti-Zionist and not anti-Jewish. To that end, they’ve held a Shabbat dinner and, during my visit, were planning a Passover seder. (The students vow to remain, police notwithstanding, until graduation in May).“We are not anti-Jewish, not at all,” Saliba said.But to talk with many Jewish students who have encountered the protests is to hear of the cumulative toll taken by words and chants and actions that call to mind something ancient and ugly.Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting on a stone bench on campus and speaking with a tall, brawny man named Danny Shaw, who holds a masters in international affairs from Columbia and now teaches seminars on Israel in the liberated zone. When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said.He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II.Shaw’s worldview is consistent with that of others in the rotating cast of speakers at late-night seminars in the liberated zone. The prevailing tone tends toward late-stage Frantz Fanon: much talk of revolution and purging oneself of bourgeois affectation. Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. The John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.”We parted shortly afterward. I walked under a near-full moon toward a far gate, protesters’ chants of revolution echoing across what was otherwise an almost-deserted campus. I could not shake the sense that too many at this elite university, even as they hoped to ease the plight of imperiled civilians, had allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle.

A handful of images of the tens of billions of individual animals divided among some 10,000 species, inhabiting nearly every environment on Earth

Too many Americans feel that our best days are behind us.

A specter is haunting Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York state court—the specter of the Access Hollywood tape. The tape does not itself feature in the charges against Trump, which allege that the former president falsified business records as part of covering up payments to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence over a past sexual encounter. But according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the tape is “centrally relevant” in explaining Trump’s alleged motives behind orchestrating the payments to Daniels. Still, jurors will not hear audio of Trump’s voice bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. Following a ruling by Justice Juan Merchan, prosecutors will be able to introduce evidence of Trump’s notorious comments, but not play the audio itself.People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump, which is set to begin in earnest today, may well be the only one of the four prosecutions of Trump to go to trial before the 2024 election. In many ways, it’s a strange fit for such a starring role. But its very seediness, encapsulated by the presence of the Access Hollywood tape, is a reminder of both a central controversy of Trump’s 2016 campaign and one of his key sources of appeal as he seeks office again: his contempt for women.When it comes to Trump’s legal troubles, People v. Trump has always been the odd case out. It doesn’t speak directly to Trump’s attempt to unlawfully hold on to power in 2020, like the cases against Trump in federal court and in Fulton County, Georgia. It’s not as legally straightforward as the charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after the end of his presidency. When, in March 2023, District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to announce criminal charges against Donald Trump, the response among the commentariat included no small amount of puzzlement: This case, really, is going first?[George T. Conway III: The Trump trial’s extraordinary opening]Thanks to delays that have snarled up the other prosecutions, the New York case is not only the first to produce an indictment, but the first to go to trial. In part because of this newfound political significance, it’s received somewhat of a rebranding in recent months—both from Bragg’s office and from the press, which seems newly inclined to take the case seriously. No longer is it a mere “hush-money case,” as many commentators described it early on. Bragg has now taken to regularly describing it as an “election-interference case,” reasoning that Trump’s alleged scheme to pay Daniels off was aimed at depriving the public of relevant information about a candidate before they cast their votes.How convinced you are by this reframing may depend, in part, on how compelling you find the legal theory behind the case, which elevates the misdemeanor charge of falsifying business records to a felony by linking it to Trump’s alleged intent to violate both state and federal election law—but without charging those other violations. (Bragg also alleges an intent to commit tax fraud.) At this point, both a federal judge and Justice Merchan have blessed Bragg’s approach to the charges as a matter of law. Still, there’s something at least a little odd about presenting the case as focused on election interference when the underlying campaign-finance issue remains uncharged—and especially when the “election interference” in question is so dramatically less consequential in nature than what happened on and before January 6.That said, the case does speak to Trump’s willingness to pull dirty tricks during the 2016 campaign, and his last-minute scrambling in the weeks before Election Day. This is where the Access Hollywood tape comes in. After The Washington Post published the tape in October 2016, Bragg has argued, the “defendant and his campaign staff were deeply concerned that the tape would harm his viability as a candidate and reduce his standing with female voters in particular”—hence the willingness to pay Daniels $130,000 for her silence. Along similar lines, Bragg has also sought to introduce material about the allegations of sexual assault and harassment that surfaced against Trump following publication of the Access Hollywood tape. Justice Merchan has not yet reached a decision on this second request.At this point, the Access Hollywood tape and the ensuing reporting about Trump’s treatment of women has—understandably—faded somewhat into the background, amid all the other scandals. But to read through the court filings from the district attorney’s office is to be plunged back anew into the dizzying chaos of those last few weeks before the 2016 election.This was a bruising period for many American women, who saw Trump’s casual disregard for their full humanity not just shrugged off but awarded with the country’s highest office. That fury erupted in the massive Women’s March on Washington following Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and resulted in a surge of political participation and organizing among women. It arguably contributed to the sudden explosion of the #MeToo movement later in 2017. But again and again, it crashed up against Trump’s seeming impunity and lack of care—most bruisingly, in the fall of 2018, when the Republican-led Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite an accusation of attempted sexual assault against him.[From the January/February 2024 issue: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]The Stormy Daniels story spanned this period: The Wall Street Journal first reported on the payments to Daniels in January 2018, and Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges involving his role in the hush-money scheme in August of that year. (The question of why the Justice Department has never charged Trump, instead leaving the matter to the district attorney’s office, is one of the lingering strangenesses hanging over the case.) In a March 2018 60 Minutes interview on her 2006 encounter with Trump, Daniels insisted, “This is not a ‘Me Too.’ I was not a victim.” Still, the episode underlines Trump’s relationship with women as fundamentally oriented around expressing his power and authority. Daniels’s own account of their evening together is unsettling; she told 60 Minutes that she did not want to sleep with him and that she did so in part because he suggested that he might give her a slot on The Apprentice. In October of that year, the then-president posted a tweet calling Daniels “horseface.”These dynamics came up during the jury-selection process. Multiple candidates had participated in the Women’s March. One female prospective juror had posted tweets decrying Trump as “racist” and “sexist”—about which Justice Merchan questioned her while Trump watched from just feet away. Another said that she didn’t closely follow politics, but added, “Obviously, I know about President Trump. I’m a female.” (None of these candidates ultimately made it onto the jury.) Outside the courtroom, meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena poll conducted earlier this month found an astonishing divergence between how men and women view the gravity of the hush-money charges. Women were twice as likely as men to consider the case “very serious,” while men were twice as likely to consider it “not at all serious.”Understanding People v. Trump in this context is not just an exercise in retreading, once again, the chaos of the 2016 election and of Trump’s first term. It speaks directly to what Trump is offering as a presidential candidate in 2024. As in 2020, campaigning against Joe Biden lends itself less well to the misogynistic aggression that fueled Trump’s run against Hillary Clinton in 2016. This time, though, Trump has built his campaign in part around a promise to force Americans to conform to a sharply restrictive vision of gender and sexuality. As Spencer Kornhaber writes in The Atlantic, Trump’s proposals would “effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government.” The candidate has also promised to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers”—and many of his supporters on the right are training their ire on young, single women, a Democratic voting bloc. If Trump’s relationship with Daniels and his treatment of women more generally speak to his understanding of the world as rigidly divided between the dominating man and the women he dominates, then his 2024 campaign is a promise to enforce that vision as a matter of government policy.In that respect, the New York trial sets up the question nicely, just as the Access Hollywood tape did in 2016: Is this really the kind of man you want to be your president? For many people, of course, the answer was yes. The revelations of Stormy Daniels’s encounter with Trump, which the campaign scrambled so desperately to silence, might not have affected his electoral chances. Will these facts, as explained to the electorate over the course of the trial, make any difference this time around?

Donald Trump’s biographers all seem to agree that he didn’t get a lot of love from his father. But what Fred Trump did impart to his son was an indelible lesson: There are two kinds of people in the world—killers and losers—and like his father, Donald had to be a killer.In Fred Trump’s dark vision, all of life was a jungle in which the strong survive and prosper and the weak fall away. The killers take what they want, however they need to take it. Rules? Norms? Laws? Institutions? They’re for suckers. The only unpardonable sin in Trumpworld is the failure to act in your own self-interest.The son learned these lessons well. He has charmed and conned, schemed and marauded his way through life on a scale his old man could hardly have imagined. From New York real estate to the White House, Trump has flagrantly breached the guardrails that contain most of us, and has largely been rewarded for it.Until now. You could see that realization etched in the former president’s drawn and gloomy face captured in photos that emerged last week from Manhattan’s fabled Criminal Courts Building. You could sense it in his frenetic comments to reporters in the hallway outside Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, where Trump robotically recited the now-familiar word salad—“scam,” “witch hunt,” “hoax”—but did so with a trace of desperation, even fear.Trump has defied seemingly career-ending controversies before, pulling off miraculous escapes. But these are more perilous straits. While he and his supporters dismiss the hush-money trial under way as a politically motivated sham, the potential consequences for the embattled former president are very real. And he seems to know it.[George T. Conway III: The Trump trial’s extraordinary opening]A conviction could carry jail time or, at the very least, chip away at his support in a precariously tight race with President Joe Biden. And defeat in the election would likely mean that the two pending federal trials Trump has so far managed to delay would move forward—one on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election; the other for allegedly snatching a trove of highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing repeated attempts by the government to retrieve them.Those charges pose even greater risks to the former president’s reputation and freedom than Trump’s New York indictment for allegedly paying off a porn star to hide an affair from voters before the 2016 election and then burying the payment on his company’s books as normal legal expenses.All of this appears to weigh on Trump as he sits in a courtroom for the first time as a criminal defendant, away from the campaign trail and cameras, in a setting and scenario he cannot control. A man who was bred to believe that the rules don’t apply to him—and who presents himself as peerless—is left to sit silently, by edict of the court, as a jury of his peers decides his fate.All it would take, of course, is a decision by one of those jurors to spare Trump, and he, in his own, inimitable fashion, would brand a hung jury as complete vindication, using it to paint all the indictments against him as unfounded and political.[Listen: The crucial factor of the Stormy Daniels case]Trump would spin a potential conviction as well. He has already begun to do so: To Trump, the district attorney who brought the charges, Alvin Bragg— who is Black—is a craven politician, trying the former president on contrived charges for his own glory while he allows violent criminals to go free. Merchan, the judge—who is Hispanic—is biased and conflicted because he appears to have donated $15 to Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, and his daughter is a Democratic consultant. Manhattan—and, by extension, the jury—is filled with Democrats and Trump-hating liberals. President Biden orchestrated the whole production.If the jury returns a guilty verdict, we will hear it all.Yet, as Trump sits and watches the criminal trial he hoped to avoid unfold, he must know that a potential reckoning he has spent a lifetime eluding could be coming. He has been reduced to a criminal defendant in a courtroom where someone else has absolute power and the rules very definitely apply. The weariness and vulnerability captured in those courtroom images betray a growing recognition that he could wind up as the thing his old man most reviled.A convicted criminal?No, worse. A loser.

In May 1995, Pat Buchanan appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. “We have an illegal invasion of this country,” Buchanan warned. To resist it, he called for a “Buchanan Fence” patrolled by the military along the southern border, a five-year moratorium on legal immigration, and a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.The platform was designed to stave off something Buchanan had long dreaded: “If present trends hold,” he noted a few years earlier, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan was the first major politician to transform white anxiety about that prospect—which the Census Bureau first predicted in 1990—into an organizing principle for the conservative movement. (Never mind that the idea of a majority-minority tipping point is contested by social scientists, who argue that ever-changing norms about racial self-identification are blurring the numbers.) “The question we Americans need to address, before it is answered for all of us, is: Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country?” he wrote in 1990. This article has been adapted from Berman’s new book. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition.“People are just alarmed by what they see in the changes in the demographics in our country,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump surrogate, said in Iowa this year. A few weeks earlier, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”[From the October 2022 issue: The long unraveling of the Republican Party]For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity. It’s also about electoral power. Even as the GOP slowly diversifies, white Americans continue to make up a disproportionate share of its base, leading many conservatives to view nonwhite immigration as an existential threat. “Either the Republican Party puts an end to mass immigration,” Buchanan wrote in 2011, “or mass immigration will put an end to the Republican Party.”Buchanan may have been the first prominent politician to focus on the majority-minority tipping point, but the American right’s preoccupation with declining white power isn’t new; it shaped the right’s defense of slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. By the time Buchanan ran for president, it wasn’t new for him either. He’d begun politicizing white resentment at the start of his career, creating a blueprint that would prove hugely influential for the GOP.As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Buchanan helped conceive of the “southern strategy” that Republicans used to appeal to white voters who were alienated by the civil-rights movement. Buchanan counseled Nixon to ignore “liberal issues” like housing, education, and unemployment. “The second era of Reconstruction is over,” he wrote to the president in 1970. “The ship of integration is going down.”When he ran for president in the 1990s, Buchanan was still criticizing the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, trying to court revanchist white voters, such as supporters of the Klansman turned presidential candidate David Duke. He described the Voting Rights Act as “regional discrimination against the South” and visited Confederate monuments while campaigning in states such as Georgia and Mississippi. “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” he asked. “Is it not time to take America back?”Buchanan first ran for president in 1992 under the slogan “Make America First Again,” a riff on Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” He mounted a strong challenge to incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, winning more than a third of the GOP electorate. After capturing nearly 3 million votes that year, Buchanan received a coveted keynote spot at the GOP convention, where he spoke apocalyptically about “a cultural war … for the soul of America.”Although Buchanan didn’t win a single state, Republicans adopted some of his positions on immigration as the official party platform, pledging to “equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies and structures necessary to secure the border.” (Buchanan’s sister and campaign manager, Bay Buchanan, insisted that “structures” meant walls; “they don’t build lighthouses on the border,” she said.)Four years later, Buchanan ran again and won the New Hampshire primary. During the campaign, he portrayed his effort to preserve Judeo-Christian values and white power in the face of a massive demographic shift as part of America’s oldest struggle, calling his followers “the true sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers.”After he lost the nomination, Buchanan was sidelined by the GOP establishment. Instead of getting a prime-time slot at the convention, he was blocked from speaking entirely. Buchanan became disillusioned and left the GOP for Ross Perot’s Reform Party, where he briefly squared off against Trump in the 2000 primary. “Look, he’s a Hitler lover,” Trump said of Buchanan on Meet the Press in 1999. “I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the Blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.”Buchanan won the Reform nomination but received fewer than half a million votes in the general election. He spent the 2000s in the political wilderness, watching as the country’s white population grew by just 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, and the Hispanic and Asian populations by 43 percent. Every few years he published screeds with titles like The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “The people who put the GOP in power are not growing in numbers nearly as rapidly as immigrants and people of color who want them out of power,” he wrote in 2006. “The fading away of America’s white majority entails an existential crisis for the GOP.”These writings, mostly ignored at the time, appeared prophetic after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Republicans fretted over the diverse coalition assembled by the first Black president. As Buchanan became more marginalized, his ideas paradoxically found greater favor within the GOP. His concerns about white displacement, which Republican leaders had mostly tried to downplay in the 1990s and 2000s, were now being pushed into the mainstream of the party, with GOP activists questioning Obama’s claim to the presidency. “For the first time in our lifetimes, outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise,” Buchanan observed in 2010. He seemed emboldened, writing the following year that “equal justice for the emerging white minority” was more important than extending rights to formerly marginalized communities.When the RNC conducted its high-profile “autopsy” after Obama’s reelection in 2012 and urged congressional Republicans to pass immigration reform to improve the party’s standing with minority voters, Buchanan told the GOP to focus instead on courting white voters who hadn’t gone to the polls. At the start of Obama’s second term, when the Senate took up immigration reform, Buchanan warned that it would “create millions of new citizens who will vote to bury the Party of Ronald Reagan forever.”[Ronald Brownstein: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’]These views clearly influenced Trump and his advisers. In August 2014, the GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway released polling showing that white voters who were unhappy about demographic change would turn out in higher numbers if a candidate emphasized “stricter enforcement of current immigration laws” and demanded that “illegal immigrants … return to their home countries.” While Trump prepared to launch a seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, his chief strategist Steve Bannon called the missing-white-voter theory and Conway’s polling on immigration “the intellectual infrastructure” of Trump’s campaign.If Buchanan helps explain the start of Trump’s presidency, he also helps explain its culmination on January 6. One year after the insurrection, the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats released a study of the more than 700 people charged with breaching the Capitol. It had a surprising conclusion. Unlike many Republicans, the insurrectionists didn’t come from the country’s reddest or most rural counties. Instead, they were more likely to reside in counties whose white populations had experienced significant declines, such as Harris County, Texas, a majority-minority area that includes Houston. The study described a political movement “partially driven by racial cleavages and white discontent with diversifying communities.”In a larger national poll, the Chicago Project found that 8 percent of the public believed both that Joe Biden’s presidency was “illegitimate” and that force was “justified” to return Trump to power. Of these 21 million Americans, three-quarters agreed that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate … with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” Fears of a “Great Replacement” were the “most important driver of [the] insurrectionist movement,” the survey concluded.The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans, census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.This article has been adapted from Ari Berman’s new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—And the Fight to Resist It.

Any discussion of freedom must begin with a discussion of whose freedom we’re talking about. The freedom of some to harm others, or the freedom of others not to be harmed? Too often, we have not balanced the equation well: gun owners versus victims of gun violence; chemical companies versus the millions who suffer from toxic pollution; monopolistic drug companies versus patients who die or whose health worsens because they can’t afford to buy medicine.Understanding the meaning of freedom is central to creating an economic and political system that delivers not only on efficiency, equity, and sustainability but also on moral values. Freedom—understood as having inherent ties to notions of equity, justice, and well-being—is itself a central value. And it is this broad notion of freedom that has been given short shrift by powerful strands in modern economic thinking—notably the one that goes by the shorthand term neoliberalism, the belief that the freedom that matters most, and from which other freedoms indeed flow, is the freedom of unregulated, unfettered markets.F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were the most notable 20th-century defenders of unrestrained capitalism. The idea of “unfettered markets”—markets without rules and regulations—is an oxymoron because without rules and regulations enforced by government, there could and would be little trade. Cheating would be rampant, trust low. A world without restraints would be a jungle in which only power mattered, determining who got what and who did what. It wouldn’t be a market at all. This article has been adapted from Stiglitz’s new book. Nonetheless, Hayek and Friedman argued that capitalism as they interpreted it, with free and unfettered markets, was the best system in terms of efficiency, and that without free markets and free enterprise, we could not and would not have individual freedom. They believed that markets on their own would somehow remain competitive. Remarkably, they had already forgotten—or ignored—the experiences of monopolization and concentration of economic power that had led to the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). As government intervention grew in response to the Great Depression, Hayek worried that we were on “the road to serfdom,” as he put it in his 1944 book of that title; that is, on the road to a society in which individuals would become subservient to the state.[Rogé Karma: Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history]My own conclusions have been radically different. It was because of democratic demands that democratic governments, such as that of the U.S., responded to the Great Depression through collective action. The failure of governments to respond adequately to soaring unemployment in Germany led to the rise of Hitler. Today, it is neoliberalism that has brought massive inequalities and provided fertile ground for dangerous populists. Neoliberalism’s grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate deindustrialization, and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Contrary to what Friedman suggested in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, this form of capitalism does not enhance freedom in our society. Instead, it has led to the freedom of a few at the expense of the many. As Isaiah Berlin would have it: Freedom for the wolves; death for the sheep.It is remarkable that, in spite of all the failures and inequities of the current system, so many people still champion the idea of an unfettered free-market economy. This despite the daily frustrations of dealing with health-care companies, insurance companies, credit-card companies, telephone companies, landlords, airlines, and every other manifestation of modern society. When there’s a problem, ordinary citizens are told by prominent voices to “leave it to the market.” They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems that one might have thought would require society-wide action and coordination, some larger sense of the public good, and some measure of compulsion. It’s purely wishful thinking. And it’s only one side of the fairy tale. The other side is that the market is efficient and wise, and that government is inefficient and rapacious.Mindsets, once created, are hard to change. Many Americans still think of the United States as a land of opportunity. They still believe in something called the American dream, even though for decades the statistics have painted a darker picture. The rate of absolute income mobility—that is, the percentage of children who earn more than their parents—has been declining steadily since the Second World War. Of course, America should aspire to be a land of opportunity, but clinging to beliefs that are not supported by today’s realities—and that hold that markets by themselves are a solution to today’s problems—is not helpful. Economic conditions bear this out, as more Americans are coming to understand. Unfettered markets have created, or helped create, many of the central problems we face, including manifold inequalities, the climate crisis, and the opioid crisis. And markets by themselves cannot solve any of our large, collective problems. They cannot manage the massive structural changes that we are going through—including global warming, artificial intelligence, and the realignment of geopolitics.All of these issues present inconvenient truths to the free-market mindset. If externalities such as these are important, then collective action is important. But how to come to collective agreement about the regulations that govern society? Small communities can sometimes achieve a broad consensus, though typically far from unanimity. Larger societies have a harder go of it. Many of the crucial values and presumptions at play are what economists, philosophers, and mathematicians refer to as “primitives”—underlying assumptions that, although they can be debated, cannot be resolved. In America today we are divided over such assumptions, and the divisions have widened.The consequences of neoliberalism point to part of the reason: specifically, growing income and wealth disparities and the polarization caused by the media. In theory, economic freedom was supposed to be the bedrock basis for political freedom and democratic health. The opposite has proved to be true. The rich and the elites have a disproportionate voice in shaping both government policies and societal narratives. All of which leads to an enhanced sense by those who are not wealthy that the system is rigged and unfair, which makes healing divisions all the more difficult.[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds. They don’t interact. A large body of evidence shows that economic segregation is widening and has consequences, for instance, with regard to how each side thinks and feels about the other. The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps ensure that the system stays as it is.The media, including social media, provide another source of division. More and more in the hands of a very few, the media have immense power to shape societal narratives and have played an obvious role in polarization. The business model of much of the media entails stoking divides. Fox News, for instance, discovered that it was better to have a devoted right-wing audience that watched only Fox than to have a broader audience attracted to more balanced reporting. Social-media companies have discovered that it’s profitable to get engagement through enragement. Social-media sites can develop their algorithms to effectively refine whom to target even if that means providing different information to different users.Neoliberal theorists and their beneficiaries may be happy to live with all this. They are doing very well by it. They forget that, for all the rhetoric, free markets can’t function without strong democracies beneath them—the kind of democracies that neoliberalism puts under threat. In a very direct way, neoliberal capitalism is devouring itself.Not only are neoliberal economies inefficient at dealing with collective issues, but neoliberalism as an economic system is not sustainable on its own. To take one fundamental element: A market economy runs on trust. Adam Smith himself emphasized the importance of trust, recognizing that society couldn’t survive if people brazenly followed their own self-interest rather than good codes of conduct: The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions … Upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct. For instance, contracts have to be honored. The cost of enforcing every single contract through the courts would be unbearable. And with no trust in the future, why would anybody save or invest? The incentives of neoliberal capitalism focus on self-interest and material well-being, and have done much to weaken trust. Without adequate regulation, too many people, in the pursuit of their own self-interest, will conduct themselves in an untrustworthy way, sliding to the edge of what is legal, overstepping the bounds of what is moral. Neoliberalism helps create selfish and untrustworthy people. A “businessman” like Donald Trump can flourish for years, even decades, taking advantage of others. If Trump were the norm rather than the exception, commerce and industry would grind to a halt.We also need regulations and laws to make sure that there are no concentrations of economic power. Business seeks to collude and would do so even more in the absence of antitrust laws. But even playing within current guardrails, there’s a strong tendency for the agglomeration of power. The neoliberal ideal of free, competitive markets would, without government intervention, be evanescent.We’ve also seen that those with power too often do whatever they can to maintain it. They write the rules to sustain and enhance power, not to curb or diminish it. Competition laws are eviscerated. Enforcement of banking and environmental laws is weakened. In this world of neoliberal capitalism, wealth and power are ever ascendant.Neoliberalism undermines the sustainability of democracy—the opposite of what Hayek and Friedman intended or claimed. We have created a vicious circle of economic and political inequality, one that locks in more freedom for the rich and leaves less for the poor, at least in the United States, where money plays such a large role in politics.[Read: When Milton Friedman ran the show]There are many ways in which economic power gets translated into political power and undermines the fundamental democratic value of one person casting one vote. The reality is that some people’s voices are much louder than others. In some countries, accruing power is as crude as literally buying votes, with the wealthy having more money to buy more votes. In advanced countries, the wealthy use their influence in the media and elsewhere to create self-serving narratives that in turn become the conventional wisdom. For instance, certain rules and regulations and government interventions—tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, deregulation of key industries—that are purely in the interest of the rich and powerful are also, it is said, in the national interest. Too often that viewpoint is swallowed wholesale. If persuasion doesn’t work, there is always fear: If the banks are not bailed out, the economic system will collapse, and everyone will be worse off. If the corporate tax rate is not cut, firms will leave and go to other jurisdictions that are more business-friendly.Is a free society one in which a few dictate the terms of engagement? In which a few control the major media and use that control to decide what the populace sees and hears? We now inhabit a polarized world in which different groups live in different universes, disagreeing not only on values but on facts.A strong democracy can’t be sustained by neoliberal economics for a further reason. Neoliberalism has given rise to enormous “rents”—the monopoly profits that are a major source of today’s inequalities. Much is at stake, especially for many in the top one percent, centered on the enormous accretion of wealth that the system has allowed. Democracy requires compromise if it is to remain functional, but compromise is difficult when there is so much at stake in terms of both economic and political power.A free-market, competitive, neoliberal economy combined with a liberal democracy does not constitute a stable equilibrium—not without strong guardrails and a broad societal consensus on the need to curb wealth inequality and money’s role in politics. The guardrails come in many forms, such as competition policy, to prevent the creation, maintenance, and abuse of market power. We need checks and balances, not just within government, as every schoolchild in the U.S. learns, but more broadly within society. Strong democracy, with widespread participation, is also part of what is required, which means working to strike down laws intended to decrease democratic participation or to gerrymander districts where politicians will never lose their seats.Whether America’s political and economic system today has enough safeguards to sustain economic and political freedoms is open to serious question.Under the very name of freedom, neoliberals and their allies on the radical right have advocated policies that restrict the opportunities and freedoms, both political and economic, of the many in favor of the few. All these failures have hurt large numbers of people around the world, many of whom have responded by turning to populism, drawn to authoritarian figures like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi.Perhaps we should not be surprised by where the U.S. has landed. It is a country now so divided that even a peaceful transition of power is difficult, where life expectancy is the lowest among advanced nations, and where we can’t agree about truth or how it might best be ascertained or verified. Conspiracy theories abound. The values of the Enlightenment have to be relitigated daily.There are good reasons to worry whether America’s form of ersatz capitalism and flawed democracy is sustainable. The incongruities between lofty ideals and stark realities are too great. It’s a political system that claims to cherish freedom above all else but in many ways is structured to deny or restrict freedoms for many of its citizens.I do believe that there is broad consensus on key elements of what constitutes a good and decent society, and on what kind of economic system supports that society. A good society, for instance, must live in harmony with nature. Our current capitalism has made a mess of this. A good society allows individuals to flourish and live up to their potential. In terms of education alone, our current capitalism is failing large portions of the population. A good economic system would encourage people to be honest and empathetic, and foster the ability to cooperate with others. The current capitalist system encourages the antithesis.But the key first step is changing our mindset. Friedman and Hayek argued that economic and political freedoms are intimately connected, with the former necessary for the latter. But the economic system that has evolved—largely under the influence of these thinkers and others like them—undermines meaningful democracy and political freedom. In the end, it will undermine the very neoliberalism that has served them so well.For a long time, the right has tried to establish a monopoly over the invocation of freedom, almost as a trademark. It’s time to reclaim the word.This article has been adapted from Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.

Once U.S. money starts flowing again, the dynamics of the war will change.