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On the Money is a monthly advice column. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. Here, we answer two questions asked by Vox readers, which have been edited and condensed. Where do I begin with investing? How does the stock market work and how do I get into investing in stocks? How do I budget without it being too strict? How do I go about smartly saving? Dear Future Investor, These questions are best answered in reverse order, so let’s begin. Smartly saving money — which is something you’ll need to do before you can start investing — comes down to the difference between your income and your expenses. Many people are unable to save because their expenses exceed their income, and spend much of their financial energy digging out of credit card debt. Other people are able to save small amounts of money, but not enough to get them out of the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. (One or two missed paychecks, or the equivalent in unexpected expenses, would empty them out of everything they’ve saved.) Budgeting is one of the more effective ways to lower your expenses and save more money, particularly if you really are overspending in certain areas of your life. (Overspending, in this case, would involve making purchases that bring neither utility nor pleasure. Clothing you don’t wear, games you don’t play, food you throw out, and so on.) However, many people aren’t actually overspending, which is why their budgets feel overly strict.  That said, there are plenty of good reasons to take a look at how much you’re earning and how much you’re spending. You might as well draft up a budget just to see how you’re doing. Any of the popular budgeting apps will help you get the job done. I use YNAB, which lets you forecast how many of your future expenses you can pay with your current income. If you’re interested in tracking both your budget and your investment portfolio, you might want to try Monarch Money. Cleo is a budgeting app that uses AI to help you decide what you can afford to buy, although I haven’t used it myself so I can’t specifically recommend it. If you want to go the DIY route, you can open a spreadsheet and start tracking earnings in one column and expenses in another — I’ve budgeted that way for years, and it works. Once you’ve done a top-level assessment of your finances, one of two things may happen. Either you’ll say, “Wow! I could save hundreds of dollars every month if I simply stopped buying all of this stuff I never use!” or you’ll say — and this is the more likely scenario — “Um, it kind of looks like I need everything I buy.”  This brings me to the most effective way to save more money, which is by earning more money.  Some people earn more money by increasing their skills. Others turn an existing skillset into a side hustle. You may even be able to leverage your current skills into a raise, a promotion, or a better-paying job. You may also be able to earn more money by investing. A lot of people turn to the stock market because they believe it’s the best way to earn enough money to achieve their biggest financial goals, whether they’re using a Roth IRA to save for retirement or a 529 Plan to save for college. Other people successfully use the market as a way to achieve smaller financial goals, such as saving up enough money for a down payment on a home. (A few people try to use the market as a get-rich-quick tool, and most of them fail.)  When you purchase stock in a company, you are predicting that the company issuing that stock will be more valuable in the future than it is right now. When you purchase a share in a total-market index fund — which essentially allows you to purchase a representative portion of everything the market has to offer — you are predicting that the entire market will be more valuable in the future than it is right now.  You are also, in a sense, helping to fund the growth of the companies and entities in which you are investing — which is one of the reasons why many people choose to invest in companies that are meeting social or environmental benchmarks.  Once you invest your money, it’s gone. Literally. You’ve exchanged your money for the stock or ETF or index fund, and you cannot count any of the numbers in your investment app as part of your net worth — no matter how high they get — until you exchange your stock for money, which is called “realizing” your investment.  In other words, and I cannot emphasize this enough — you have to sell your stock for its value to become reality. There are two reasons to sell an investment: The value of your investment is enough for you to meet a specific financial goal, such as homeownership or retirement. You believe the investment will be worth less in the future than it is worth right now. Read more from On the Money Should you combine finances with your partner? How to cope with inflation and lifestyle creep How are you supposed to start investing? Do you have questions related to personal finance? Submit them here. In either case, you are at an advantage if you sell early. The first person to realize the value of their investments makes more money than the second person (who makes more money than the third person and so on). Every sale reduces the total value of the investment, and the value won’t start to go back up again until there are more buyers than sellers. This can get complicated really fast, which is why a lot of people navigate the bulls and bears of the stock market by following a strategy called “buy and hold.” Simply put, they believe that the long-term future of the market will be better than the present even if there are ups and downs in between.  The trouble is that every once in a while the market crashes — and although it has historically always rebounded, it takes a while to get those numbers back to where they were. During the Great Recession, for example, it took about four years for the market to recover. If you needed to sell your investments during those four years, perhaps to cover an income gap due to unemployment, you might have found yourself at a loss. This is one of the reasons why financial advisers recommend saving a three-to-six-month emergency fund before getting started with investing. Since we all know how difficult it can be to save up six months of expenses, some people choose to invest small amounts of cash specifically to build up their emergency fund, then sell the investments and transfer the money into a high-yield savings account or CD ladder. At that point, they can begin an investing strategy that could help them achieve longer-term financial goals. After all of that, investing is the simple part, all things considered. It’s a matter of picking a brokerage and installing an app. From there, you can open an account, follow a series of prompts that are designed to help you build an investment portfolio, and decide how much money you can afford to invest. Some people choose to get a financial adviser involved, but you don’t have to — there have been plenty of studies on whether the average investor benefits from an actively managed portfolio, and it turns out that passive management may be just as effective. (In other words, picking an index fund and sticking with it could be just as good as buying and selling a bunch of different stocks and/or hiring someone to buy and sell your stocks for you.) You might want to do some research before you choose your brokerage and your portfolio, but you could also pick one of the more popular options and set yourself up with whatever they recommend. The amount of work you put into your investment decisions is entirely up to you. Some people read everything Warren Buffett ever wrote. Other people spend part of every day having conversations on investment forums. Most people simply let their investing app guide them toward a balanced portfolio, which is perfectly fine! You don’t have to master the art of investing to earn a modest return on your investment.  On the other hand, if you find the market fascinating and want to invest both time and money into understanding it, go ahead. Buy low and sell high, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose, and remember that past performance does not guarantee future results.

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International affairs rarely determine how Americans vote in presidential elections, but this year could be different. The Biden administration’s policies toward the war raging in the Middle East have divided Democrats and drawn criticism from Republicans. Whether the administration has supported Israel’s military response to last October’s Hamas attack too much or too little, how it has responded to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and whether it has done enough to broker an end to the fighting all may influence the decisions of some voters in swing states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.Kamala Harris spoke out about the situation in the Middle East quickly upon becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and has been scrutinized continually since for daylight between her stance and Joe Biden’s. But what about Donald Trump? If he wins the presidency in November, how will he approach Israel, the war in Gaza, and the conflict now spreading to southern Lebanon and Iran?[Read: Does Kamala Harris have a vision for the Middle East?]Over the past several months, I have combed through the public record and spoken with former Trump-administration officials in search of the answer. What I learned is that, compared with the Biden administration, a second Trump administration would probably be more permissive toward the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and less inclined to bring U.S. leverage to bear in shaping Israeli conduct (as the U.S. government recently did by warning Israel that it could lose military assistance if it doesn’t provide more humanitarian aid to Gaza). In fact, a second Trump administration’s Middle East policies would likely focus more on confronting Iran and broadening Israeli-Arab diplomatic normalization than on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This approach would be in keeping with Trump’s policies as president and the views of many of his Middle East advisers.The wild card in all of this, however, is Trump himself. On some issues, the former president has views that can be documented back to the 1980s—that the United States is getting a raw deal in free-trade agreements and alliances, for example—but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not one of them. And just how he will choose his policies, based on what concerns, is not entirely predictable.“Trump does not think in policy terms,” even though “the people around him may,” John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, told me this past May. “I don’t think he has any philosophy at all.” Bolton, who has emerged as a critic of the former president, described Trump as “ad hoc and transactional,” drawn above all to the “idea of making the bigger deal.” And if these are the terms in which he sees his Middle East policies, rather than filtered through a particular outlook on geopolitics or national security, the old investment adage may apply: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.When I reached out to the Trump campaign with direct questions about the candidate’s likely approach to the war in Gaza and the Middle East more broadly, I didn’t receive a response. And the Republican Party’s more than 5,000-word 2024 platform doesn’t offer many clues. It contains just one line on the conflict—“We will stand with Israel, and seek peace in the Middle East”—and makes no mention of Gaza or the Palestinians. So a look at Trump’s recent public statements seemed in order.On the stump, Trump has boasted that he is “the best friend that Israel has ever had,” based on a record as president that includes imposing a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and negotiating the Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab countries normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. With regard to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, and the expanding regional conflagration, however, Trump’s most consistent remark is that none of it would have happened on his watch, because Iran was “broke” on account of sanctions he imposed and therefore couldn’t have funded terrorist groups.[David Frum: The defeat-Harris, get-Trump politics of protest]What that line of argument has going for it is that it’s impossible to prove wrong. But it’s also impossible to prove right. The attack and the ensuing conflicts have happened. So what might Trump do about it? Here he has sent mixed messages, initially saying that the best course was to let this war “play out,” then pivoting to his now-frequent call for Israel to quickly finish it up. “I will give Israel the support that it needs to win, but I do want them to win fast,” Trump declared in August, criticizing what he described as the Biden administration’s demands for “an immediate cease-fire” that would “tie Israel’s hand behind its back” and “give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7–style attack.”Trump doesn’t want a cease-fire, he’s made clear, but he does want the fire to cease: “You have to have that ended, one way or the other,” he stated last month when asked about the war spreading from Gaza to Lebanon. “The whole thing over there is unacceptable.” In an April interview, he declined to say whether he’d consider withholding or conditioning military aid to Israel. Even regarding his personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has demonstrated dueling impulses—airing grievances that could complicate their future relations, asserting that Netanyahu “rightfully has been criticized” for being unprepared for the October 7 attack, welcoming him to Mar-a-Lago in July while lauding their “great relationship,” and declaring that “Bibi has been very strong.”As Bolton sees it, if a singular ideological purpose is hard to discern from this welter of signals, that may be because Trump’s posture toward Israel is driven more by self-interest than anything else. Trump has said “that he wished the Israelis would get it over with, which could be interpreted two ways: one, finish off Hamas, or two, withdraw from Gaza,” Bolton noted when we spoke earlier this year. “And I don’t think he really cares which one. He just knows that the Israelis are under criticism. He has defended Israel, and he’s worried he’s going to be under criticism for defending Israel. And he doesn’t want to be under criticism.”Robert Greenway, who served on Trump’s National Security Council as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs, told me this past spring that he believes a second Trump administration would have a strategy for the region—just not one that revolves around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which is not to say that Trump would back away from supporting Israel’s war in Gaza or its defense against Iranian-sponsored groups; quite the contrary, Greenway made clear. But Greenway, who was one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, outlined U.S. national-security interests in the Middle East as follows: “Stability of global markets—that’s energy and trade—counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and counterterrorism, in that order. What I did not state in there as a vital national-security interest is the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Because it’s not.”I asked Greenway whether a second Trump administration would have a plan to address the aftermath of the war in a devastated Gaza. He gestured toward a “collective, regional response to both security and reconstruction.” But to his mind, the effects of the war on energy and trade markets will be the more urgent American concerns.Given these priorities, Trump and his advisers don’t necessarily believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cornerstone of regional security, nor are they likely to press an unwilling Israel to embrace such an outcome. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner did characterize the Middle East peace plan that he rolled out during Trump’s presidency as an effort “to save the two-state solution,” but the proposal was widely viewed as favorable to Israel’s positions. When asked during the first presidential debate whether he would support establishing a Palestinian state, Trump equivocated. “I’d have to see,” he said.[David A. Graham: Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness]In the Middle East, the focus of a second Trump administration, according to Greenway, would be on confronting threats from Iran and its proxies while improving relations between Israel and Arab states. Bolton predicted that Kuwait or Qatar could be among the next states to normalize relations with Israel. And then there’s Saudi Arabia. Biden-administration officials have so far unsuccessfully sought a grand bargain that would fold a Gaza cease-fire into an Israeli-Saudi normalization arrangement. The Biden proposals have included U.S.-Saudi security and nuclear pacts and an Israeli commitment to a pathway for a Palestinian state. But Bolton said he could envision a second Trump administration unbundling these items, particularly once the war in Gaza ends and there is less pressure on the Saudis to demand a commitment to a Palestinian state as part of a diplomatic deal with Israel. The Israelis and Saudis might pursue normalization without progress on a two-state solution, for instance, while the United States brokers a separate, bilateral defense deal with Saudi Arabia.When Trump was president, his administration approached the Middle East in exactly this fashion. As Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s former Middle East envoy, reflected in a 2023 podcast regarding the genesis of the Abraham Accords, the administration deliberately “broke” apart the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts to see if it could “solve” one or both of them that way. “I think we proved that separating the conflicts allows reality to set in and improves the lives of many people without holding them back by the Palestinian conflict,” he contended.Bolton maintains that for Trump himself, a far more significant factor than any past policy position is the lure of the big deal. That might even extend to striking an agreement with Iran. Trump made his hard-line stance on Iran the signature element of his administration’s Middle East record. But during a podcast appearance in June, Trump mused, “I would have made a fair deal with Iran,” and “I was going to get along with Iran,” so long as Iran agreed to not develop a nuclear-weapons capability (by many assessments, Iran is now a threshold nuclear-weapons state). He added, remarkably, that “eventually Iran would have been in the Abraham Accords.”Trump made these comments before reports emerged of Iranian efforts to assassinate him and hack his campaign. Yet even after all of that, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, Trump expressed openness to striking a new nuclear agreement with Tehran. Just days later, after Iranian leaders walked right up to the brink of war with Israel with their second direct attack on the country, Trump criticized Biden for opposing Israeli retaliation against Iranian nuclear sites, underscoring just how wide Trump’s Overton window is when it comes to policy toward Iran and the Middle East more broadly.“The idea that [Trump] will be ‘death to Iran’ when he takes office in the second term is not accurate,” Bolton told me in May. Trump is attracted to the notion of “being the guy who went to Tehran or Pyongyang,” he argued. “I’ll bet you a dollar right now, if he’s elected, he’ll end up in one or both of those places in his first year in office.”Could the appeal of the deal overcome a Trump administration’s calculations about the importance of peace between Israelis and Palestinians relative to other U.S. interests in the region? During Trump’s first term, Kushner’s effort to broker a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians failed. Kushner has said that he does not expect to join a second Trump administration, but Bolton told me that he can imagine Trump dusting off those plans if Kushner has second thoughts: “Now, whether he would really get into it when he realizes what trying to make a deal in the Middle East is like is a different question.”Trump casts himself as the consummate dealmaker no matter how daunting the deal, but even he seems to suspect that a solution between Israelis and Palestinians is beyond him. “There was a time when I thought two states could work,” he has noted, but “now I think two states is going to be very, very tough.” Given that assessment, the backdrop of a devastating and still-unfolding war, and the low priority that Greenway suggests a second Trump administration would place on the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace, the agreement that Trump once described as the “ultimate deal” would likely prove elusive, yet again.

Colombia is hosting COP16 this year, and its environmental minister, Susana Muhamad, is leading the event. | Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images Starting this week, thousands of people will descend on the Colombian city of Cali for an important meeting you may have never heard of: COP16.  This event is a big deal.  Commonly known as the UN biodiversity summit, COP16 is a meeting of government official from around the world — likely including some heads of state — to figure out how to stop ecological collapse. COP, which stands for “conference of the parties,” brings together environmental leaders and officials from countries that are part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty under the UN to conserve nature. They meet every other year to push forward a conservation agenda.  The last summit, known as COP15, was arguably much more important. During the event, held in 2022, nearly all countries of the world agreed on a groundbreaking new deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. The deal has 23 targets, including conserving at least 30 percent of land and oceans and reducing annual subsidies that harm ecosystems by at least $500 billion. Experts hailed it as the Paris agreement for nature, the global treaty to combat climate change.  COP16, which runs from October 21 through November 1, won’t have the same sort of flashy outcome. Yet it’s a critical moment as countries assess their progress toward the 23 targets and hold each other accountable.  Spoiler: They’re way off track. A new report, for example, found that less than 3 percent of the ocean is effectively protected from harmful activities, like overfishing. Subsidies that harm nature have only ballooned in recent years, reaching into the trillions of dollars. What’s more is that many countries have failed to meet a deadline to submit plans for how they aim to achieve the objectives of the nature deal, known as the global biodiversity framework, within their own borders.  Beyond serving as a formal check-in, COP16 will center a few major issues. To understand the biggest stakes of these negotiations, we’ve compiled our reporting below. Inside the extremely messy, profoundly confusing fight over who should profit from DNA One of the major issues to take center stage at this month’s negotiations is how best to manage DNA from plants and animals that’s found in online databases. This genetic data, referred to as digital sequence information, or DSI, is used by a range of companies to create products such as vaccines and drought-tolerant crops. We explain this thorny issue here. The global plan to save nature has a $700 billion hole In Cali, global leaders will be discussing how to address a major funding gap and how to raise funds needed for critical conservation. Negotiations will focus on what role governments and the private sector — companies and investors — will need to play. Read our coverage on this here.  A new report reveals “catastrophic” declines of animals worldwide — but is it accurate? Another major part of this year’s summit will be a discussion about how to monitor progress toward achieving the 23 targets in the global monitoring framework. This includes figuring out what data to use to check if the world has, say, actually conserved 30 percent of all land. Read Vox’s story about one of the indicators, the Living Planet Index, here. Why the US won’t join the single most important treaty to protect nature One important piece of context to keep in mind is that although the US helped negotiate the Convention on Biological Diversity — the treaty under which COP16 takes place — it’s not a formal member of the agreement. In fact, the US is the only country, other than the Vatican, that’s not party to the Convention. I wrote about what that means here. Keep in mind this story was published in 2021. Reach out! Next week I’ll be in Colombia following these major themes. If you have feedback or ideas for our coverage, please get in touch.

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The left’s hopes for sweeping change from the 2010s have crashed into the reality of the 2020s. The energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the George Floyd protests is a distant memory. Some members of the Squad have moved toward the Democratic mainstream, while others lost primaries. Several of the progressive prosecutors elected in recent years have been ousted from office (by voters or due to scandals) or appear headed that way.  In Democrat-dominated spaces — like cities and mainstream media outlets — there’s been growing pushback against the left. Ambitious progressive rallying cries of just a few years ago, such as defunding the police and Medicare-for-all, are now absent from the discourse. Politicians who assiduously cultivated left activists are now increasingly tacking to the center — most notably Vice President Kamala Harris, who has abandoned many of the positions she took while running in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary.  Altogether, it’s seemed that progressives have moved from being on the offensive to being on the defensive — in both politics and the nation’s culture. Of course, it’s not as if progressives’ gains over the past 20 years or so have been entirely wiped away. The Democratic Party remains significantly further to the left than it was a decade ago and certainly two decades ago (see, for instance, my recent article about the rise of the New Progressive Economics).  Yet, as bloggers Noah Smith and Tyler Cowen have argued, there are growing indications that the leftward drift of the party and of the country’s culture broadly has stopped. On some fronts, there has indeed been a reversal. “No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right,” Semafor’s David Weigel argued last week, citing “immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies, and criminal justice reform” as issues where progressives are on the defensive. Being on the defensive is not new for the left — it’s the historical norm. Bursts of activist energy and successful reform are typically followed by long stretches where either the new status quo persists or a backlash reverses at least some recent change.  Still, it’s certainly a shift from how politics has looked for most of the 21st century. So how and why did this change happen? Why did the progressive advance happen in the first place, and why did it stop? The era of rising progressive ambitions lasted from about 2005 to 2020 Historical periodization is a tricky thing, but here’s a rough attempt at it. From about 1980 to 2005, the left was mostly irrelevant to national politics. The Cold War was over, and capitalism reigned ascendant. The Republican Party moved right, while the Democratic Party moved to the center. The country cracked down on criminals, unauthorized immigrants, and non-working welfare recipients. 9/11 made patriotism mandatory. Same-sex marriage was viewed as politically toxic. But 2005 to 2020 was, broadly, a period where progressives and the left became increasingly influential inside the Democratic Party, in Democrat-dominated spaces, and in the larger culture. Call it the era of rising progressive ambitions. The disasters of George W. Bush’s second term kicked off the shift, discrediting Republican governance. This enabled the election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whose agenda was strikingly ambitious and progressive when compared to the Clinton years. Democrats’ leftward shift accelerated in the 2010s, which saw: The increased cultural influence of the social justice left, which transformed how much of the country thought and spoke about racial and gender issues (“the Great Awokening”) The launch of viral protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too The nationwide spread and Supreme Court’s protection of same-sex marriage rights, followed by increased advocacy for trans rights The rise of more economically progressive and even democratic socialist politicians, as seen in the support for Sanders’s campaigns, the Squad’s arrival in Congress, and party leaders’ embrace of some of Elizabeth Warren’s ideas A leftward move of mainstream Democrats on issues like immigration and criminal justice, where activists had made the case that status quo policies were cruel and harmful Increased public discussion about causes like Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, and student loan forgiveness Basically, on a host of issues, the “Overton window” — the boundaries of which political and policy ideas are deemed fit for mainstream discussion, rather than fringe or self-evidently absurd — opened far further left. Trump’s election didn’t stop the left’s rising influence. Indeed, it intensified it, raising the stakes of politics and heightening passions. (Trump’s rise simultaneously opened the Overton window further right on some issues, as leading Republicans increasingly embraced bigotry and flouted democratic norms.) The assumption spread among Democrats that the establishment’s approach had failed and that bold new progressive ideas were necessary. During the party’s 2020 presidential primary, most candidates — including Harris — scrambled to the left, wooing activist groups. Joe Biden, the most old-school major contender, won, but rather than a full-on pivot to the center for the general election, he embraced much of the progressive agenda. It was a political necessity for helming the Democratic Party of 2020. That year then brought further chaos as the country battled over the pandemic and the election, while the George Floyd protests led to a racial reckoning that played out in communities, companies, and institutions in intense and often controversial fashion. The backlash and disillusionment of the 2020s Things feel different in the Biden years. In part that’s due to the constraints and disappointments that always exist when a party tries to turn a bold campaign agenda into governing reality. Narrow congressional majorities limited Democrats’ legislative possibilities (and then they lost the House). The conservative Supreme Court, meanwhile, blocked some Biden actions like student loan forgiveness and rolled back abortion rights protections. But the trend was broader. Democrats in cities disavowed police cuts as they struggled with rising crime and complained they couldn’t handle a migrant influx. Corporations have laid off DEI workers. Mainstream media companies, increasingly influenced by progressive causes (and sensitive to left criticism) in the 2010s, are now more forthrightly asserting their journalistic independence and challenging progressive ideas. Activism in protest of Israel was met with fierce pushback at universities. Commentators started declaring that “wokeness” had peaked as social justice controversies grew less intense and frequent. The common thread is that the Democratic Party, corporations, and the media have all become less deferential to the progressives who’d been trying to push them left. And the main reason for that, I’d argue, is a spreading sense among many who are in the center, center-left, or politically neutral that the left has overreached or screwed up. Indeed, one reason for the left’s 21st-century resurgence was that, at that point, they’d been irrelevant for so long that it was difficult to blame any of the country’s current problems on them. The flaws of centrism, neoliberalism, and conservatism seemed glaring and obvious, while left and progressive ideas simply hadn’t really been tried for some time.  But by 2020 the left’s influence on our politics and culture had become quite significant. And though Trump’s critics had been united around the common cause of ousting him when he was in power, once he left office, those with misgivings about recent trends felt freed up to focus more on them. The right got more effective at stoking these misgivings. Conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target helped send a message that it was risky for corporations to get too political. Elon Musk bought Twitter — which had been so central to the social justice trends of the 2010s — and turned it into the right-wing-friendly X. Christopher Rufo helped stoke a nationwide war on DEI. Yet Democrats and progressives also simply had a hard time dealing with various challenging governance problems. The post-pandemic years have been a tough time to be in power: Incumbent parties have been struggling around the world. But in the US, progressive ideas were blamed, fairly or unfairly, for causing or worsening problems like inflation, border chaos, and crime.  Some commentators who’d previously been aligned with progressives now had second thoughts. “I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years,” Smith wrote in his Substack newsletter last week. He said he now believed some of those policies were bad ideas, others suffered from “botched implementation,” and yet others simply had no path to broader political popularity.  (Smith is just one of many commentators who have become increasingly critical of the left in recent years.) To what extent has the broader public turned against the left? I’m hesitant to generalize about public opinion, which contains many conflicting strains. Immigration is the issue where the clearest backlash to progressive ideas is seen in polling; on other issues (like the economy), dissatisfaction is harder to disentangle from Biden’s record. Though some stalwart progressives have lost primaries, others have held on without difficulty. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did quite well in swing states. But the GOP gained ground in blue states like New York, which could suggest a frustration with governance in deep blue areas.  Overall, though, Harris’s positioning clearly reflects a belief that many of her left positions of four years ago would be electorally detrimental in 2024. All of this has happened before Meanwhile, there’s also been a conspicuous decline of energy and intensity among progressive activists. While many certainly remain committed to their longtime causes, others have disengaged or shifted their focus to opposing Israel’s war in Gaza (an issue that bitterly divides the Democratic Party and where Democratic leaders are disinclined to embrace the left). Perhaps if Trump wins, progressive energy would surge again in opposing him — but perhaps too many people are now burned out and apathetic, and the mobilization won’t match the bygone days of Trump’s first term. And a backlash against Trump’s governance would not necessarily spur the Democrats to resume their leftward march. Activists naturally get disappointed and disengaged when major change proves elusive.  “Every major social movement of the past 20 years has undergone a significant collapse,” the activist Bill Moyer wrote in 1987, “in which activists believed that their movements had failed, the power institutions were too powerful, and their own efforts were futile.” Fatigue, burnout, and organizational crisis then ensue; some move on to new causes. But Moyer argued that that is not, necessarily, the end of the story for such movements. The next step, he wrote, was for activists to pivot and to focus on the long, slow slog of changing public opinion in their favor. So one possibility is that we’re headed for a political situation resembling the late 20th century, where the left is weakened and politically irrelevant for years if not decades. That’s no sure thing, though. The challenge for the progressives now is regrouping around ideas and causes that can both energize activists and win popular support — while addressing doubts that have arisen about their competence.  If they can pull that off, this period of left decline may prove to be just a blip. If not, their stay in the political wilderness could be a long one.

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