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Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing

its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.

Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.

As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.

The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.

But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.

decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.

And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty

One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.

Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.

Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.

An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control

Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.

As Douglass argued, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”

Acts of intimidation are as grave a threat to free speech as restrictive government policies. Again, Douglass said it well: “There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”

this latest effort provoked a response that was swift and scathing and revealed something new: the existence of a tightknit group of scholars who are clamoring for more empathetic political analyses of rural Americans.

“We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins,’” said Mr. Jacobs, a co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”

There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.

It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote.

Even if that shift does hint that “rural” may now be its own kind of identity, it’s a cohort that’s hard to define.

The Census Bureau classifies any community as rural if it isn’t within an urban area, meaning it is not part of a densely settled area with 5,000 or more people or 2,000 or more housing units. (In the 2020 census, 20 percent of Americans were classified as rural.)

Beyond these basic definitional problems, rural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,”

“I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”

Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, like race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.

Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.

Thomas Frank in his best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.

a handful of academics were so frustrated with the book that it inspired them to pursue their own research.

Ms. Cramer came to a different understanding from Mr. Frank’s of why people voted the way they did: Rural Americans resented city dwellers. They believed that national and state governments had enriched urban areas at the expense of rural ones, taking note of all the road-building in Madison, for example, when they drove to sports games.

Their reaction was hostility toward the very idea of government, so they supported politicians who promised to keep it out of their lives; Ms. Cramer called this “the politics of resentment.”

Ms. Cramer’s 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment,” quickly became an anchor in the growing field of rural political studies. At least half a dozen academics credit her with foundational thinking for their research.

“A lot of the focus has been on ‘What’s wrong with those people?’” she said. “But most people studying what’s going on with rural political behavior are people with empathy for people who live in rural places. They aren’t discounting them as ignorant or uninformed. There’s more of an attempt to understand the way they’re seeing the world.”

When Mr. Jacobs decided this year to convene a group of 15 scholars for a conference called Rethinking Rural, he was struck by the flurry of excitement that greeted the invitations. “It was like the first time they’d been asked to the dance,”

What rankled the experts who had read “White Rural Rage” was what they considered slapdash analysis. The authors build some arguments on polls with sample sizes as small as 167 rural people. The book is filled with critiques of rural Americans — their resistance to pluralism, their willingness to embrace conspiracies — that apply to many groups and that some scholars reject because they are not based on the long-term observation they say is needed to truly understand the political motives of any community.

Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.

Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.

That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often,

“If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”

Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?

As millions left rural areas seeking economic opportunity, an appreciation formed for the businesspeople who stayed and tried to create jobs. That led to an outsize influence by local business leaders in the political realm, driving support for anti-union laws and tax policies generous to businesses.

Broadly, rural Americans see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper

So the resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere.

“Rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms,” he wrote in Politico. “Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”

And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide.

“I would have to say Tolkien,” Vance said. “I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.” He added of Tolkien’s colleague: “Big fan of C.S. Lewis — really sort of like that era of English writers. I think they were really interesting. They were grappling, in part because of World War II, with just very big problems.”

In the books, the future of civilization rests on the search and eventual destruction of The One Ring. While Frodo and Gollum jostle over the singular ring, true fans know there are a total of 20 rings of power. Vance is apparently among those ranks, as the venture capital firm he founded in 2019 is named Narya, named after one of those other rings that Gandalf wears. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel similarly named his company Palantir after the crystal ball used by Saruman in Lord of the Rings, and Vance has invested in the defense startup Anduril, named after Aragorn’s sword.

“By the time of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Narya has been entrusted to Gandalf to resist the corrupting influence of evil, preserve the world from decay, and give strength to its wielder,”

“Gandalf, unlike the other great powers in Lord of the Rings, cared for the hobbits and other lowly people of Middle-Earth, and so it is unsurprising that Vance would see himself as a kind of Gandalf, caring for the forgotten people of his hometown, keeping a watchful eye on them against the corrupting effects of the world.”

Luke Burgis, author of a book about René Girard (another of Vance’s intellectual heroes) and Catholic University of America professor, said he suspects “Vance’s appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.” (At a closed-door speech in September 2021, Vance said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.)

Vance likely took away from Tolkien “an apocalyptic frame of mind” Burgis told me, a final and all-encompassing battle between good and evil

The books have a definite anti-war streak. In the Two Towers, the second of the trilogy, Tolkien wrote: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

Vance has said his own time in the Marines deployed in Iraq was formative to his isolationist, dovish approach to foreign policy. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance once recounted. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

But his fandom also is in tension with some of Tolkien’s ideas about how nation-states should approach the outside world. The books are, in many ways, anti-isolationist. Frodo wants to ignore the ill tidings and stay home but eventually realizes that the Shire isn’t untouched by troubles elsewhere (like, say, NATO being pulled into defending Ukraine from Sauron Putin). In the end, Rohan, Gondor, the elves, ents and dwarves, all must band together and end their petty nationalist squabbles. Their lives are, they realize, interconnected.

Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni used to cosplay as a hobbit. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” she has said, though unlike Vance she has supported aid to Ukraine.

Rick Santorum, the former senator and two-time GOP presidential candidate, is a fellow Tolkien-pilled Catholic but he has different takeaways from Vance.

“I’m a huge Tolkien fan,” he continued. “I’m also someone who believes that the message of Tolkien is that evil must be confronted. And so the idea is that well, we can wait until it comes to the Shire, but that is not a very good game plan. You gotta go to Mordor.”

All of this points to intellectual and spiritual tensions Vance still seems to be working out. “He’s been in office a year and a half. He’s never been greatly involved in politics before this,” Santorum said. “I suspect that this is one of the reasons Trump may have picked him: JD is a smart guy but is still a work in progress.”

Those close to Vance say he has been undergoing an awakening since he converted to Catholicism in 2019.

Conservative writer Rod Dreher, who Vance invited to his initiation to the faith in 2019 and was present for his first communion, told me that Vance “is thinking broadly about how all must join in the great struggle against darkness — there is no avoiding the struggle — and how God can use the humble and the lowborn to do great things.”

“Think about it: Who would have imagined that sad, scared little Ohio boy living in a wreck of a family would have come through it all, and risen to the gates of supreme political power? What might God be doing with him? J.D. Vance might be Frodo of the Hollers, a veritable hillbilly hobbit.”

What is A.I. even for?

“A.I. slop”: often uncanny, frequently misleading material, now flooding web browsers and social-media platforms like spam in old inboxes. Years deep into national hysteria over the threat of internet misinformation pushed on us by bad actors, we’ve sleepwalked into a new internet in which meaningless, nonfactual slop is casually mass-produced and force-fed to us by A.I.

It has already helped drive down the cost and drive up the performance of next-gen batteries and solar photovoltaic cells, whose performance can also be improved, even after the panels have been manufactured and installed on your roof, by as much as 25 percent

while the internet was never perfectly trustworthy, one epoch-defining breakthrough of Google was that it got us pretty close. Now the company’s chief executive acknowledges that hallucinations are “inherent” to the technology it has celebrated as a kind of successor for ranked-order search results, which are now often found far below not just the A.I. summary but a whole stack of “sponsored” results as well.

Where not long ago we used to find the very best results for Google searches, we can now find instead potentially plagiarized and often inaccurate paragraph summaries of answers to our queries

Machine learning may help make our electricity grid as much as 40 percent more efficient at delivering power as it is today, when many of its routing decisions are made by individual humans on the basis of experience and intuition

This month, KoBold Metals announced the largest discovery of new copper deposits in a decade — a green-energy gold mine, so to speak, delivered with the help of its own proprietary A.I., which integrated information about subatomic particles detected underground with century-old mining reports and radar imagery to make predictions about where minerals critical for the green transition might be found.

.I. is designing new proteins, rapidly accelerating drug discovery and speeding up clinical trials testing new medicines and therapies.

perhaps that a more optimistic perspective can be drawn by analogy to what economists call the “environmental Kuznets curve,” which suggests that, as nations develop, they tend to first pollute a lot more and then, over time, as they grow richer, they ultimately pollute less.

Even in describing regular old pollution, this framework has its shortcomings, especially because it treats as automatic eventual progress that has always required tooth-and-nail fights against some very stubborn bad actors

A.I. is generating an awful lot of genuine pollution, too — both Google and Microsoft, which each pledged in 2019 to reach zero emissions by 2030, have instead expanded their carbon footprints by nearly 50 percent in the interim.

“I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” DeSantis wrot

His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.

The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.

Gone is the bushy-tailed Vance who wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something 13-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous.” The up-and-comer who, in thrall of Yale’s “aura,” confessed that he “wanted to go to Yale more than any other school.”

The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.

he Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.

Stock prices of its five biggest makers of panels and other equipment have halved in the past 12 months. Since late June, at least seven large Chinese manufacturers have warned that they will announce heavy losses for the first half of this year.

The turmoil in the solar energy sector amid enormous factory capacity and booming exports highlights how China’s industrial policymaking works. The government decided 15 years ago to put extensive support behind solar power, and then let the companies claw it out. Beijing has shown a high tolerance for letting firms stumble and even fail in large numbers.

Something similar is happening in the automotive sector. Annual car sales in China are around 25 million a year, more than any other country but barely half the country’s ability to make vehicles. So automakers in China are now following the solar industry’s lead in cutting prices sharply and ramping up exports.

China’s approach can lead to big financial losses for local governments, state investment funds and state-supported banks, all of which bankroll companies in favored industries.

Sunzone’s rivals, including Tongwei and Longi Green Energy Technology, gained formidable economies from large-scale production. They have plowed part of their extra revenue into developing solar panels that are increasingly efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.

The rise and fall of Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in south-central China, is a case study of how China’s policies work.

“It’s a very expensive development model, but it produces national champions quite reliably,” said David R. Hoffman, a senior adviser on China for the Conference Board, a global business group.

Despite the financial help, Sunzone’s factory now sits empty. A large “Sunzone” sign on the second floor rusts in the swampy heat of Changsha. The only person still working at the site on a recent afternoon, a security guard, said that manufacturing equipment was removed in January and the factory was set to be demolished and turned into office buildings.

Sunzone epitomizes how lavish lending from state-owned banks and generous local subsidies have produced manufacturing overcapacity. Solar companies cut costs and prices sharply to maintain market share. That led to a few low-cost survivors while many other competitors were driven out of business in China and around the world.

China’s banks, acting at Beijing’s direction, have lent so much money to the sector for factory construction that the country’s solar factory capacity is roughly double the entire world’s demand.

Started in 2008, the solar panel manufacturer benefited early on from practically every possible subsidy. It got 22 acres of prime downtown land in the heart of the city almost for free. One of China’s biggest state-owned banks arranged a loan at a low interest rate. The Hunan provincial government then agreed to pay most of the interest.

Many other factories, like Sunzone’s, quickly become obsolete.

“Enterprises continue to put advanced production capacity into operation to maintain competitiveness” said Zhang Jianhua, director of China’s National Energy Administration, at a news conference last month. “At the same time, the outdated production capacity is still extensive and needs to be gradually phased out.”

Compounding the problems facing China’s solar energy companies is the rapid disappearance of local subsidies. Local governments are running out of money as a housing crisis makes it hard for them to sell long-term leases on state land to real estate developers — previously their biggest source of cash.

Partly because of worries about Chinese subsidies, President Biden last month allowed steep tariffs that had expired to go back into force on solar products imported from Southeast Asia that use lots of Chinese components. And the Department of Commerce has begun trade cases against imported solar panels that could lead to further tariffs.

Today, those who express different ideas about racial identity often encounter serious resistance. When Tiger Woods, the child of two mixed-race people, announced himself to be “Cablinasian” — as a combination of Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian — he was mocked as not knowing who he is. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams encountered skepticism when he said he couldn’t see his blond, blue-eyed child as Black.

all signs indicate that my children are growing up in a world that’s very different from the one I grew up in. I experienced plenty of passing instances of racism, even as a student at fancy private schools. But it’s been a half century now. Experiences of the kind Harris has recounted, of suburban white kids whose parents told them not to play with her because she was Black, have been alien to my girls so far.

If someday they decide not to define themselves as Black, it will not be because they are ashamed or in some kind of denial. It will be because the world has changed, and we should be thankful for that.

American discourse is, happily, becoming more amenable to the idea that a person who is half Black can be two things rather than just one

What is most important is that Harris, Obama and other people of mixed racial heritage can now get as far as they have. As for our habit of processing Blackness as foundational — much as Strom Thurmond did — it will be ever more absurd as the races mix further over the coming generations. On this custom, history will look upon us in puzzlement.

But what kind of men were featured? They’re all rich and powerful, and as a longtime fan of professional wrestling, I loved watching Hogan as a kid, but none of them are the kind of man I’d want my son to be. White was caught on video slapping his wife. Kid Rock has his own checkered past, including a sex tape and an assault charge related to a fight in a Nashville strip club. Hogan faced his own sex scandal after he had a bizarre sexual relationship with a woman who was married to one of his close friends, a radio host who goes by “Bubba the Love Sponge.”

We know all about Trump, but it’s worth remembering some of his worst moments — including a jury finding that he was liable for sexual abuse, his defamation of his sex-abuse victim, the “Access Hollywood” tape and the countless examples of his cruelly insulting the women he so plainly hates.

I highlight McRaven for a reason; he has perfectly articulated how to attack MAGA masculinity. Ten years ago, he gave one of the most powerful commencement speeches in recent American history. He addressed the graduates of the University of Texas, Austin, and three YouTube versions have racked up more than 70 million views combined.

It’s known — oddly enough — as the “Make Your Bed” speech. While it wasn’t aimed only at men, every person who forwarded it to me was a man. It appealed to universal values, but it connected with men I know at a deep and profound level.

McRaven draws on his SEAL training to teach students how to change the world. It begins with the small things, like accomplishing that tiny first task of making your bed, because “if you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right.”

Republican manliness was the capstone of the convention.

I wonder if Democrats should answer the Republican men’s night with a men’s night of their own — a night that features heroes instead of bullies and showmen, a night that answers the Republican appeal to men’s basest instincts with an appeal to their highest ideals.

Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.

When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like Vance.

Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boy

if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.

We aren’t simply electing women and men; we’re electing role models, and Trump has unquestionably been a role model for countless men. He has molded not just the policies but also the ethos of the Republican Party. But America’s men need different role models and a different ethos.

let’s return for the moment to the Navy SEAL who served his country for decades, who helped kill one of America’s deadliest foes and who declared to American college graduates, “You must have compassion. You must ache for the poor and disenfranchised. You must fear for the vulnerable. You must weep for the ill and infirm. You must pray for those who are without hope. You must be kind to the less fortunate.”

The address builds to a conclusion that is alien to Trumpist masculinity: “Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when the times are the toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never ever give up — if you do these things, the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today.”

there’s a better way for men — for all of us. It’s rooted in honor, courage and love. Or as McRaven put it, “For what hero gives so much of themselves without caring for those they are trying to save?

Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital

in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital

bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.

We want community, and yet there’s something that takes us away from community. Why?

The first answer is we’re busy. And you might think therefore busy people are going to be more online and less face to face.

the fact is busy people are more connected with the rest of the world. If you’re asking, “Why do we have people no longer connecting face to face,” it absolutely is not because we’re too busy.

Their reasoning is straightforward: These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on

“If we’re going to justify a trillion or more dollars of investment, [AI] needs to solve complex problems and enable us to do things we haven’t been able to do before.” Today’s flagship AI models, he said, largely cannot.

Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off. OpenAI, for its part, may lose up to $5 billion this year, almost 10 times more than what the company lost in 2022,

Over the past few weeks, analysts and investors at some of the world’s most influential financial institutions—including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Moody’s, and Barclays—have issued reports that raise doubts about whether the enormous investments in generative AI will be profitable.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the rival start-up Anthropic, has predicted that a single AI model (such as, say, GPT-6) could cost $100 billion to train by 2027. The global data-center buildup over the next few years could require trillions of dollars from tech companies, utilities, and other industries, according to a July report from Moody’s Ratings.

generative AI has already done extraordinary things, of course—advancing drug development, solving challenging math problems, generating stunning video clips. But exactly what uses of the technology can actually make money remains unclear

At present, AI is generally good at doing existing tasks—writing blog posts, coding, translating—faster and cheaper than humans can. But efficiency gains can provide only so much value, boosting the current economy but not creating a new one.

Right now, Silicon Valley might just functionally be replacing some jobs, such as customer service and form-processing work, with historically expensive software, which is not a recipe for widespread economic transformation.

McKinsey has estimated that generative AI could eventually add almost $8 trillion to the global economy every year

“Here, we can manufacture intelligence.”

Tony Kim, the head of technology investment at BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, told me he believes that AI will trigger one of the most significant technological upheavals ever. “Prior industrial revolutions were never about intelligence,”

this future is not guaranteed. Many of the productivity gains expected from AI could be both greatly overestimated and very premature, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, has found

AI products’ key flaws, such as a tendency to invent false information, could make them unusable, or deployable only under strict human oversight, in certain settings—courts, hospitals, government agencies, schools

AI as a truly epoch-shifting technology, it may well be more akin to blockchain, a very expensive tool destined to fall short of promises to fundamentally transform society and the economy.

Researchers at Barclays recently calculated that tech companies are collectively paying for enough AI-computing infrastructure to eventually power 12,000 different ChatGPTs. Silicon Valley could very well produce a whole host of hit generative-AI products like ChatGPT, “but probably not 12,000 of them,

even if it did, there would be nowhere enough demand to use all those apps and actually turn a profit.

Some of the largest tech companies’ current spending on AI data centers will require roughly $600 billion of annual revenue to break even, of which they are currently about $500 billion short.

Tech proponents have responded to the criticism that the industry is spending too much, too fast, with something like religious dogma. “I don’t care” how much we spend, Altman has said. “I genuinely don’t.

the industry is asking the world to engage in something like a trillion-dollar tautology: AI’s world-transformative potential justifies spending any amount of resources, because its evangelists will spend any amount to make AI transform the world.

in the AI era in particular, a lack of clear evidence for a healthy return on investment may not even matter. Unlike the companies that went bust in the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, Big Tech can spend exorbitant sums of money and be largely fine

perhaps even more important in Silicon Valley than a messianic belief in AI is a terrible fear of missing out. “In the tech industry, what drives part of this is nobody wants to be left behind. Nobody wants to be seen as lagging,

Go all in on AI, the thinking goes, or someone else will. Their actions evince “a sense of desperation,” Cahn writes. “If you do not move now, you will never get another chance.” Enormous sums of money are likely to continue flowing into AI for the foreseeable future, driven by a mix of unshakable confidence and all-consuming fear.

Young men backed Trump over Biden by 14 points in the merged Journal polls this year, a substantial swing from 2020. In that election, they supported Biden by 15 points, according to AP VoteCast, a voter survey. Young women in the Journal surveys backed Biden by 30 points and Democratic control of Congress by 34 points, essentially unchanged from 2020.

Women now make up a record 60% of college students and carry 66% of all student-loan debt, research shows.

The testosterone-fueled lineup, coming on the heels of Trump’s fist-pumping response to bullets flying past him, “positions Trump as an anti-hero that millions of young men—specifically, young, first-time voters—connect with and even aspire to,’’ said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard Youth Poll. “It’s something they see everywhere they consume information, whether it’s in the gamer community, TikTok, Instagram.’’

“The American flag is in the background, and there’s blood on his face,” Mertz said, “I mean, it just looks pretty badass.”

The gender gap extends to opposing views of abortion, student-loan forgiveness and other issues affecting the lives of young adults.

Polling last week by the Journal found Harris leading Trump among young voters by about 10 percentage points, less support than Biden drew from the group in 2020. The sample size was too small to measure how voter preferences differ by gender among those under 30.

Some men say they have lost economic, cultural and political influence to women amid the focus on equity and diversity. Others expressed resentment over feminist and progressive attitudes on college campuses, in the entertainment industry and at many workplaces. 

In certain U.S. cities, young women are outpacing young men in median annual income and are more likely than young men to live apart from their parents. A larger share of women under 30 are reaching financial independence compared with young women in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, while fewer young men are reaching that milestone compared with four decades ago.

The Democratic push for diversity is making them more likely to vote for Republicans, some men said. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that 23% of men—and 33% of men who backed Trump—believed the advancement of women has come at their expense. 

Many young men feel abandoned by Democrats, saying Republican politicians are the ones making direct appeals to them, according to interviews with dozens of men under 30.

Biden successfully pressed for trillions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure construction, semiconductor manufacturing and other sectors that traditionally employ men. Yet young men maintain an overwhelmingly negative view of him,

The shift toward Trump includes Black and Latino men. Young Black men had backed Biden over Trump by about 70 percentage points in 2020, and Latino men backed Biden by more than 40 points, according to AP VoteCast. 

Journal polls found support for Biden shrank this year before the president withdrew from the race, leaving him with a narrow lead, as small as in the single digits, among nonwhite men.

Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men.

Other men say they are drawn to the so-called manosphere, a loose collection of male influencers who espouse macho, “anti-woke” views. The hyper-masculinity of the right, many of them said, is at the core of its appeal, not policies or party politics.“Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline,” said Lester, who kickboxes in his spare time. 

Many young people said their political views hardened years before they could vote.“Even back in 2016, when I was a 12-year-old trying to make sense of my place in the world and one of the candidates for president was making crude remarks toward women about their body parts—even at that age I felt it wasn’t right,” Isabelle Ems, a 19-year-old rising junior at Pennsylvania State University, said of Trump.

Harrison Wells, 22, said Trump’s 2016 campaign initiated his shift to the political right. He recalled being confused by the apoplectic reaction from teachers and students to Trump’s victory. His high school canceled classes and held listening sessions with students.“People were crying, upset,” he said. “Everyone was hysterical.”The experience crystallized growing skepticism of his private Catholic high school outside Menlo Park, Calif., which organized lectures about the importance of access to abortion and contraceptives and celebrated transgender visibility. 

“I felt as though there was a narrative and certain school of thought that was being pushed on us aggressively,” said Wells. “That was what made me think and start learning more about politics.”

He led a chapter of a conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, at the University of Wisconsin and voted for Trump in 2020. He sides with the former president on the economy, taxes and immigration.

Journal polling found that young men are open to Trump policy proposals that young women reject. That includes Trump’s idea to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.