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Newsroom leaders, concerned that some Times journalists are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests to coverage decisions, are seeking to draw a line. 

Kahn noted that the organization has added a lot of digital-savvy workers who are skilled in areas like data analytics, design and product engineering but who weren’t trained in independent journalism. He also suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views

International editor Philip Pan later intervened, saying the WhatsApp thread—at its worst a “tense forum where the questions and comments can feel accusatory”—should be for sharing information, not for hosting debates, according to messages reviewed by the Journal. 

Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has become particularly fraught at the Times, with some reporters saying the Times’s work is tilting in favor of Israel and others pushing back forcefully, say people familiar with the situation. That has led to dueling charges of bias and journalistic malpractice among reporters and editors, forcing management to referee disputes.

“Just like our readers at the moment, there are really really strong passions about that issue and not that much willingness to really explore the perspectives of people who are on the other side of that divide,” Kahn said, adding that it’s hard work for staffers “to put their commitment to the journalism often ahead of their own personal views.”

Last fall, Times staffers covering the war got into a heated dispute in a WhatsApp group chat over the publication’s reporting on Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, which Israel alleged was a command-and-control center for Hamas.

While the Guild represents staffers across many major U.S. news outlets, its members also include employees from non-news advocacy organizations such as pro-Palestinian group Jewish Voice For Peace, Democratic Socialists of America and divisions of the ACLU. 

“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees.

The publisher of the Times, 43-year-old A.G. Sulzberger, says readers’ trust is at risk, however. Some journalists, including at the Times, are criticizing journalistic traditions like impartiality, while embracing “a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction,” Sulzberger wrote in a 12,000-word essay last year in Columbia Journalism Review. 

Despite such moves, NewsGuard, an organization that rates credibility of news sites, in February reduced the Times’s score from the maximum of 100 to 87.5, saying it doesn’t have a clear enough delineation between news and opinion.

Emboldened by their show of strength on Bennet, employees would flex their muscles again on multiple occasions, pushing to oust colleagues they felt had engaged in journalistic or workplace misconduct. 

One thing Powell noticed, he said, was that coverage that challenged popular political and cultural beliefs was being neglected. Powell’s work includes a story on MIT’s canceling of a lecture by an academic who had criticized affirmative action, and another examining whether the ACLU is more willing to defend the First Amendment rights of progressives than far-right groups.

Kahn, who succeeded Baquet as executive editor in June 2022, and Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury said in a letter to staff that they wouldn’t tolerate participation by Times journalists in protests or attacks on colleagues.

Divisions have formed in the newsroom over the role of the union that represents Times staffers, the NewsGuild-CWA. Some staffers say it has inappropriately inserted itself into debates with management, including over coverage of the trans community and the war. 

The Times isn’t the only news organization where employees have become more vocal in complaints about coverage and workplace practices. War coverage has also fueled tensions at The Wall Street Journal, with some reporters in meetings and internal chat groups complaining that coverage is skewed—either favoring Israel or Palestinians.  

When Times staffers logged on to a union virtual meeting last fall to discuss whether to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, some attendees from other organizations had virtual backgrounds displaying Palestinian flags. The meeting, where a variety of members were given around two minutes to share their views on the matter, felt like the kind of rally the Times’ policy prohibits, according to attendees. 

In January, Sulzberger shared his thoughts on covering Trump during a visit to the Washington bureau. It was imperative to keep Trump coverage emotion-free, he told staffers, according to people who attended. He referenced the Times story, “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, as a good example of fact-based and fair coverage. 

Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety

is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”

El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model

As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.

As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity

Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites

Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.

At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask

Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.

The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho

od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.

“We have an outstanding mayor, who is committed to tackling climate change. She said the 15-minute city will be the backbone for creating a new urban plan. The last time Paris had a new urban plan was in 2000, so this road map will be relevant for the next 10 or 15 years at least,”

“I said to Hidalgo, the 15-minute city is not an urban traffic plan. The 15-minute city is a radical change of our life.”

He also thinks office should generally be closer to homes, as well as cultural venues, doctors, shops and other amenities. Shared spaces such as parks help the people living in the areas to form communities.

They have also often been segmented into wealthier and poorer areas; in the less prosperous area to the north-east of Paris, Moreno says up to 40% of homes are social housing. In the wealthier west of Paris, this drops below 5%.

“My idea is to break this triple segregation,” he says.

Moreno thinks this segregation leads to a poorer quality of life, one designed around outdated “masculine desires”, so his proposal is to mix this up, creating housing developments with a mixture of social, affordable and more expensive housing so different social strata can intermingle

He also wants to bring schools and children’s areas closer to work and home, so caregivers can more easily travel around and participate in societ

When many modern cities were designed, they were for men to work in. Their wives and family stayed in the suburbs, while the workers drove in. So they have been designed around the car, and segmented into different districts: the financial district (think Canary Wharf), the cultural area (for example, the West End) and then the suburbs

The city has also been regenerating the Clichy-Batignolles district in the less prosperous north-west of Paris to have a green, village-like feel. About a quarter of it is taken up by green space and a new park.“As a 15-minute district, it is incredible,” says Moreno. “It is beautiful, it has proximity, social mixing, 50% of the inhabitants live in social housing, 25% in middle class and 25% own their homes.”

Many of his proposals are dear to the culture of the French. In a large, wealthy metropolis such as Paris, it is easy for small shops to be choked out by large chains. The city of Paris, in its new plan, has put measures in to stop this.

“We have a commercial subsidiary of the city of Paris which has put €200m into managing retail areas in the city with rates below the speculative real estate market. This is specifically to rent to small shops, artisans, bakeries, bookstores.

This is not only a good investment because it creates a good economic model, but it keeps the culture of the city of Paris,”

This is in keeping with the 15-minute city plan as it keeps local shops close to housing, so people can stroll down from their apartment to pick up a fresh baguette from an independent baker. “It creates a more vibrant neighbourhood,” he adds.

Hidalgo inevitably faced a large backlash from the motorist lobby. Stroll down the banks of the Seine today in the new protected parks and outdoor bars, and it is hard to imagine that it was recently a traffic-choked highway

“The drivers were radically very noisy, saying that we wanted to attack their individual rights, their freedom. The motorist lobby said she cannot be elected without our support, that they are very powerful in France,” Moreno says. But Hidalgo called their bluff: “She often says ‘I was elected two times, with the opposition of the automotive lobby’. In 2024, nobody requests to open again the highway on the Seine, no one wants the Seine urban park to be open for cars.”

Moreno talks about the concept of a “giant metronome of the city” which causes people to rush around. He wants to slow this down, to allow people to reclaim their “useful time” back from commuting and travelling to shops and cultural areas.

“I bet for the next year, for the next decade, we will have this new transformation of corporation real estate,” he says. “Businesses are choosing multi-use areas with housing, schools, shops for their office space now. The time of the skyscrapers in the masculine design is finished.”

Israelis pursue happiness through family and community, by feeling rooted and having a sense of purpose. My son Yoni got married in Jerusalem midwar, while serving in the military reserves. He notes that “Israelis grow up with many outside influences, many adult role models, not just their parents. It starts with our large weddings, when you’re blessed to ‘build a faithful home in Israel.’ ”

Alexis de Tocqueville called families the backbone of healthy democracies. Family inculcates loyalty, commitment and self-sacrifice. Belonging to communities—extended families—teaches citizens to care about and cooperate with others.

Despite disagreeing passionately, Israelis live in an intimate society that runs on trust and generates hope. Israelis feel they’re never alone, and that their relatives and friends will never abandon them.

Living in what Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, called Altneuland, old-new land, Israelis don’t count in days and decades but in millennia and eternity. They feel part of a bigger story, Jews’ historical saga reaching back 3,500 years.

The pain punctuating this story helps transcend passing traumas. Even as most Israelis experienced Hamas’s Oct. 7 killing spree as a Jewish event, powered by centuries of Jew-hatred, Israelis recall many redemptive moments too. Israelis’ favorite holidays, including Hanukkah, Passover, and Independence Day, re-enact this reassuring oppression-to-liberation arc.

Compare anti-Israel progressive students with their Israeli soldier peers. Many protesters are the avatars of America’s lost generation. Their pinched ideology deems the U.S. systemically racist and is intent on sorting everyone by “gender identity” and skin color. Rather than optimistically expand America’s economy for all, they pessimistically compete for reparations and indulgences—their “restorative justice” is often more vengeful than just.

These illiberal liberals trash traditional families, religion and America’s noble story of a flawed nation becoming “a more perfect union.” These campus commissars are among the unhappy Americans the surgeon general sees in the depths of loneliness and despair.

Israelis didn’t seek this war—but when attacked, they unleashed a patriotism, idealism, self-sacrifice and grit that today’s regressive progressives scorn. Israelis’ resilience, duty and love of life explain how this often polarized and besieged society remains such a happy place

In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares.

After the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories become not just a fringe hobby but a “permanent feature of the American mental landscape.” U.F.O. sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate

In the meantime, a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not gray or white. And apparently there were only eight plastic surgeons in all of Manhattan. But the market for hair color and plastic surgery explodes, as America starts writing its “national fiction of permanent youthfulness.”

the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago

Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the ’60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” Or put more simply: You do you.

If there’s a flaw in this book, it’s repetitiveness. Andersen seems by nature a collector. He goes for wide rather than deep. So he doesn’t examine, for example, how we would separate the junk from the gems

What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, preached by someone with the fire of Anne Hutchinson. A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality.

our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavor: propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.

In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West: She was, he writes, uniquely American “because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality,” a total stranger to self-doubt.

As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.”

Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:

Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.

Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.

[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.

This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.

Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:

Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.

And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.

The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.

The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.

The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.

And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.

The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.

Pressler and Patterson were heroes within the movement. Patterson led Baptist seminaries and became president of the convention. Pressler was a Texas state judge and a former president of the Council for National Policy, a powerful conservative Christian activist organization.

Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations — including writing in an email that he wanted to meet alone with a woman who had reported being raped to “break her down” — at both Southwestern and another Baptist seminary.

Pressler’s story is in some ways eerily similar to that of Harvey Weinstein. Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions.

The suit set off a sprawling investigation into S.B.C. sexual misconduct by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News. Their report, called “Abuse of Faith,” documented hundreds of sex abuse cases in the S.B.C. and led to the denomination commissioning an independent investigation of its handling of abuse.

The American right exists in a news environment that reports misconduct on the left or in left-wing institutions loudly and with granular detail. When Weinstein fell and that fall prompted the cascade of revelations that created the #MeToo moment, the right was overrun with commentary on the larger lessons of the episode, including scathing indictments of a Hollywood culture

the coverage, or lack thereof, of Pressler’s fall also helps explain why we’re so very polarized as a nation.

the bottom line is clear: For decades, survivors of sex abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

the coverage on the right also fit a cherished conservative narrative: that liberal sexual values such as those in Hollywood invariably lead to abuse.

stories such as Pressler’s complicate this narrative immensely. If both the advocates and enemies of the sexual revolution have their Harvey Weinsteins — that is, if both progressive and conservative institutions can enable abuse — then all that partisan moral clarity starts to disappear

We’re all left with the disturbing and humbling reality that whatever our ideology or theology, it doesn’t make us good people. The allegedly virtuous “us” commits the same sins as the presumptively villainous “them.”

How does a typical conservative activist deal with this reality? By pretending it doesn’t exist.

Shortly after the Pressler settlement was announced, I looked for statements or commentary or articles by the conservative stalwarts who cover left-wing misconduct with such zeal. The silence was deafening.

I’m reminded of the minimal right-wing coverage of Fox News’s historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest known media defamation settlement of all time. I consistently meet conservatives who might know chapter and verse of any second-tier scandal in the “liberal media” but to this day have no clue that the right’s favorite news outlet broadcast some of the most expensive lies in history.

t’s more like a cultivated ignorance, in which news outlets and influencers and their audiences tacitly agree not to share facts that might complicate their partisan narratives.

the dynamic is even worse when stories of conservative abuse and misconduct break in the mainstream media. Conservative partisans can simply cry “media bias!” and rely on their followers to tune it all out. To those followers, a scandal isn’t real until people they trust say it’s real.

In other words, the Marshall Plan and the tech boom during the 1990s were products of their time and place. They wouldn’t necessarily have the desired effects in a modern context.

“A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class. A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains. A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of overdependence.”

What was the solution? Instead of rampant globalization, Sullivan’s pitch was that a reenergized American economy made the country stronger. It was time to remake the Rust Belt into a Cobalt Corridor, to establish industries that led not only to blue-collar work but to azure-collared careers. If that was done right, a strengthened America could act more capably around the globe.

“By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges,” he said, citing China’s large-scale subsidization of multiple sectors that crushed America’s competitiveness across industries. Making matters worse, Sullivan continued, “economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions.” It also didn’t stop countries like Russia from invading their neighbors.

Implicitly, Sullivan said the main assumptions undergirding America’s foreign and economic policy had been wrong for decades. China, and the Washington belief that liberalized markets would eventually lead to democracy within the halls of power in Beijing, was the most glaring example.

“This moment demands that we forge a new consensus. That’s why the United States, under President Biden, is pursuing a modern industrial and innovation strategy — both at home and with partners around the world,

Standing in front of the esteemed audience, Sullivan was telling them he didn’t want to be caught flat-footed as the global economy reshaped around them. The U.S. government would be proactive, prepared and proud in search of an industrial strategy to undergird American power. Without saying the words, he was offering a plan to make America great again.

A self-proclaimed “A-Team” came together to move beyond the Trump era, but in some ways they embraced elements of it. Not the nativist demagoguery, but the need to return to fundamentals: a healthy middle class powered by a humming industrial base, a humility about what the U.S. military alone can accomplish, a solid cadre of allies, attention to the most existential threats and a refresh of the tenets that sustain American democracy.

“This strategy will take resolve — it will take a dedicated commitment to overcoming the barriers that have kept this country and our partners from building rapidly, efficiently, and fairly as we were able to do in the past,”

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard

With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally

He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal

he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.

From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government

As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.

the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.

Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.

As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.

it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.

it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat

After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.

It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?

The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.

“in every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443, 2f455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the U.S., trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.”

A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 31, “Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the Covid-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of U.S. Adults,” by doctors and health specialists

“During the Covid-19 pandemic,” the authors write,medicine and public health more broadly became politicized, with the internet amplifying public figures and even physicians encouraging individuals not to trust the advice of public health experts and scientists. As such, the pandemic may have represented a turning point in trust, with a profession previously seen as trustworthy increasingly subject to doubt.

Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In twenty years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage point gap) emerged.

Some people suffer from poor dental health in part because their parents distrusted fluoridation of drinking water. The national failure to invest until recently in combating climate change has raised the odds of pandemics, made diseases more rampant, destabilized entire regions, and spurred a growing crisis of migration and refugees that has helped popularize far-right nativism in many Western democracies.

Distrust of science is arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide

Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued,turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.

Between 2018 and 2021, the General Social Survey found that the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who said they have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” rose to 33 points (65-32) from 13 points (54-41).

The direction of the partisan response, Bardon wrote, is driven by “who the facts are favoring, and science currently favors bad news for the industrial status quo.

The roots of the divergence, however, go back at least 50 years with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, along with the enactment that same year of the Clean Air Act and two years later of the Clean Water Act.

These pillars of the regulatory state were, and still are, deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party

These agencies and laws fostered the emergence of what Gordon Gauchat, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, calls “regulatory science.” This relatively new role thrust science into the center of political debates with the result that federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”

In their 2022 article, Oreskes and Conway, write that conservatives’ hostility to sciencetook strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.

Oreskes and Conway argue that the strength of the anti-science movement was driven by the alliance in the Reagan years between corporate interests and the ascendant religious right, which became an arm of the Republican Party as it supported creationism

religious and political skepticism of science have become mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.

and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party-sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.

As partisan elites have staked out increasingly clear positions on issues related to climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other science-related policy issues, the public has polarized in response.

People look to their political leaders to provide them with information (“cues” or “heuristics”) about how they ought to think about complex science-related issues.

This creates a feedback cycle, whereby — once public opinion polarizes about science-related issues — political elites have an electoral incentive to appeal to that polarization, both in the anti-science rhetoric they espouse and in expressing opposition to evidence-based policies.

In a demographically representative survey of 1,959 U.S. adults, I tracked how intentions to receive preventative cancer vaccines (currently undergoing clinical trials) vary by partisan identity. I find that cancer vaccines are already politically polarizing, such that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to intend to vaccinate.

Another key factor driving a wedge between the two parties over the trustworthiness of science is the striking partisan difference over risk tolerance and risk aversion.

Their conclusion: “We find, on average, that women are more risk averse than men.”

Our survey revealed that men rate a wide range of hazards as lower in risk than do women. Our survey also revealed that whites rate risks lower than do nonwhites

The group with the consistently lowest risk perceptions across a range of hazards was white males.

Furthermore, we found sizable differences between white males and other groups in sociopolitical attitudes.

white males were more sympathetic with hierarchical, individualistic, and anti-egalitarian views, more trusting of technology managers, less trusting of government, and less sensitive to potential stigmatization of communities from hazards

These positions suggest greater confidence in experts and less confidence in public-dominated social processes.

In other words, white men — the dominant constituency of the Republican Party, in what is known in the academic literature as “the white male effect” — are relatively risk tolerant and thus more resistant (or less committed) to science-based efforts to reduce the likelihood of harm to people or to the environment

major Democratic constituencies are more risk averse and supportive of harm-reducing policies.

Insofar as people tend to accept scientific findings that align with their political beliefs and disregard those that contradict them, political views carry more weight than knowledge of science.

comparing the answers to scientific questions among religious and nonreligious respondents revealed significant insight into differing views of what is true and what is not.

When asked whether “electrons are smaller than atoms” and “what gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or oxygen,” almost identical shares of religious and nonreligious men and women who scored high on measures of scientific knowledge gave correct answers to the questions.

However, when asked “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals, true or false,” the religious students high in scientific literacy scored far below their nonreligious counterparts.

the evolution question did not measure scientific knowledge but instead was a gauge of “something else: a form of cultural identity.”

Kahan then cites a survey that asked “how much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” The survey demonstrated a striking correlation between political identity and the level of perceived risk: Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none.

the different responses offered by religious and nonreligious respondents to the evolution question were similar to the climate change responses in that they were determined by “cultural identity” — in this case, political identity.

Indeed, the inference can be made even stronger by substituting for, or fortifying political outlooks with, even more discerning cultural identity indicators, such as cultural worldviews and their interaction with demographic characteristics such as race and gender. In sum, whether people “believe in” climate change, like whether they “believe in” evolution, expresses who they are.

2023 PNAS paper, “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” Cory J. Clark, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Philip Tetlock, David Geary and 34 others make the case that the scientific community at times censors itself

“Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”

Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM.

Clark and her co-authors argue that

The explicit politicization of academic institutions, including science journals, academic professional societies, universities, and university departments, is likely one causal factor that explains reduced trust in science.

Dietram A. Scheufele, who is a professor in science communication at the University of Wisconsin, was sharply critical of what he calls the scientific community’s “self-inflicted wounds”:

One is the sometimes gratuitous tendency among scientists to mock groups in society whose values we see as misaligned with our own. This has included prominent climate scientists tweeting that no Republicans are safe to have in Congress, popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson trolling Christians on Twitter on Christmas Day.

Scheufele warned againstDemocrats’ tendency to align science with other (probably very worthwhile) social causes, including the various yard signs that equate science to B.L.M., gender equality, immigration, etc. The tricky part is that most of these causes are seen as Democratic-leaning policy issues

Science is not that. It’s society’s best way of creating and curating knowledge, regardless of what that science will mean for politics, belief systems, or personal preferences.

For many on the left, Scheufele wrote,Science has become a signaling device for liberals to distinguish themselves from what they see as “anti-science” Republicans. That spells trouble

Science relies on the public perception that it creates knowledge objectively and in a politically neutral way. The moment we lose that aspect of trust, we just become one of the many institutions, including Congress, that have suffered from rapidly eroding levels of public trust.

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress.

If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

While many decent people remain — and represent the hope for future reform — Trump’s Republican Party has become a magnet for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists of all stripes

Trump has set the course of the Republican Party’s cultural river for more than nine years. Fewer and fewer resisters remain, and they’re growing increasingly exhausted and besieged

Indeed, Trump in his diabolical shrewdness knows how to build and maintain his own base

He’s shed the Republican Party’s traditional commitment to life. He’ll sprint away from any policy or principle that he believes might cost him power. At the same time, he watches his crowd roar when he demonizes immigrants (MAGA’s true north star) and he sees “red-pilled” young men rally to his side when he punches hard and never backs down.

Leaders don’t simply enact policies; they dictate the cultures of the institutions they lead

I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.

the “crank realignment.”

The mere suggestion that Republican primary voters can and should do better is greeted by scorn and contempt.

Both parties have always been vulnerable to nominating or electing the occasional crank, but Donald Trump’s ascendance meant that a crank led the party, and the best way to join with him is to imitate him.

That’s how leaders change institutions. They make them into images of themselves.

In this case, Trump has done so explicitly. Almost all the worst figures in the Republican Party have ridden Trump endorsements to the top of their local pyramids. Robinson received Trump’s endorsement and swamped his primary opposition. Trump even called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

It’s possible that the Republican Party is simply too far gone, at least for now. A primary electorate that chooses Robinson over more reasonable candidates by 45 points — and a party that blames “the left” for revealing that he’s even worse than anyone knew — does not seem ready to change.

It not only steers our life choices, it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

Beyond the right major, the not-so-secret formula for the perfect résumé demands participation in a relevant extracurricular activity, which explains the competitive process at some selective schools to join pre-professional clubs.

Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.

In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.

The interview process for Cornell’s Undergraduate Asia Business Society includes entering a pitch-black lecture hall, having a projector light shone in one’s face and yelling responses to questions. Getting into Yale isn’t enough: Its investing club turned away 236 applicants in 2022.

Once one snags a spot in a club, it’s straight to LinkedIn. Nearly 20 percent of people on the site are between the ages of 18 to 24, making the platform an incubator of young adult FOMO

I wondered how I missed the memo that I needed to take microeconomics. This fall at Penn there are 672 seats in the course; as of Monday, only four had not been taken. Does everyone like economics that much?

When I first got to the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2019, it felt like a daily pop quiz, one where I was graded on a language I still struggle to speak.

I heard students say things like: I think I want to work in mergers and acquisitions. Do you have any interest in that? It’s very competitive, just so you know. And: Unless it’s Goldman or J.P. Morgan, who cares?

There, we stress over whether our headshots look too high school (at the age of 18) and race to the coveted over-500-connections designation.

It sounds silly — in hindsight, it was — but that is how I felt when I was surrounded by thousands of intelligent classmates competing for the same handful of results. I’d wake up at 3:30 a.m. from the recurring nightmare that I didn’t land an internship my junior year summer

I heard people, maybe friends, endlessly discussing the “only way” to be successful. I consoled a sobbing roommate after she failed to land the job her parents expected her to get.

But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020.

Naturally, when thousands of students rush into the same handful of majors and professions, supply cannot possibly meet demand. That’s particularly true now, as openings for postgraduate tech industry jobs advertised on the student job board Handshake decreased about 30 percent this spring from the prior year

Selective colleges and universities can fix this by overhauling their on-campus recruiting systems to prevent finance and consulting firms from pushing students to commit earlier and earlier. No student should have to determine her first career path before junior year begins.

This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing.

To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.

Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

This, I would say, is the unifying theory of a second Trump term. Purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters

The Heritage Foundation was one of these groups and Project 2025 their signature effort. In 2021, Roberts took over Heritage and retooled it into an organization dedicated to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He sought centrality through both scale and publicity: Project 2025 was a vast undertaking, and Roberts promoted it relentlessly

The next Trump administration will do far more than the Trump campaign is describing, and Project 2025 — which was produced with input from more than 100 conservative organizations that see themselves as part of the MAGA-governing coalition — filled the void that Trump himself has left. He did not tell us what he was going to do, so Project 2025 did.

The second is that Trump’s 2024 campaign differs from his 2016 campaign in a fundamental way. In 2016, Trump ran as the destroyer of the existing Republican coalition. He won by humiliating the politicians who had held power before him, but he did not, during that campaign, attempt to replace them

so Trump presided over a kind of uneasy coalition government with the Republican Party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. His major domestic policy projects reflected that coalition: Repeal of Obamacare was what united congressional Republicans in 2016, so that’s what the Trump administration attempted in 2017. Cutting corporate taxes is what got Speaker Ryan out of bed in the morning, so that is what the Trump administration turned to next.

But now Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump

But Trump is not temperamentally suited to the work of managing a coalition and he has not elevated a trusted ideological consigliere to do it for him. He is a diffident, distracted ruler, and the result is dozens of groups competing for his favor and unsure of how to win it

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, said in July.

“The problem, which I had always suspected, was that very few plans survive contact with Donald Trump,” said Matthew Continetti, the author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.” “He always wants to maintain maximum flexibility and maximum maneuverability in order to improve his position at any given moment. So he was not just going to turn around and say, yes, Project 2025 is exactly what my program will be, and it’s exactly who I plan to have in my administration.”

The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he ha

t is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.

Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is, but MAGA is whatever his movement becomes. This is why JD Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment.

Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.

Trump’s problem in the 2024 election is that he can no longer run as if he is a man alone.

A Trump administration would be full of people like Vance pursuing the agendas they believe in. In the Talento presentation I mentioned, she describes the Biden administration as “a federal leviathan that is killing our babies” and argues that “every cabinet secretary who comes into a new, hopefully Republican administration will have a pro-life agenda that they must enact.” This is not Trump’s election-year message but it would be his administration’s reality.

Another Trump administration would be filled with people pursuing agendas like this at every level, and properly so: That is what coalitions do when they win elections.

He is denying a reality of his second term that everyone else can plainly see. Project 2025 is not a perfect guide to that second term, but it the closest thing we have to one. It was all so much easier when the deep state was something Trump could complain about, rather than something he had to manage and own.

in just six months, Pakistan imported solar capacity equivalent to 30% of its total electricity generation capacity - an absolutely staggering amount.

Energy analyst Dave Jones has gone to great lengths to track this spread on Google maps, finding building after building across the country with big new solar arrays on the roof.

“In Namibia we uncovered they have about 70 megawatts of distributed generation—that’s rooftop solar pv that’s about 11 percent of Namibia’s installed capacity

by the end of the year, Pakistan’s distributed solar system could be nearing half the capacity of its entire grid! This isn’t just growth; it’s a silent revolution in energy production.

reports something similar happening in country after country—Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, on and on.

This won’t just transform the climate, it will transform lives.

South Africa is the biggest market, and it has five gigawatts of distributed solar—about 9 percent of South Africa’s installed capacity.”

“You will not see these numbers anywhere,” he said. “They’re not reported in national plans, not anywhere in continental statistics. No one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities,” and even they know mostly about the larger installations—there are doubtless far more hut-scale systems across Africa.

People are driven by the high cost of electricity, but also by its unreliability—in much of the continent “load-shedding” is endemic, with diesel generators roaring on to compensate, at least at businesses solvent enough to afford it

For middle-class Pakistanis, they can pay off the investment in a few years selling back power to the grid; in poor areas, things like tube wells for irrigation are now increasingly run on solar. This means not just a decline in natural gas use for centralized generation; it also means many noisy, dirty and expensive diesel generators that used to provide backup power are being turned off

All this, he points out, is happening without any help from governments, and except for South Africa without financing from banks, who haven’t yet learned how to evaluate the credit ris

many nations probably won’t need the big and expensive increases in bulk electric supply they’ve been predicting. And Nana and his colleagues are working hard to figure out how to make the most of this—how to turn solar pv into real economic assets for entire communities, through practices like net metering.

The African market is a huge market for some of the Chinese manufacturers, so we have availability—huge availability. The market is flooded with panels from China.”

IEA said this weak that oil demand around the world is softening because of “surging” sales of electric vehicles.

In China, demand for gasoline will peak this year or next and then decline sharply.

California—arguably earth’s most modern economy—has managed to weather its worst heat waves ever without blackouts this simmer thanks to ever-growing batteries of…batteries

“It is increasingly challenging to address the nuances of complex topics like the energy transition because of the growing segregation into ideological camps, which in turn reduces the space for honest practical dialogue,” said Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer at the Church of England Pensions Board, which manages over £3 billion ($3.9 billion) of assets.

Alastair Marsh reports that some of the big financial houses are just plain abandoning their ballyhooed climate targets.

A recent Bloomberg Intelligence analysis said most US companies have “significantly scaled back” discussions of ESG and similar topics on quarterly earnings calls. And for those whose goals appear increasingly out of reach, the temptation to keep quiet is even greater.

+The oft-strained relationship between labor and environmentalists took a big step forward last week, when the annual convention of the International Association of Machinists adopted an important series of new pledges

After considering new findings, members passed a resolution to include the concept of “Just Transition.” This concept asserts that workers displaced from jobs by climate change should receive supplemental income, insurance, and pension benefits. It aims to address and correct the inequities faced by people of color who have been systematically excluded from jobs in the energy sect

policy makers and environmentalists need to get smart about political capital: how to build it and, most importantly, how to avoid wasting it.

Environmentalist policies don’t just need to be well-intentioned or feel virtuous; they need to be effective in accomplishing their stated goals.

Cumulatively, they risk giving citizens the impression that those in charge care more about forcing them to change their lifestyle than about solving real problems

If we want to win the fight against climate change, we need to get serious about achieving the biggest possible environmental impact for the smallest possible price in quality of life and political goodwill

Low-impact policies that demand small, if frequent and highly salient, sacrifices feel virtuous. But they deplete a disproportionate amount of political capital.

It’s time for a new paradigm. Call it “effective environmentalism.”

This is driven by a deeper sense, widespread in the environmental movement, that the fight against climate change is coterminous with the fight to remake the world from scratch. To many, social ills like racism, sexism and even capitalism itself are facets of one interrelated system of oppression. A victory against any one facet requires a victory against all.

Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything is a classic of the genre. Tellingly, the first change she admonishes her readers to make concerns their lifestyle: “For us high consumers,” she writes, preventing the dire future that awaits humanity requires “changing how we live.”

Even more tellingly, Klein maintains that making these changes will require nothing short of the abolition of capitalism. To her, the right way to understand this historical moment is as “a battle between capitalism and the planet.”

it turns out that you can’t scare and shame people into taking action on climate change. If anything, this political moment seems to be characterized by a mix of apathy and backlash. In the United States, a recent poll of young voters reveals that only 6 percent of them consider “environmental issues” their top priority, the same number who say their top priority is immigration (economic issues easily eclipse both).

As recently as four years ago, Germany’s Green Party was polling around 25 percent of the vote, and looked likely to lead a federal government for the first time in the country’s history. Now, its support is down to about ten percent, with the decline among young voters especially dramatic. Opinions about the party in the electorate give a clue about the source of its troubles:

In a recent exit poll conducted during the state election in Brandenburg, 71 percent of voters complained that the party “has insufficient concern with the economy and creating jobs.” 66 percent complained that the party “wants to tell us how to live.”

The environment, like most areas of public policy, is the realm of painful trade-offs. Efforts to fix the climate crisis will involve a significant degree of expense and inconvenience. For both moral and strategic reasons, the goal of environmental regulation should therefore be to accomplish important goals while minimizing these costs insofar as possible

effective environmentalism consists in actions or policies which maximize positive impact on the environment while minimizing both the price for humans’ quality of life and the depletion of a collective willingness to adopt other impactful measures.

most of the time, such a definition is less helpful than the spirit which animates it. And that spirit is best captured in a more informal register. So rather than focusing on the definition, effective environmentalists should evaluate any proposed action, policy or regulation by asking themselves three questions:

. How big a positive impact (if any) will the proposed action have?

In politics, it’s easy to obsess over whatever happens to be salient. If some question touches a cultural nerve, or has given rise to major political battles in the past, its stakes can come to seem existential—even if not much hinges on it in the real world. This is part of what makes it so tempting to obsess about such things as banning plastic straws or detachable bottle caps (which have little impact) rather than tax incentives or cap-and-trade schemes (which would have a vastly larger impact)

2. To what extent will the proposed action lead to a deterioration in quality of life?

this also gives them reason to care about the negative consequences that environmental policies may have for human welfare. So the extent of the trade-off needs to be a key consideration. The bigger an adverse impact a particular policy has on people’s quality of life, the more skeptical we should be about implementing it.

For the most part, people who worry about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation are motivated by a concern about human welfare. They worry about the negative consequences that runaway climate change would have for humankind

3. To what extent will the proposed action lead to backlash?

Political capital is limited. In most democracies, a clear majority of the population now cares about climate change to some extent. But this genuine concern competes with, and tends to be eclipsed by, voters’ concern about economic priorities like the availability of good jobs

This context makes it all the more important for voters to feel that governments and environmental groups are focusing on impactful steps that leave them in charge of decisions about their own lives; otherwise, support for any environmental policy is likely to polarize along partisan lines, or even to crater across the board. 

When I coined the term “effective environmentalism,” I was of course inspired by an earlier movement: “effective altruism.”

for all of the problems with effective altruism, the original insight on which it is built is hard to contest. People spend billions of dollars on charitable contributions every year. Much of that money goes to building new gyms at fancy universities or upgrading the local cat shelter. Wouldn’t it be better to direct donors’ altruistic instincts to more impactful endeavors, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people?

Something similar holds true for the environmental movement. Many activists are more focused on interventions that feel virtuous than on ones that will make a real difference. As a result, much of the movement has proven ineffective

Effective altruists pride themselves in adopting principles and mental heuristics that are supposed to help them assess what to do in a more rational way. These include not judging an idea based on who says it; reserving judgment about an idea until you’ve analyzed both its benefits and its costs; paying attention to the relative weight of different priorities; and being skeptical about forms of symbolic politics that don’t lead to real change

these norms make a lot of sense, and have relevance for environmentalists focused on having real impact.

So, to figure out what policies can make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change, and actually win the political capital to put these into practice, effective environmentalists should:

Assess Policies on the Basis of their Impact, not Their Perceived Purity:

Prioritize Actions that Solve the Biggest Problems:

It would be a mistake to subsume all environmental concerns to the fight against climate change. People have reasons to care about living in a clean environment or alleviating animal suffering even if it does not help to protect us from the threat posed by climate change

There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods. And yet, those who care about environmental goals need to have a clear sense of relative priorities. Some goals are more important than others

effective environmentalists should unflinchingly give precedence to the most important goals.

Be Willing to Build Cross-Ideological Coalitions:

Activists increasingly pride themselves in being “intersectional.” Since they believe that various forms of oppression intersect, people who want to participate in the fight against one form of injustice must also get on board with a set of progressive assumptions about how to combat other forms of perceived injustice

This can raise the entrance ticket for anyone who wants to get involved in fighting for an environmental cause; distract major environmental organizations from fighting for their stated goals; and make powerful players unwilling to forge tactical coalitions with partners whose broader worldview they disdai

Effective environmentalists should reject this purist instinct, making common cause with anyone who favors impactful action irrespective of the views they may hold about unrelated issues.

Put People in Charge of Their Own Lives:

Effective environmentalists should fight to transition as much of the economy as possible to forms of energy that do not emit carbon. This will require broad political support and, yes, real financial trade-offs

effective environmentalists should avoid overly intrusive regulations about how people then go about using that energy. If consumers are willing to pay an elevated price for the pleasure of sitting on an outside terrace in the late fall, it shouldn’t be for the government or for environmental activists to decide that a different use of energy is more morally righteous.

No-Bullshit Environmentalism

For the last decades, the environmentalist movement has tried its hand at fear-mongering.

this kind of rhetoric is factually misleading and politically disastrous.

This is why I favor a different approach. This approach centers the serious risks posed by climate change. But it also insists that humans are capable of meeting this moment with a mix of collective action and ingenuity.

With the right investments and regulations, we can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of a warming planet. And while this transition will exact considerable costs, it need not make us poor or require us to abstain from putting plentiful energy to its many miraculous uses.

at a start, the mix of policies advocated by effective environmentalists is likely to include: a commitment to creating energy abundance while transitioning towards a low-carbon economy; significant investment in both renewable and nuclear energy; regulatory action to raise the price of fossil-fuels; the adoption of genetically-modified crops that can withstand a changing climate; public and private investment to mitigate the effects of the warming that is already underway; the development and adoption of new technologies that can capture carbon; and a willingness to do serious research on speculative ideas, such as marine cloud brightening, that have the potential to avert worst-case outcomes in the case of a climate emergency. 

In life as in economics, trade-offs are real. But in the context of a growing economy, we should be able to bear those costs without suffering any overall reduction in human affluence or well-being. If we adopt the principles of effective environmentalism and take energetic action, our future shines bright.

On Monday morning, I saw on Twitter/X that New York magazine had just published a profile of and interview with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his forthcoming book (partially) about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coates makes very clear in the interview that he endorses from top to bottom the position advocated by the most militant pro-Palestinian activists: Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza; Palestinian resistance is equivalent in purity and righteousness to those who marched against Jim Crow in the American South during the 1950s and ’60s and against South African apartheid in the 1970s and ’80s—while Israel’s position is equivalent in wickedness to the brutalizing forces of racism and oppression in both contexts.

The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business. In an interview, Longwell told Semafor that subscriptions are on track to generate more than $5 million a year, which represents the main source of revenue for the publication.

The Bulwark is riding two converging trends in politics and media.

The publication has capitalized on the tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates. (Weiss, in a neighboring ideological lane, offers a safe space for Democrats who can’t stomach Trump but feel their party and their flagship newspaper, The New York Times, have abandoned them, especially on campus-culture issues and Israel.)

This sometimes produces surreal scenes: Last week, a room full of 400 liberal and center-left Atlantic Festival guests erupted in applause for remarks by Kristol, once best known as the most committed media promoter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

The Bulwark’s YouTube explosion also offers a glimpse into what a post-cable future might look like for political news. The Bulwark’s success has been driven in large part by Miller’s natural loose on-camera persona and the interest in some of its well-known hosts like George Conway. But its growth on YouTube mirrors that of conservatives like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro or Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News personality, whose YouTube following rivals that of major broadcasters.

“Because my bigger political ambition is: How do you build a new center in the country that sort of refuses to engage in extreme sides of politics? And so I want to build as big a community as possible.”

MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.

If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.

In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators.

the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”

“the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”

we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common futur

Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay.

Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.

MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.”

MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.

MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside

MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics.

MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century

My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness.

Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control.

Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.

offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete

champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.

If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business

They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede.

Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.

Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education.

tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.

The economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less

Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”

t aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened

“The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”

But these past few weeks suggest that it wasn’t merely collateral damage at all. The assault on these groups really was the point. The alleged failures of liberal elites (to, say, close the border or protect manufacturing jobs) are the excuse for the assaults on immigrants and minorities that we’ve seen throughout the Trump years. That’s where the real political payoff is