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Freudian psychoanalysis offers yet another account. As Mr. Chopra’s summary has it: “Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality.”

Finally, there is the idea of “materialist alienation,” advocated by both Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse. This theory identifies the sources of anxiety in the material and economic conditions of society rather than in the individual psyche:

Although Mr. Chopra, a philosophy professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, notes many overlaps and commonalities in the four approaches, their differences make them inconsistent as a set. It isn’t clear that they are centrally concerned with anxiety at all.

ukkha in Buddhism isn’t usually understood to refer to anxiety but rather to a state of discontent.

Mr. Chopra acknowledges that one of his key existentialist figures, Nietzsche, never uses the term. Alluding to Marx’s alienated labor, Mr. Chopra asks: “What does such alienation feel like?” His answer: “Like anxiety, for it is anxiety.

Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not. He says, for example, that from his own experience he has concluded that being “indecisive, distracted, insecure, or anxious . . . amounted to the same thing.” But for many people those conditions are very different.

Mr. Chopra is a serial user of the “presumptive we”: using the first-person plural to speak for all of us when he is really speaking for some or sometimes only himself.

At times Mr. Chopra writes of anxiety as though it were a key to self-definition, saying, at one point “thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.” Tell me your anxieties and I’ll tell you who you are may sound profound, but replace “anxieties” with “dreams,” “loves,” “hopes” or “values” and it is just as true.

Even philosophy in Mr. Chopra’s view springs not from wonder, as Aristotle and Plato claimed, but from anxiety. However, neither those giants of thought nor others who followed them for centuries had much to say about it

That “anxiety is a basic human affect and signature of human consciousness” is made somewhat problematic, he concedes, by the fact that it only emerged as “an explicitly named and identified problem in the nineteenth century.”

Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice—not to push anxiety away but “to see what it ‘points to’ ”—is also spot-on

his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.

That shame mangrove has been completely uprooted by Trump.

The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short

in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”

People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like suckers for following them.”

Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.

Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”

. Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system.

He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud.

Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove — has also experienced serious destruction.

It used to be that if you had the incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down

Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.

Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.

when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding.”

In November 2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564 full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative backlashes by classmates.

Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies

in 2023, the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”

As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.

It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”

we have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.

More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown away.

Blown away — that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.

a trend ailing America today: how much we’ve lost our moorings as a society.

Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be mangroves.

civility itself also used to be a mangrove.

“Why the hell not?” Drummond asks.“You’re not supposed to say ‘hell,’ either,” the announcer says.You are not supposed to say “hell,” either. What a quaint thought. That is a polite exclamation point in today’s social media.

Another vital mangrove is religious observance. It has been declining for decades:

So now the most partisan national voices on Fox News, or MSNBC — or any number of polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson — go straight from their national studios direct to small-town America, unbuffered by a local paper’s or radio station’s impulse to maintain a community where people feel some degree of connection and mutual respect

In a 2021 interview with my colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama observed that when he started running for the presidency in 2007, “it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. … They didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value.”

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.”

Each new principle is rooted in his experience, including “If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not by the size of their flippers.” Here’s one that’s particularly salient in the face of Trumpist bullying: “If you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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?

Even when they arrive at college wanting something very different, an increasing number of students at elite universities seek the imprimatur of employment by a powerful firm and “making a bag” (slang for a sack of money) as quickly as possible.

Elite universities have always been major feeders into finance and consulting, and students have always wanted to make money. According to the annual American Freshman Survey, the biggest increase in students wanting to become “very well off financially” happened between the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s been creeping up since then.

According to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard Seniors, the share of 2024 graduates going into finance and consulting is 34 percent. (In 2022 and 2023 it exceeded 40 percent.

Another student, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer in a row practicing case studies in preparation for management consulting internship interviews, told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.

“There’s definitely a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, said. “If you’re not doing finance or tech, it can feel like you’re doing something wrong.”

As a freshman, he planned to major in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics, joining five of his six roommates. One of those roommates told me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the time he was in his 30s. Before that, he wanted to earn a good salary, which he defined as $500,000 a year.

But in the last five years, faculty and administrators say, the pull of these industries has become supercharged. In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition and inequality, students and their parents increasingly see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.

These statistics approach the previous highs in 2007, after which the global financial crisis drove the share down to a recent low of 20 percent in 2009, from which it’s been regaining ground since

Fifteen years ago, fewer students went into tech. Adding in that sector, the share of graduates starting what some students non-disparagingly refer to as “sellout jobs” is more than half. (It was a record-shattering 60 percent in 2022 and nearly 54 percent in 2023.)

“When people say ‘selling out,’ I mean, obviously, there’s some implicit judgment there,” said Aden Barton, a 23-year-old Harvard senior who wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper headlined, “How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom.”

“But it really is just almost a descriptive term at this point for people pursuing certain career paths,” he continued. “I’m not trying to denigrate anybody’s career path nor my own.” (He interned at a hedge fund last summer.)

David Halek, director of employer relations at Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, thinks students may use the term “sell out” because of the perceived certainty: “It’s the easy path to follow. It is well defined,” he said.

“It’s hard to conceptualize other things,” said Andy Wang, a social studies concentrator at Harvard who recently graduated.

Some students talk about turning to a different career later on, after they’ve made enough money. “Nowadays, English concentrators often say they’re going into finance or management consulting for a couple of years before writing their novel,” said James Wood, a Harvard professor of the practice of literary criticism.

And a surprising number of students explain their desire for a corporate job by drawing on the ethos of effective altruism: Whether they are conscious of the movement or not, they believe they can have greater impact by maximizing earnings to donate to a cause than working for that cause.

Roger Woolsey, executive director of the career center at Union College, a private liberal arts college in Schenectady, N.Y, said he first noticed a change around 2015, with students who had been in high school during the Great Recession and who therefore prioritized financial security.

that might be why students and their parents were much more focused on professional outcomes than they used to be. “In the past few years,” she said, “I’ve seen a higher level of interest in this first-destination data” — stats on what jobs graduates are getting out of college.

“The students saw what their parents went through, and the parents saw what happened to themselves,” he said. “You couple that with college tuition continuing to rise,” he continued, and students started looking for monetary payoffs right after graduation.

“Twenty years ago, an ‘introduction to investment banking’ event was held at the undergraduate library at Harvard,” said Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Forty students showed up, all men, and when asked to define ‘investment banking,’ none raised their hands.”

Now, according to Goldman Sachs, the bank had six times as many applicants this year for summer internships as it did 10 years ago, and was 20 percent more selective for this summer’s class than it was last year.

“Harvard is more diverse than ever before,” Mr. Contomanolis said, with nearly one in five students eligible for a low-income Pell Grant. Those students, he said, weigh whether to, for instance, “take a job back in my border town community in Texas and make a big impact in a kind of public service sense” or get a job with “a salary that would be life changing for my family.

according to The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey, as Mr. Barton noted in his opinion column, “The aggregate rate of ‘selling out’ is about the same — around 60 percent — for all income brackets.” The main distinction is that students from low-income families are comparatively more likely to go into technology than finance.

In other words, there is something additional at play, which Mr. Barton argues has to do with the nature of prestige. “If you tell me you’re working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, that’s amazing, their eyes are going to light up,” Mr. Barton said. “If you tell somebody, ‘Oh, I took this random nonprofit job,’ or even a journalism job, even if you’re going to a huge name, it’s going to be a little bit of a question mark.”

“Even if you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life, it’s seen kind of as the golden standard of a smart, hardworking person,”

Matine Khalighi, 22, founded a nonprofit to award scholarships to homeless youth when he was in eighth grade. When he began studying economics at Harvard, his nonprofit, EEqual, was granting 50 scholarships a year. But some of the corporations that funded EEqual were contributing to inequality that created homelessness, he said. Philanthropy wasn’t the solution for systemic change, he decided. Instead, he turned to finance, with the idea that the sector could marshal capital quickly for social impact.

Part of that has to do with recruitment; the most prestigious banks and consulting firms do so only at certain colleges, and they have intensified their presence on those campuses in recent years. Over the last five years or so, “the idea of thinking about your professional path has moved much earlier in the undergraduate experience,” Ms. Ciesil said. She said the banks first began talking to students earlier, and it was the entrance of Big Tech onto the scene, asking for junior summer applications by the end of sophomore year, that accelerated recruitment timelines.

The marker that really distinguishes Gen Z is how pessimistic its members are, and how much they feel like life is beyond their control, according to Jean Twenge, a psychologist who analyzed data from national surveys of high school students and first-year college students in her book “Generations.”

Money, of course, helps give people a sense of control. And because of income inequality, “there’s this idea that you either make it or you don’t, so you better make it,” Ms. Twenge said.

Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard’s business and law schools, wrote a 2017 essay in The Crimson titled “The Trouble With Optionality,” arguing that students who habitually pursue the security of prestigious employment foreclose the risk-taking and longer-range thinking necessary for more unusual or idealistic achievements.

Mr. Desai believes that’s often because they are responding to the bigger picture, like threats to workers from artificial intelligence, and political and financial upheaval.

he’s observed two trends among students pursuing wealth. There’s “the option-buyer,” the student who takes a job in finance or consulting to buy more time or to keep options open. Then there’s what he calls “the lottery ticket buyer,” the students who go all-in on a risky venture, like a start-up or new technology, hoping to make a windfall.

In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.

“Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”

Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”

But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”

y contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.

The left is contemptuous of Mr. Trump, and since the Republican Party has implicitly become a party that stands for what the left despises, it has been very difficult to separate Republican voters from Mr. Trump in the name of any more positive vision or ideal. Mr. Levin put it this way: “The left isn’t going to hate anyone more than they hate Mr. Trump, so Republicans aren’t going to love anyone more than they love Mr. Trump.”

Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me that as a practical matter, the Republican Party at this point should be understood as the anti-left party. “It understands itself defensively, as speaking for a coalition that is being abused, excluded, mistreated and pushed around by a left-leaning elite in American life,” he said. “Its sense of purpose is therefore fundamentally defensive. That means it is largely defined in opposition to its understanding of the left, more than it is defined by a specific policy vision of its own.”

“That opposition,” he added, “obviously gives shape to some assertive or constructive action, too, but the vision of America underlying that action is largely a function of Republicans think Democrats are trying to destroy.” JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s pick for vice president, told The American Conservative magazine in 2021, “I think our people hate the right people.” (

“Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”

A third way to understand today’s Republican Party, something that grows more obvious with every passing day, is that it has become a populist rather than a conservative party. Th

when traditionally conservative views aren’t in alignment with populist views, it’s the traditionally conservative views that most often get jettisone

Mr. Trump tapped into the growing resentment of millions of voters. He was seen by them as their tribune. Unfortunately, he exploited their fears and did almost nothing to solve their problems. But that doesn’t seem to matter to them. It’s all about the posturing.

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories

Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

But the most worrisome feature that has defined the Republican Party during the Trump era is a relentless assault on reality, fused with lawlessness and the embrace of illiberalism.

The Republican Party once preached about the importance of standing for moral truths and standing against moral relativism; today it is, in important respects, nihilistic.

It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.