Two hundred fifty years ago, the Continental Congress dispatched an enterprising Connecticut merchant named Silas Deane on a covert mission to France. His orders were simple: secure gunpowder.

It was a longstanding need. For decades, Parliament had kept colonial industry under its boot. The Iron Act of 1750 compelled the colonies to ship their raw iron to Britain and prohibited the construction of furnaces and forges that would have made America industrially self-sufficient. When war severed the lifeline to British supply, there was a single working powder mill in all 13 colonies.

Upon assuming command of the Continental Army, General George Washington discovered there were only 90 barrels of gunpowder available, enough for about 10 minutes of firing. An eyewitness reported that Washington was so horrified he did not utter a word for half an hour. Thus, in February of 1776, Massachusetts delegate John Adams introduced resolutions directing every colony to “forthwith erect Powder Mills.” Adams leveraged the admittedly limited power of the fledgling Continental Congress to make that happen, sensing no contradiction between the liberty the colonies espoused and a proactive government engaging in order to defend it.

What the Founders did to secure gunpowder ought to humble anyone who believes American intervention on behalf of strategic industry is a modern invention. It also happens to be a surprisingly prescient playbook.

Today, China dominates global critical mineral supply chains. It mines roughly 70% of the world’s rare earths and processes upwards of 90%, while also holding commanding positions in lithium, cobalt, and graphite. These vital resources are essential to everything from weapons systems to the power grid. Gunpowder was the critical mineral of the eighteenth century; critical minerals are the gunpowder of ours. Without them, no missiles fly, no semiconductors are fabricated, no power flows.

The Continental Congress of 1776 realized that sovereignty, in the end, is only as real as the matter and materials that sustain it, and Deane worked diligently to make sure that Washington’s army had both. By the end of that year the diplomat Benjamin Franklin and Virginia’s Arthur Lee had joined him in France to secure a treaty of alliance. France pledged military support and, by the end of 1777, had supplied roughly 2 million pounds of gunpowder and 60,000 arms.

Congress also pledged to buy all domestic gunpowder at $8 per hundredweight, far above prevailing rates. It was a buyer of last resort for an industry that barely existed. It issued direct contracts to Oswald Eve at the Frankford mill outside Philadelphia, whose output had limped along at roughly 250 pounds per month. With guaranteed offtake, Eve reportedly scaled production to 2,200 pounds per week within two months.

The Continental Congress printed pamphlets on gunpowder manufacturing and sent Paul Revere to Philadelphia to study Eve’s mill, armed with letters from fellow delegates Robert Morris and John Dickinson urging Eve to open his works and share his mysterious methods. Revere returned to Massachusetts with acquired knowledge, built a powder mill of his own at Canton, and produced over 40,000 pounds in its first months.

The knowledge transfer also ran across the Atlantic. Antoine Lavoisier, who oversaw France’s national powder works, had revolutionized gunpowder chemistry, producing what he declared “the best in Europe.” Lavoisier’s published formulas set the standard that American powder makers would follow for a generation. His powder gave colonial riflemen fewer misfires and greater accuracy, advantages that mattered greatly in a war of inches and attrition.

The same logic holds today as the United States works to outcompete China and achieve industrial independence once again. In February, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted ministers from over 50 countries at the first Critical Minerals Ministerial, the capstone of a diplomatic sprint that produced bilateral agreements with partners as varied as lithium-rich Argentina and the nickel-flush Philippines.

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The ministerial’s centerpieces are the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), a preferential trade bloc with coordinated price floors designed to prevent any single nation from undercutting allied producers, and Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic reserve. Just as it was 250 years ago, even the most resourceful nation cannot produce everything it needs alone.

Last July, the Pentagon took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, which runs America’s only large-scale rare earth mining and processing facility, and set a price floor of $110 per kilogram for key rare earth oxides, again above prevailing rates. The Section 45X production tax credit, launched in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act but preserved and tightened by President Trump in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, offers a 10% credit for domestic mineral extraction and processing. The credit has proven so popular that Republican legislators, including Senators Jerry Moran of Kansas and John Curtis of Utah, have even introduced bills to expand it to distribution transformers and fusion energy components. Price floors, equity stakes, production credits: the playbook is older than the Republic.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, launched by executive order last November, has marshaled all 17 national laboratories and two dozen private sector partners to apply artificial intelligence to the nation’s hardest technical problems, with critical mineral discovery and processing named among its top challenges.

The CHIPS and Science Act, the largest federal research investment in a generation, authorized $280 billion to rebuild American capacity in strategic technologies, including putting our government’s best scientists to the task of eliminating foreign mineral dependency. When Congress ordered pamphlets printed and mills opened for inspection, it was making the same bet we are making now: that American ingenuity, properly resourced and responsibly distributed, can close a gap that patience alone will not.

Two years before the Adams resolutions, the Continental Congress had adopted the Continental Association, a sweeping trade embargo against Britain and its colonies. The embargo was principled and necessary, but by 1775 had broadened well beyond its original scope, as delegates moved to choke off trade for fear that exported cargo would drain supplies at home or fall into enemy hands. John Jay of New York posited that the only way to keep American goods from the British was to “publish a law that none go from the Continent.” But the war could not be fought without powder, so the delegates carved out an exception: any ship that imported gunpowder, arms, or ammunition could carry American goods out in return. When policy threatened the cause it was built to protect, Congress tore it open.

Likewise, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 was born of an honorable impulse to preserve our nation’s wildlife, water, air, and natural beauty built by the hands of God. Half a century later, that impulse has calcified into a regulatory regime that can hold a mine in permitting limbo for a decade while China builds processing capacity by the quarter. The United States House of Representatives passed the SPEED Act in December to clear that logjam, imposing statutory deadlines on environmental reviews and limiting the litigation that can stall a permitted project for years after approval. Like the Continental Association before it, NEPA is not the enemy. But when a good law becomes a barrier to the national interest, the law must yield.

Some 250 years after our nation’s founding, the tools are more sophisticated but the logic has not changed. The Continental Congress entered the Revolutionary War with 90 barrels of powder, a collection of delegates with more resolve than means, and the good sense to act rather than wait. The nation they built now boasts wealth, allies, and technology they could not have imagined. What America has always needed, and what no resource can replace, is the conviction to use them.

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Conservatives and liberals are splitting along fertility lines more than ever before, a gap that will only grow more pronounced as the next generation takes shape.

Some right-leaning commentators are running victory laps over the “more conservative world” of the future. After all, counties that voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election had higher fertility rates than ones that voted for Kamala Harris. Republican states have higher fertility than Democratic states, and parents are more likely to move from blue states to red ones.

But it’s a Pyrrhic victory. Yes, young women are increasingly swinging to the Left and, at the same time, losing interest in marriage and parenthood. But this presents a problem for young men who hope to start a family. Even if conservatives stay committed to marriage and childrearing, we could see a mismatch between the sexes that prevents it from happening.

In the 1990s, conservative women between the ages of 35 and 45 had, on average, 2.1 children, compared to 1.7 among liberal women. The latest data from the General Social Survey shows that today’s conservative women in the same age range have an average of 2.3 children, compared to 1.6 among liberal women.

According to a new brief from the Institute for Family Studies, liberals are more likely to cite mental health concerns when thinking about parenthood. About 19% of liberals said their mental health was not good enough to have kids, compared to 10% of conservatives. Additionally, 18% of liberals worry about passing bad genes or inheritable conditions to their offspring, a significantly higher than that of conservatives (10%) even when controlling for parental status and other variables.

Data also suggests that the fertility divide may widen even further in the years to come.

One longstanding poll, the Monitoring the Future survey, asks American high school seniors about their ideal family size. From the late 1970s through the early 2010s, the vast majority of both liberal and conservative teens said they wanted to be parents someday.

But over the past decade, left-leaning teens have shifted dramatically away from the parenthood ideal.

Today, fully 23% of liberal teens say they don’t want kids, and an additional 10% are unsure. Those identifying as “very liberal” are the least likely to want children, with 39% saying they don’t know or do not want kids.

On the other side of the aisle, just 5% of conservative teens say they don’t want kids and 6% say they are unsure, consistent with survey results in previous decades.

The data is even more eye-opening when it comes to the two sexes, with teenage boys now more likely to say they want kids than girls.

Almost a third of 12th-grade girls, 31%, say it is unlikely or uncertain they will want children if they get married, compared to 22% for boys. The same figure sat at 16% for both girls and boys in 2009, before the present gap emerged.

Historically, teenage girls were more likely than boys to say they expected to get married in the future. The Monitoring the Future survey found that between 1976 and 2010, 83% of 12th grade girls said they expected to marry one day, compared to 76% of boys. But the gap narrowed in the 2010s as girls became more skeptical of marriage. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, only 67% of 12th grade girls say they expected to marry, versus 72% of boys.

The ideological divide largely explains the diverging family ideals between American boys and girls. Liberal boys are about as likely to say they want no kids as liberal girls. Conservative girls and boys are about as likely to desire parenthood. Once you control for political views, the difference between boys and girls nearly disappears. Girls identify as liberal at higher rates, which accounts for the new dissensus on parenthood between the sexes.

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It’s unclear whether becoming liberal makes teens desire kids less, or the other way around. It is plausible that fearing marriage and kids moves people Left, and wanting kids nudges people to the Right. As my colleague Lyman Stone has argued, the Left-Right political divide might be emergent of deeper disagreements over sex, marriage, and kids.

In a time where young adults already struggle with dating and coupling, the last thing American men and women need is ideological divisions on whether to have kids after getting married.

The root cause of this swing is hard to pin down, though the trend correlates strongly with the wide adoption of algorithmic social media platforms. As has been widely discussed, social media provides users with divisive content about the opposite sex, and makes it easy to access pornographic materials as well. Teenage social media usage also correlates with poor socialization and worse mental health, neither of which will help people become successful parents.

With increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness among younger generations, mental health concerns could play a larger role in fertility decisions moving forward, especially among the liberal-identifying youth.

Although it is unclear whether liberal ideology leads directly to greater mental health concerns or vice versa, the survey data reflects a consistent association between liberal political views and fears about parenting and childbearing.

Given these trends, progressive commentators are sounding the alarm over the possibility of a more conservative political climate.

The Financial Times’s John Burns-Murdoch fears that “progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world,” going so far as to blame conservatives for the Left’s reticence to take fertility decline seriously.

Blaming the Right for the Left’s fertility problem is odd. For decades, progressives have worked to decentralize marriage and parenthood in culture and public policy, often celebrating singleness and a childfree lifestyle over the burdens that come with kids.

But the problem of low fertility will impact everyone, regardless of your political outlook. Fewer children, more loneliness, and greater division between the sexes will only add to America’s social strife.

Widespread isolation can lead to political extremism and other unhealthy social behaviors such as drug abuse and violence.

At a larger level, this generational shift could portend a remarkable change in the body politic. Family formation has been a near ubiquitous ideal for young Americans historically. Even with the cultural revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s, young adults were constant in their desire for family life. But if recent trends persist, we may see a future where the family loses further ground in American political life and cultural imagination. With low marriage rates, low birth rates, and an aging population, the American family desperately needs broad support.

In the long run, political polarization around parenthood is a game no one wins.

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Editor’s note: This piece was originally published at American Compass on September 8, 2023.

Gatsby, jazz, the Lost Generation, flappers, Art Deco, Babe Ruth, Buster Keaton, Charles Lindbergh, the Charleston. The “Roaring Twenties” surely ranks high on many Americans’ “what time period would you travel back to?” list. It’s a decade we remember as a cultural golden age, and for good reason. America for the first time projected a mass popular culture out into the wider world, thanks to its newfound identity as a nation of middle-class consumers: consumers of GM cars and movie tickets, radios and baseball cards.

Thanks to the decade’s ad men and financiers and would-be radicals, and to intentional neglect by laissez-faire political leaders, this new model of American life eclipsed the traditional one; no longer republican citizens or free laborers or yeoman farmers who could fashion their community through productive work and engagement in politics, middle-class Americans would now perpetually fashion themselves through engagement with the market. Decisions about the direction of economic change or the nature of the political community no longer belonged to them. A hundred years later, still a nation of consumers, we look back on that culture fondly and forget what was lost. The price Americans paid for their new freedom as consumers was their political and economic agency.

Beneath the vibrant consumer culture we associate with the 1920s was seismic economic change. One particularly noticeable aspect of this change was the explosion of advertising, which promised greater happiness and power—therapeutic release from the psychic burdens of daily life and tighter control over one’s health and appearance—through purchasing. New mass media made radio ads and the nationwide mailing of catalogs a regular part of life.

But a more important feature of the economic revolution of the 1920s was a sudden, massive increase in the amount of loose cash flying around for people to use on consumer products, an increase that wasn’t coming from wage growth (more on that later). It came from the opening of a new frontier of credit, stocks, and speculation, which would make up for the closure of the old frontier, the West, where value could only come from land and labor. Puff pieces in mass-market magazines touted the investors and business leaders of this new age as natural successors of the pioneers, promising that, for those with an eye for opportunity and a willingness to gamble, it was now as possible to strike it rich in the big cities of the East as it had been in the empty expanses of the West. If mass culture and mass media became part of every American’s life in the 1920s, so too did financialization.

It started with the repeal or reform of usury laws across the United States. Historian Lendol Calder relates how, in the 1910s, Progressive activists spurred the emergence of the personal finance industry. Noticing that industrial workers would often go to illegal loan sharks and pawnbrokers to supplement low wages, reformers set up “remedial loan” shops as a palliative and “philanthropic” alternative (instead of, say, calling for higher wages).

Along with this innovation came a political campaign to overturn usury laws, which were making it difficult for these new remedial loan shops to operate. This “legalize but regulate” tactic failed to end loansharking, but it succeeded in making usurious lending more acceptable to bourgeois America. Proponents of the industry assuaged the uneasy middle-class conscience, arguing that locking oneself into long-term payment plans encouraged hard work and personal discipline. Loan sharks now had a path to legitimization, and many rebranded as “personal finance” enterprises managed by experts. All of a sudden, middle-class America had a socially acceptable path to easy credit.

Banks embraced the easy-money ethos as well. Earlier generations of bankers were content to sit back and let the occasional loan application come to them. “To most bankers before the 1920s, the notion of banks actively selling credit would have sounded strange,” writes economist Tobias Rötheli. “New ways of doing business arrived with the introduction of the instruments of marketing … innovated in the marketing of consumer goods.” Banks started hiring experts in consumer psychology and adopting marketing tactics, as if they were Ford selling Model Ts. Following the Progressives’ craze for “scientific management” and applied social science, major U.S. banks also adopted standardized formulae for evaluating creditworthiness.

Based almost exclusively on comparing debt-to-asset ratios, these turned out not to be very good at differentiating levels of risky borrowers, a problem banks would not notice until it was too late. But they served an ideological purpose. Flattening client portfolios into a few numbers for comparison, a bank could ignore certain complexities of an individual client’s life and livelihood. The math said where the money was, and the math gave power to make decisions about where it should go. Bankers had the math; clients and regulators did not. Concerns about the disempowerment that comes with debt could be dismissed as naïve Victorian moralizing, made obsolete by the latest innovations in social science. Armed with their formulae, banks aggressively advertised their loan products to consumers of credit, certain of safe returns.

And even though there was no more land in the West for homesteads, there was a new site of the American Dream: Wall Street. On this new frontier, you didn’t have to work on what you owned, you just had to own it (or buy or sell at the right time). Now the market would provide what, for a century, the hard toil of westward expansion had: access to property and thereby upward mobility.

Stock trading had been something of a niche activity in America for the several decades since its first appearance. But now middle-class people were buying stocks, often with borrowed money. Fewer than one million Americans owned corporate shares in 1910. By the early 1930s more than 10 million did. And companies increasingly relied on selling stock to raise funds; the number of industrial stocks on the New York Stock Exchange doubled from 1915 to 1920 and doubled again from 1920 to 1930. The number of stocks on the Chicago stock exchange also doubled from 1915 to 1920, and then did it again between 1920 and 1925.

Sellers of consumer goods encouraged middle-class borrowing with credit innovations of their own. The 1920s was the era of the installment plan. First utilized in the nineteenth century for expensive, technologically complex labor-saving devices (like Singer sewing machines and McCormick reapers), “buy now, pay later” plans became the norm for more and more consumer products. Companies offered them for furniture and clothes and other common items, and, like personal loans, installment buying attained middle-class acceptability by the 1920s.

It took some convincing, of course. During the years 1926 and 1927, business organizations launched a significant PR campaign to recast “consumptive credit” (which connoted not just waste and extravagance, but sickness) as “consumers’ credit.” The message is captured by one 1928 ad from the Julian Goldman department store: “A factory or a fur coat (both of them may be bought on credit) … What is the difference in these transactions? Nothing—except size!” The lesson was clear: consumption was just as good as production; production is what we businesses do, while consumption is what you do. Going into debt is just as appropriate for one as for the other.

The average American—branded, for the first time, as “The Consumer”—was now confronted with easy money from lots of institutions, some new and some old. State-of-the-art personal finance companies and old neighborhood banks, the newly developed stock market and the long-trusted retailer all offered new ways to purchase, even without substantial wages or savings. Middle-class buying and borrowing habits changed drastically. American households’ consumer debt more than doubled over the course of the decade, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of household income. It went from $3.3 billion in 1920 to $7.6 billion in 1929, and, after hovering between 4–6% in the first two decades of the 20th century, it jumped to 10% in the third. After declining from 1900 to 1916, real debt per household nearly doubled in the 1920s. Urban mortgage loans to homeowners and businesses also doubled over the course of the decade.

In 1930, Harvard economist Franklin W. Ryan declared that “the American family’s plunge into debt for commodities during the last few years constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena in modern history.” It was as if every financial institution and consumer goods retailer were just printing money out of nothing. The rapid increase in liquid cash boosted the economic metrics, ensuring boom times for as long as the credit and consumption and investing habits persisted. And yet, while these economic changes were transforming life for the average American, economic issues were being taken off the ballot.

For the entirety of American history up to that point, economic questions were highly contested in the public square. Issues we might today consider too technical for the average voter often decided presidential elections. Should there be a national bank? Should the federal government spend money on “internal improvements” (that is, infrastructure)? What should be the going rate for sales of federal land? Should the dollar be backed by gold or silver or both—that is, should the U.S. pursue an inflationary or deflationary monetary policy? From the earliest days of the republic to the eve of the twentieth century, popular movements rose and fell on questions like these.

The 1920s marked a turning point. Redefining the middle-class American as a consumer meant certain questions weren’t addressed to him anymore. Decisions about economic policy were no longer up for democratic political debate; they now belonged to a specific set of people and institutions. Any intervention by elected officials was reframed as a threat to the whole system.

Crucial to the depoliticization of economic questions was the identification of a new and very narrow set of protagonists in the story of the American economy. In his study of the rhetoric of “free enterprise,” historian Lawrence Glickman identifies the 1920s as the moment when “free enterprise” stopped referring to a spirit shared by Americans as a people and began to be identified with the business community in particular. “In the 1920s,” Glickman writes, “advocates began to describe free enterprise as a system of business autonomy that worked automatically and efficiently, but only if the government played a limited role in aiding … the firm.”

The drive to create, to develop, to strive was no longer understood as a common trait of American citizens. It now belonged to businesses and their leaders. It was they—and the efficiency experts who floated between posts in business and government—who were fit to make decisions about national banks, monetary policy, taxation, and spending. And those happy few still allowed a say on economic policies all agreed on what those policies should be: cut taxes, cut spending, and deregulate.

Both major political parties took the unpopularity of the Woodrow Wilson administration as an opportunity to elevate business-friendly candidates for office. The presidential nominees for both parties in 1920—and again in 1924—campaigned on tax and spending cuts, and didn’t touch the growing debt, speculation, and consumption that increasingly defined middle-class American life.

The GOP in particular proved a willing vehicle for the depoliticization of economic policy. Its nomination in 1920 of an empty suit named Warren G. Harding signaled a clean break from the Teddy Roosevelt era, and Harding passed off policy decisions to cabinet members like banker-turned-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Mellon and Vice President Calvin Coolidge (who rose to the presidency when Harding died suddenly in August 1923) successfully lobbied to cut the top marginal tax rate from 73% all the way down to 44%. During Mellon’s tenure as Treasury Secretary, the federal budget was cut by more than half, from $6.4 billion to $2.9 billion.

Coolidge, best known for his maxim “the chief business of the American people is business,” has become the subject of considerable conservative nostalgia. Some speak of him as a prophet of later generations’ supply-side thinking and even attribute the prosperity of the 1920s entirely to his tax policies, which lowered the top tax rate all the way to 25%. But this is simplistic and misleading. The Coolidge economy was artificially propped up by the enduring effects of wartime production, the plethora of new financial instruments, and now-obvious credit bubbles.

In any case, Coolidge didn’t cut taxes and spending to unleash economic growth or advance the common good. Rather, he understood these cuts as a matter of public servants’ personal character. “I regard a good budget as among the noblest monuments of virtue,” he declared in one 1924 speech. Sticking to his administration’s proposed budget, he said in another, “requires us to demonstrate whether we are weaklings, or whether we have strength of character.” In accepting his proposed budget cuts, government employees (saying nothing of the lay beneficiaries of government spending) showed they were willing to make “sacrifices,” while resisting them was a sign of “extravagance and inefficiency in the public service.”

This rhetoric reduced tax and spending issues to a question of good governance, and to the personal thriftiness and virtue of public servants as individuals. The Progressives had moralized against monopolies and tried to wrest policy from contentious elections and place it in the hands of virtuous experts. Coolidge’s Republicans, in their moral crusade against government “extravagance,” did something analogous.

Both movements encouraged an inward turn by American political elites. What drove political contention over economic questions, for them, was not concern for the common good or the pursuit of social goals, but some personal attribute of public officials—their level of expertise or their moral character. The only economic interests up for discussion were those of the businessmen and bankers who could make friends in Washington—men like Mellon. There was no place in the picture for middle- or working-class Americans to have interests of their own that business leaders and their collaborators in government were obliged to recognize, much less balance against their interests.

The 1920s GOP could equate the interests of big business with the economy as a whole thanks to vigorous and violent suppression of working-class dissent. The year 1919 was a disaster for organized labor. A series of highly publicized strikes, from Seattle to Boston, drew suspicion from the middle class and violent crackdown from authorities. With the Russian Civil War raging, it was all too easy for bosses and clout-seeking politicians to paint the strikers as Bolsheviks who needed to be put down for the good of democracy.

In 1919, fighting the unions made one an instant political darling. Then-Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge put his name on the political map by sending in a militia to break up the Boston police strike. On the other side of the aisle, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched raids on suspected Communists, arresting thousands of people with left-wing sympathies (including labor leaders), in hopes of riding the wave of panic to the Democratic nomination for president the following year.

Palmer’s Red Scare blew over quickly, but it left lasting damage. Labor was now thoroughly alienated from both political parties and held suspect by the middle class. Union membership fell from five million to three million over the 1920s. Business leaders in rail, steel, and other industries felt empowered to refuse union recognition and fire anyone who threatened strikes. Companies enjoyed greater bargaining power as widespread adoption of mass-production techniques and elevation of a new managerial class trained in “scientific management” devalued blue-collar work. Wage growth lagged far behind industrial productivity, and non-union wages actually fell from 1920 to 1926. But that wasn’t really seen as a problem, so long as the simultaneous expansion of consumer credit meant people could still buy stuff.

Without labor as a live political force, and with anything to the left of Warren Harding viewed as traitorous, the version of the American Left that emerged in the 1920s was just another expression of the decadent culture of debt and consumption. The failures of Wilson’s foreign policy led the prior decade’s leading Progressive intellectuals (such as Walter Lipmann, John Dewey, Herbert Croly) to give up on their cherished project of using science to improve society and optimize politics. The rising generation of radicals aimed instead for personal renewal, challenging gender norms, and enshrining self-expression.

“All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them,” F. Scott Fitzgerald later wrote of his work in the 1920s. And it wasn’t just him. The defining trait of writers, artists, and intellectuals of this time was pessimism. The world war and the ensuing economic boom alike proved that progress was a lie, and that America was too obsessed with materialism and utility and machinery to be hospitable for art.

Many famously expressed their rebellion against the “business civilization” of the United States by emigrating to France. Others tried to build a community of artists in Greenwich Village. Literary critic Malcolm Cowley, in his 1934 memoir Exile’s Return, outlined their governing values: “self-expression,” “paganism,” “living for the moment,” “female equality,” and “changing place.” But, Cowley pointed out, wherever they went, the Lost Generation’s rebellion against materialism and business only fed the emerging “consumption ethic.”

“It happened that many of the Greenwich Village ideas proved useful” in the establishment of a new consumer ethos by business and advertising, Cowley recalled. His discussion of the convergence between the values of radical self-expression and those of consumerism is worth quoting at length:

Self-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of products—modern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match. Living for the moment meant buying an automobile, radio or house, using it now and paying for it tomorrow. Female equality was capable of doubling the consumption of products—cigarettes, for example—that had formerly been used by men alone. Even changing place would help to stimulate business in the country from which the artist was being expatriated. The exiles of art were also trade missionaries: involuntarily they increased the foreign demand for fountain pens, silk stockings, grapefruit and portable typewriters. They drew after them an invading army of tourists, thus swelling the profits of steamship lines and travel agencies. Everything fitted into the business picture.

Everywhere around him, Cowley saw people striving to remake themselves through consumption. Everyone could shed Jimmy Gatz and become Jay Gatsby.

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With old Progressives and young radicals alike uninterested in politics, and with the economic interests of the middle and working classes removed from discussion, there was only one thing left for Republicans and Democrats to fight over: identity.

Mind you, it was not much of a fight. The Democrats sustained the largest presidential election losses in American history in 1920 and 1924, winning only 34% and 29% of the popular vote, respectively. Republicans also gained a congressional supermajority in 1920. Since their candidates shared the Republicans’ low-tax, small-government agenda, the Democrats were entirely defined, as a national party, by Woodrow Wilson’s unpopular administration.

Making things worse for the Democrats were intense internal divisions, resulting especially from the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan—itself a creature, at least in part, of mass consumer culture. The KKK had been defunct for half a century, until everyone saw a movie about it. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation supplied a new look and new habits for white nationalists too young to realize that flaming crosses and white hoods were not markers of some noble heritage, but mere images from the silver screen. Despite its roots in marketing and movies, the new Klan was highly politically motivated, and it broadened the targets of its violence to include not only African Americans but immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. This was bad news for a political party built on a coalition of Southern whites and Northern industrial workers, large percentages of whom were Catholics and immigrants.

Religious identity supplied plenty of fodder for the culture wars of the 1920s. Prohibition became for many, including the KKK, a proxy for the divide between Catholic and Protestant, immigrant and native. Within the ranks of American Protestantism, conservative fundamentalists and liberal modernists took potshots at each other, in sermons and in the press, over evolution and Biblical literalism. The Scopes “monkey” trial made these issues a national flash point.

It all spilled over into the presidential election of 1928. After the embarrassing failures of pro-business candidates in the two prior elections, the Democrats nominated New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic whose prior bids for the nomination had failed thanks largely to Southern opposition. Smith’s personal identity became the sole issue in the general election. Newspapers and pundits openly declared that to be Catholic was an automatic disqualifier for public office. Rumors claimed the Pope was orchestrating Smith’s campaign, and if elected, the Democrat would move the Vatican to Washington, D.C. The part-Italian, part-Irish Catholic New Yorker stood no chance against Herbert Hoover, a self-made Iowa boy from an old Quaker family. On the eve of the biggest economic event in American history, questions of economic policy were simply off the table for voter scrutiny. Identity was the only thing to vote on.

And yet, Smith outperformed the previous two Democratic nominees by a significant margin. By nominating him, the Democrats began to reach out again to voters they had neglected for a decade. Issues of class and economics did not come up explicitly, but it became clear that there was an untapped working-class constituency.

Everything fell apart in September 1929. Our collective cultural memory of the 1930s could not be more different from our picture of the “Roaring Twenties.” It turned out that the whole decade’s worth of culture and politics had been premised on an illusion—“endless” growth fueled by ballooning consumer debt and a self-obsessed political class. All of it had to change, and the Democrats were positioned to keep up with the times. The “New Deal” Franklin Roosevelt promised in his own campaign against Hoover was not so much a set of policy goals (those would be developed over the course of his presidency) as a promise to bring economic policy and a recognition of working- and middle-class interests back on to the ballot. The Republicans did not get the memo. Doubling down on the laissez-faire consensus of the Coolidge years, never admitting that that consensus had relied on conditions that no longer existed, they wallowed in political irrelevance for generations.

Cowley’s characterization of the 1920s as a shift in American culture from a “production ethic” to a “consumption ethic” following the First World War struck a chord decades after the publication of his memoir. It shaped how historians and social critics in the second half of the twentieth century understood cultural change in their own time. Memory of the first consumer age became relevant again as a new cultural vibrancy driven by consumerism seemed to overtake politics and remove concrete economic questions of work and class from public discussion. Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, and others understood the 1960s and 1970s as an echo or continuation of the 1920s.

That conversation is ongoing, almost a century after Cowley started it. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, internet memes foretold a new “Roaring Twenties” emerging out of the biggest pandemic since the 1918 flu. And indeed, even if the GDP doesn’t surge as dramatically as it did in the mid- to late-1920s, today’s ever-deepening financialization, wage stagnation, culture wars over identity issues, and the spreading rule of technocrats and “experts” should look familiar.

Without a political expression of working-class interests, and with no one looking beyond the ephemera of consumer self-expression to the care of the common good, the future wellbeing of families and communities is in doubt. If the 1920s tell us anything, it’s that allowing political leaders and economic institutions to treat us as mere consumers, rather than as workers and citizens, is unlikely to end well.

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The chorus of war enthusiasts never loses its enthusiasm for war. Each war is a good idea at the start and, once it turns out not to be a good idea, the answer is more war. The only way to lose is to stop fighting, and this they never suggest, which means that when we do lose, they can invariably say that we lost only because we stopped taking their advice. Convenient.

This is not so much a “forever war” as infinite war—a strategy akin to the unbeatable gambling maneuver of always doubling your bet. If you put $1 on red and the ball lands on black, put $2 on red. If that loses, go to $4. If that loses, go to $8. Then $16, then $32… Sooner or later, you will win, and when you do, you’ll have recovered all your money and then some. The strategy can fail only if you lose your nerve, or if you run out of money. What could go wrong?

Some people are confused by this notion that we lost. We dropped so many bombs! As Daily Wire editor-in-chief Brent Scher enthused in the war’s first week, retweeting Pentagon explosion-porn of an Iranian ship struck by an American torpedo, “I think a lot of the dove sentiment on the right is because it was burnt into people’s brains that the U.S. isn’t good at war anymore. Images from the Afghan withdrawal disaster made us look like a collapsing empire. This is a different team. Recalibrate your minds.” But as any sober-minded observer could have seen, and I explained, “No one doubts that the U.S. can drop large numbers of bombs on Middle Eastern countries and blow up boats in international waters. The skepticism has more to do with seeing what that has and has not accomplished, and where it tends to lead.”

Of course, Iran was going to close the Strait of Hormuz and begin firing missiles at Gulf infrastructure. We had assassinated their senior leadership and declared regime change the goal. We made the fight an existential one for them, and they behaved accordingly.

In the Land of Wars Are Fun, where we get to decide strategy for both sides and then ours always wins, this Iranian reaction was taken as justification for prompting it. “The fact is that Iran’s conduct in the war shows exactly why it must be crippled,” backflipped AEI’s Matthew Continetti in the Wall Street Journal. “True, military action carries a price. Yet in lashing out against the world, the Iranian regime has made its own best case for U.S. intervention.”

Perhaps that would make sense if time were a flat circle and Iran’s lashing out had prompted our already-in-motion campaign. In fact, time moves forward. There was a “before” we had launched the war, an era in which the Iranian regime was not firing its missiles at Gulf infrastructure, or closing the Strait, in part because it was not facing an existential threat and in part because it knew the price of such actions would be steep. And then we just went and imposed the maximal cost anyway.

I say “maximal cost” not because it was the greatest cost we could hypothetically impose, but rather because it was the greatest cost we had any interest in imposing, as was obvious to everyone, including the Iranians. Back in mid-March, I warned:

The United States should only ever go to war as a last resort, only after careful deliberation, only with a just cause and a clear rationale, and only after leaders have built support from the citizenry they are sworn to represent, and from whom the soldiers and resources must be drawn. The Trump administration did none of this, which makes the costs unjustifiable and also weakens the U.S. position, lacking the deep political support necessary to make a “fight until we win” posture credible. Deploying ground troops, as is reportedly under discussion, would compound all these problems.

The quick, limited strikes on Iran in June and Venezuela in January seem to have given the White House a false confidence that “We Can Just Do Things.” But this conflict is two-sided, and the other side currently holds a veto over how and when it ends. The regime could fall, but it appears more likely to survive, solidify control, and radicalize further—with less to lose and no fear of an American threat already carried out.

Wars are not won or lost by a tally of explosions, but by the achievement of strategic objectives and by arriving at a conclusion where one side can further impose its will and advance its interests and the other side cannot. Certainly, the United States destroyed many Iranian ships and missiles and set back the Iranian nuclear program. It may see a benefit from the world’s increased efforts to reduce dependence on Persian Gulf exports. But it did not achieve its constantly shifting goals and it was unwilling to accept the costs of pushing further. The Iranian regime survived, may even have tightened its grip on the nation, and proved that it could persevere in the face of an American onslaught, that it could close the Strait indefinitely, and that its still-intact missile capability could sufficiently menace neighbors to deter further aggression. Thus it is the United States now suing for peace and Iran that, while it sustained the brunt of the physical damage, emerges more credibly powerful and able to assert its geopolitical prerogatives.

War enthusiasts resent all this talk of constraints and reality. They make blanket declarations like “Iran must not have a nuclear weapon” as if their desire for that outcome is somehow determinative. When the conflict does not go as they hoped, the fault lies with anyone who went off script. Iran is firing at other countries? That’s not fair play. The American people have no interest in bearing the economic costs, let alone sending in ground troops? Then the real blame lies with them. President Trump didn’t want to continue escalating, with no end in sight, as costs quickly rose out of proportion to benefits? He just lacks patience and fortitude.

An effective strategist always presumes his opponents will take the action he least wants them to. An effective statesman makes and wins a case of the war’s wisdom and necessity to the citizenry. An effective commentator notes that Trump did try threatening outlandish escalation and fortunately backed down when Iran called his bluff. The medicine men of foreign policy instead insist that the rain will still come and lecture us that we have not done their dance with enough fervor. Our bad.

So here we are now, with the war having gone exactly as badly as should have been expected, driven not by the wishes of the war enthusiasts but rather by the enormous imbalance between participants in preparation, clarity of objective, and willingness to bear costs. The citizens of the United States, for whom their government exists and conducts foreign policy, have shown no appetite for what would be necessary to win, so we cannot.

That’s not a criticism of the American people. To the contrary, they have every right to define the national interest and rule out actions that fail to advance it. Public support is as critical to a military campaign as are munition stockpiles; in the absence of either, proceeding and inevitably failing is folly, and the blame lies with whomever attempts it. Leaders play an important role in assessing the national interest, but they are still left with the obligation to articulate their view and persuade the people of its wisdom. The necessity that they do so, frustrating though they may find it, is one of the chief distinctions between a republic and an empire, and one of the most valuable powers that a republic’s citizens retain. That we could prevail if we were willing to do more is not a defense of an unpopular effort. As the saying goes, if my bubby had balls, she’d be my zayde.

This failure to comprehend the two-sided nature of conflict is reaching absurdist heights in the context of negotiations, with war enthusiasts condemning outcomes they dislike without the faintest awareness that their own preferred actions have led to the situation where their preferred outcomes are not available. “The U.S. shouldn’t be providing economic relief first and seeking security concessions later,” says former Vice President Mike Pence. “We should be securing concessions first. That’s what we used to call ‘America First.’”

Such a fascinating sentence construction, more suitable to psychiatric analysis than policy commentary. It is the language of domestic policy and assumes a level of control over outcomes. “The U.S. shouldn’t be providing tax cuts first and seeking spending cuts later” is a quite reasonable assertion, and a fair basis for criticism of policymakers who take a different approach. But whether the United States has the power to secure concessions is not a matter of choice or will, it is a function of the situation in which we find ourselves. “America First” might mean avoiding entanglement in foreign wars that will lead to unfavorable negotiating dynamics. It cannot mean throwing a tantrum when bad policy leads to unfavorable results, imagining that we have some power to achieve a better one by fiat.

The agreement that we have to reach now with Iran will be a bad one for the United States, as measured against the status quo ante. That result is already baked, a function of the forces that led us here, not of the negotiating team’s skill or the president’s social media posts. The humiliation is not the unfavorable deal but the failure of the war, yet we find our public square jammed with the very people who have been most wrong, jeering at the tow-truck driver trying to pull their car from the ditch. The people acting badly are not the ones trying to conclude a deal and bring this latest foreign misadventure to a conclusion, but the ones who would rather dig deeper than admit they supported a misadventure and left us with no better option.

This political dynamic is one of the great dangers of war, and an important reason to err against starting one. There may hypothetically be a limited downside. But once underway, if it goes poorly, the leader who acknowledges the problem and attempts to correct course is seen as weak and takes the fall, while the peanut gallery clamoring to fight on can always claim victory is just around the corner and they could get a better deal. Who can prove them wrong? Pulling out of the dive requires more strength than many leaders can muster. The sheer predictability and irrationality of the resulting tragedy has been a repeated experience for the American people over the past two generations, indeed it is the only experience younger Americans know, and the elite’s determination to repeat it at every opportunity is a leading cause of cynicism and nihilism.

Insofar as President Trump is prepared to cut bait, he deserves genuine credit for doing the rare, right, and thankless thing. He could help himself by being honest about what has happened and what he is now prepared to accept, instead of trying to sell the deal as great, which obviously it is not. Someone who seems to have no idea of the score will build little trust or support. A clear-eyed, hard-headed assessment of reality and a willingness to do what is best for America, embarrassment be damned, is far more admirable. If we are going to have leaders who start foolish wars, let us hope at least for the kind who are not too foolish to end them. — Oren

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

• In the Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent writes that Hamilton Inspires Trump’s Economic Statecraft.

• Fusionism for the 21st Century | In National Affairs, Henry Olsen writes that there’s “no going back” to the pre-Donald Trump Republican Party and that “the new conservative coalition can only thrive if it understands that compromise and policy innovation, not doctrinal purity and policy dogma, is the price of—and the path to—victory.”

• My New Life With the Palantir Chore Coat | Writing for the Atlantic, Saahil Desai takes Palantir’s made-in-America chore coat for a spin through the streets of New York.

• In UnHerd, Geisha-Marie Bland argues Against “Toddlercore” and the self-infantilization of Gen Z.

MANUFACTURING GAMBLERS

The New York Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg has assigned a small team to build a prediction-markets app, internally called Arena. That app would run independently of Facebook and Instagram, but Meta would steer its users toward it. Arena would likely run on a video-game-style points system first, with real-money wagering coming later, presumably if and when it clears regulatory hurdles. Insiders characterize the project as “experimental” but say it’s one of Zuckerberg’s top priorities, and part of his broader push into products built around “emerging social behavior.”

Meta’s edge over Polymarket and Kalshi is distribution. Where existing prediction-market apps have to “acquire” a gambler, Meta can manufacture one, routing its 3.56 billion daily users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—most of whom opened the app to message a relative or read the news—into a betting product. The points system does the habituation before any money is at stake, training the muscle memory of wagering and converting it to revenue once the habits are formed. The behavior gets cultivated first, monetized later, raising the question: is Meta serving “emerging social behavior,” or manufacturing it?

Speaking of manufactured demand: a Wall Street Journal investigation finds that Polymarket, one of the competitors Meta is chasing, is manufacturing its own. The report finds the company paid “creators” to film themselves trading on near-perfect copies of its own site—dummy pages built for the purpose—and many did not disclose they were on the payroll until the Journal asked. Across more than 1,100 videos reviewed, 70% showed a creator placing a bet, every one of them on a fake site; in roughly one in ten, the creators also faked the payoff, splicing in outdated footage and fake headlines to look like they had won. Those faked wins added up to almost $900,000 on bets that would really have lost more than $166,000. Polymarket also paid thousands of low-wage workers, often teenagers in Asia, to repost the clips from sockpuppet accounts scrubbed of any ties to Polymarket, a tactic designed to give the illusion of authentic interest.

• BONUS LINK: The Ethics & Public Policy Center published a new report outlining the problem of online sports gambling, its consequences, and recommendations for policymakers on how to respond.

ONE YEAR IS NOT AN EQUILIBRIUM

A new paper titled “The Effects of a Sudden Stop in Low-Skilled Immigration: Evidence from Korea’s Guest Worker Program,” from Giovanni Peri and coauthors, finds that when pandemic-era border closures froze South Korea’s low-skilled guest worker program—halting new inflows—and the participating workforce fell about 22% over 2020 to 2021; the firms most dependent on those workers were likelier to close. The harm concentrated among low-wage, low-productivity firms; their higher-wage competitors came through largely unaffected. Rather than hire Koreans to fill the gap, surviving firms shifted their existing Korean employees into the vacated lower-skilled jobs—occupational downgrading that shows up in the data as lower measured wages. The authors conclude that low-skilled immigrants cannot be easily replaced and that restricting their supply imposes real costs on firms and native workers.

There are at least two problems here. First, consider what the paper actually measures: a one-year, unanticipated shock that everyone expected to reverse. Firms did what rational firms do when a cheap input disappears for what they take to be a single bad year: they wait for it to return rather than recruit native workers or make major capital expenditures in automation and the like. That is the cost of transition, not the equilibrium that a permanent policy of restriction would eventually result in. Second, the paper treats firm exit as damage. But the firms that closed were the least productive, paying well below the sector average. Their exit is what you would expect when businesses built on a cheap, imported-labor model lose access to that labor. To call their exit a cost is to treat dependence on cheap imported labor as the equilibrium worth preserving.

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ON CAPITOL HILL

This week in Congress, the House of Representatives passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a vote of 358 to 32, a day after the Senate passed it 85 to 5. Most of the legislation focuses on supply-side reforms—streamlining environmental reviews, making it easier to build manufactured homes, and conditioning dollars from federal programs on whether localities actually build more housing. But, as we’ve written here in Understanding America, what makes the legislation remarkable is that it addresses both sides of the affordability problem—supply and demand—and affirms a principle the housing debate usually ignores: not all demand is created equal. The version that cleared both chambers retained the provision barring large institutional investors—those controlling 350 or more single-family homes—from buying any more, the demand President Trump put to Congress at January’s State of the Union when he said “homes are for people, not corporations.” A decade ago the provision would have died in committee; the free-market veto that once disciplined the Republican conference would have ruled a purchase ban on private capital out of bounds. Now that same Republican conference has told a class of investors that a category of homes is off-limits to their money.

But if the free-market veto is gone, a presidential one remains—and President Trump may use it. Hours before he was scheduled to sign the bill into law, he cancelled the signing ceremony, saying he would not sign it unless Congress passed the SAVE America Act, legislation that, among other election reforms, mandates voter identification to cast a ballot in federal elections. Despite unified Republican support for the legislation in Congress, the path to passage is narrow, if nonexistent, in the face of Democratic opposition, and Senate Republicans’ reluctance to nuke the legislative filibuster. President Trump routinely uses hardball tactics to extract concessions. But in this case, he has no leverage. Holding the housing bill hostage in a fight he cannot win would mean killing the one provision he demanded, in a package that’s directly responsive to the affordability concerns at the top of voters’ minds. President Trump should sign the bill, and take the win.

Elsewhere in Congress, Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) published an op-ed in the New York Times, proposing to eliminate the cap on the Social Security payroll tax—the $184,500 ceiling above which wages go untaxed. The proposed change, they estimate, would add some $3 trillion to the program over the next decade, and “extend the solvency of Social Security for another generation.” Moreno, a populist Republican, deserves credit for grabbing the third rail of entitlement reform and pushing conservatives past the Paul Ryan era, when “entitlement reform” was a euphemism for benefit cuts, toward an approach that puts revenue on the table. But revenue alone is not sufficient. Any comprehensive reform must also restrain costs, and reduce spending on high-income households especially, if the nation is to find a fiscally sustainable future.

And some REINDUSTRIALIZATION news to end your week:

U.S. Bets Billions of Dollars in Low-Cost Loans Can Revive Nuclear Power (Wall Street Journal): “The Trump administration is so eager to see a nuclear power renaissance that it is starting to fund billions of dollars for reactor orders…low-interest loans amounting to $17.5 billion from the Energy Department…The loans are intended to speed up construction of 10 reactors in the United States.”

DOD Commits $1.2B in Conditional Loans to Phoenix Tailings, Energy Fuels (Manufacturing Dive): “The funds, provided through the agency’s Office of Strategic Capital, are expected to support the two companies’ scale-up of their domestic rare-earth mineral processing in the United States.”

Army Will Lease Land on Bases for Critical Mineral Production (Wall Street Journal): “The U.S. Army is leasing land on bases across the country to companies that will build and operate critical mineral processing plants…In lieu of cash payments from the companies, the Army will get some percentage of the processed mineral output, officials said. Collectively, the companies are expected to invest about $2 billion on the projects…”

Enjoy the weekend!

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It was the one clear victory in what was otherwise a disappointing visit. After several days of talks in Beijing, there was no agreement on Taiwan, nor was the war in Iran settled. Still, at least President Trump managed to sell a lot of planes.

During Trump’s visit in May, China agreed to buy more than 200 Boeing aircraft, marking the company’s first sales to the world’s fastest-growing aviation market since 2017. The deal “will drive high-paying, high-skilled U.S. manufacturing jobs and enable the Chinese people to fly on American-made planes for decades to come,” according to the White House.

On the surface, it sounded like a big win for the United States. After all, America is a global leader in commercial aerospace, an industry which provides the type of well-paid, high-skill, sophisticated manufacturing jobs the president‘s MAGA movement is meant to champion.

But if you dig a little deeper, a different story emerges. First off, the Boeing deal was for far fewer than the 500 planes Wall Street analysts initially hoped for. Meanwhile, reports emerged within days that China was slowing down approval of Airbus planes unless the European Union accelerates its own purchase of Chinese-made COMAC planes.

These developments clarified what was really happening. Sure, China does not mind buying a few more Boeing planes. It needs the kit as its airlines expand. And yet, China’s long-term goal is to build up its own aerospace industry, breaking the European-American duopoly that has dominated the market for the last 50 years.

The wider lesson—and one that should be better understood—is that aerospace is a microcosm of everything that is going wrong with the president’s approach to rebuilding American industry with tariffs. The strategy is to protect U.S. industry from foreign competition, but so far nothing is being done to rebuild it. Unless that changes, the project will end in failure.

No one disputes that Trump’s tariffs have been controversial. Depending on your political persuasion, they are either a bold reassertion of American economic sovereignty or a reckless, self-indulgent act of self-harm. We have already witnessed angry retaliation from trade partners. The panels at Davos have been filled with angst-ridden warnings about the collapse of the “rules-based order,” and the lawyers have already managed to reverse many of them.

And yet amid all the fury, it is remarkably easy to miss the most important point of all.

Tariffs only make sense if they are part one of a plan—a strategy for rebuilding the industrial base that made America the dominant economic power of the twentieth century. What should always have been part two. The strategic deployment of the revenues raised has yet to materialise. Without it, America is not protecting its industries but merely building a wall around an empty lot.

A Conflict of Visions

For the better part of three decades, America told itself that manufacturing didn’t matter anymore. Let the Chinese make the steel and the semiconductors and the toys. Americans would do all the clever stuff—the design, the branding, the intellectual property. There would be a clean division of labor, and everyone would win.

The results of that approach are clear for everyone to see. Taiwan now dominates advanced chip manufacturing, while American domestic capacity remains a fraction of what it should be. Beijing and Shanghai had more biotech laboratory and research space under construction at the end of 2024 than any other hub on earth. Boston—long the undisputed global capital of life sciences—is now a distant third. China now accounts for 53% of global shipbuilding tonnage. The United States—which built the armadas that won World War II—produced just five ships in 2022.

And then there is aerospace, perhaps the most significant example of all.

Of all the strategic industries America needs to defend, aerospace may be the one that matters most. For much of the post-war era, it was taken for granted that the U.S. would dominate commercial aviation, with Boeing and McDonnell Douglas carving up the market between them.

Europe’s Airbus eventually arrived as a serious competitor—one backed by generous government subsidies—and the industry became a duopoly. There was plenty of tension, but it was a duopoly America could live with. Europe, whatever its rivalries with Washington, was an ally.

China is a different matter entirely. COMAC—the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China—was founded in 2008 for the explicit purpose of breaking the Boeing-Airbus duopoly and giving the Chinese Communist Party a domestic commercial aircraft industry. For years, Western observers treated COMAC with polite skepticism. The planes were old-fashioned, the supply chain was unreliable, and the certification hurdles seemed insurmountable. It was largely dismissed as an irrelevance at best and a joke at worst.

But that is starting to change. COMAC’s C919, a narrow-body jet roughly comparable to the Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A320, has entered service with Chinese domestic carriers. It might be a while before it is certified to fly into London’s Heathrow Airport or New York City’s John F. Kennedy International. But with enough pressure on the EU, and enough Airbus delays, Europe could buckle.

The U.S. may not be far behind. For one, China can afford to wait. Its domestic aviation market is already one of the largest on earth, and it is growing faster than almost anywhere else. COMAC has a guaranteed captive market of hundreds of millions of passengers. Non-aligned nations in Africa, Asia, and South America may well start buying COMAC planes, especially if they owe China money. Every C919 that takes to the skies is a Boeing or Airbus that does not get sold.

Boeing, meanwhile, is struggling in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. Following the 737 MAX crisis of 2024 and subsequent production slowdowns, quality control failures, and management turmoil, the company that put men on the moon has spent the better part of five years fighting for basic credibility. Its market capitalisation has slumped, while its order book has slowed. The once-unassailable American champion of commercial aviation is visibly wobbling.

The real problem, however, is that there is no serious American plan for what comes next. The U.S. has no credible next-generation passenger jet program. Where is the Apollo-style national commitment to supersonic or hypersonic commercial travel? There is no strategic vision for what American commercial aviation might look like in 2040 or 2050.

Meanwhile, China’s aviation ambitions do not end with the C919. The CR929, a wide-body jet being developed in conjunction with Russia, is in the planning stages. COMAC has signaled it aims to produce a full family of commercial aircraft. China’s five-year plans, of the sort that Washington used to dismiss as a weak throwback to the Soviet era, include ambitious targets for aviation manufacturing output.

That isn’t to say that state-directed economies are superior. They have plenty of inefficiencies and distortions of their own, as China’s recent property crisis amply demonstrates. But in strategic industries with long lead times, enormous capital requirements, and deep national security implications such as aerospace, the ability to take a 20-year view and fund it lavishly is a genuine competitive advantage that Western market economies have consistently underestimated.

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Correcting Course

So what should America actually do to protect its own industry? Tariff revenues, assuming they survive legal challenges, represent a significant pool of capital. The question is whether Washington has the strategic vision to deploy them effectively, or whether they will simply vanish without a trace in the vast federal budget.

A serious industrial strategy for aerospace starts with a properly funded next-generation aircraft program. It would not be another defense contract but an initiative aimed at developing the propulsion systems, materials science, and avionics for the aircraft that will dominate the 2040s and 2050s. Commercial aviation requires long planning. After all, Boeing’s 737 has been in continuous production in various forms since 1967, and Airbus’s A320 family dates to 1988. The decisions taken in the next five years will shape the industry for the next 50.

America needs to be the world leader. To make that happen, the U.S. also needs a serious commitment to supersonic and hypersonic commercial transport. There is a market for faster travel. A properly funded American program, along the same lines as the British-French Concorde of the 1970s (but better managed) could establish a decisive lead in a segment that China has not yet entered. Concorde was not ultimately profitable, but that was half a century ago, and the science, to put it mildly, has improved.

Thirdly, the U.S. needs a strategic aerospace manufacturing cluster modeled on what the nation got right with its Silicon Valley and Research Triangle technology clusters. This will mean co-locating the supply chains, research universities, skills pipelines, and regulatory infrastructure to create genuine network effects. Germany has done this with automotive manufacturing in Baden-Württemberg. South Korea has done it with semiconductors. America has done it before with software technology. Washington should replicate the model for hardware.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the U.S. needs to decide what Boeing is actually for. Is it a national strategic asset, like the nuclear deterrent or the dollar? If so, decisions about its future should not be left to quarterly earnings calls and shareholder demands. This doesn’t mean nationalization, but there is a strong case for a structured strategic partnership between the federal government and the company, of the kind that has always existed in defense units but needs to extend more explicitly to commercial aviation.

None of that will be cheap. But nor should it prove impossible, or unaffordable for an economy the size of America’s.

The window for the U.S. to respond to China’s aggression is not unlimited. In aerospace, as in semiconductors, decisions that will determine who dominates the market in 2040 are being made right now, both in government planning sessions and in COMAC boardrooms. The question is whether equivalent decisions are being made in Washington.

There is something poignant about the spectacle of a once-great industrial power putting up trade barriers around industries it has spent 30 years neglecting. The tariffs have been imposed at a huge political cost. But the industrial strategy, the plan that gives tariffs their meaning, has so far failed to materialize.

A country that erects barriers without building anything behind them is not engaged in industrial policy. It is engaged in dreamy industrial nostalgia, guilty of sentimental attachment to a manufacturing past that, if it is to have any future, requires active, intelligent, well-funded public investment rather than the mere hope that keeping foreign competitors out will regrow domestic capacity.

America used to do that very well. The interstate highway system, the space program, the internet itself—none of them were products of the market alone. They were produced by a state that was willing to think strategically, invest long-term, and accept that some of the most important things a government can do will not show a return for decades.

The tariffs are on. Revenues are accumulating. But the next-generation aerospace program is still waiting to be funded, semiconductor clusters are waiting to be built, and biotech hubs are waiting for federal funding that will make them competitive with Shanghai.

Does Washington have the strategic intelligence to invest wisely while it still can? Or will the tariffs wind up meaningless—leaving the United States with no strategic industries left to protect?

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“I ain't had too many friends in the last 5-10 years. They mostly all faded away …” - Austin

Austin is a 39-year-old father of three who lives in northern California and works construction for a big paving company. He has one close friend—a family friend since childhood—but aside from her, all of his friendships have faded away throughout adulthood.

To him, this slow fade was about effort. “I didn’t make the effort [to keep in touch], and I guess they didn’t make it either,” he said. Today, Austin is largely alone. He has few friends, no community, and, since his dad passed away, no mentors. Austin described the impact of these losses, especially the loss of his only mentor, in moving terms: “I felt the big difference, the big emptiness since then.”

Austin is far from an outlier among men without college degrees. In conversations with him and 29 others for Nobody to Call, our research project on friendship, community, and purpose among men without degrees, the unavoidable takeaway was that most were almost completely disconnected. Many had no close friends, no community, and no mentors or role models. It wasn’t just one thing that was missing for living a flourishing, connected life; it was often almost everything.

Still, the story that emerged from our interviews was more nuanced than the simple binary of connected versus disconnected. It was a story of increasingly precarious lives leading to increasingly tenuous ties—one friend, one mentor, or one group—which became single points of failure. For these men, new relationships were hard to make, and existing ones were easy to break. As a result, common life changes like a move or a job change often made the difference between living somewhat connected lives or living in isolation. Within a decade or two after high school, many men looked like Austin: all alone, with nobody to call.

The cruel irony was that the men blamed themselves for their isolation, and saw it as their personal responsibility to “fix” their relational lives on their own. But we place the blame elsewhere. This is on us: We designed a society that made a college degree the golden ticket for living a good life, undermined the material foundations of working-class life, and prized a form of consumerized choice at the expense of the commitments and communities that have historically bound us together.

The responsibility, therefore, is also on us. We must call these men in to connect, contribute, and belong to something bigger than themselves.

The Cliff and the Drift

These men were not lifelong loners. But for many, the loss of the consistent structure of high school, coupled with the lack of a new structure like college or the military, contributed to the gradual atrophying of their relational lives.

Some of them experienced a friendship cliff immediately after graduating from high school. Before graduation, they had friends who they could interact with day-in and day-out because they participated in the structure of school and extracurriculars. But as soon as their time in high school was up, their friendships started to wither. Many of their peers went off to college. Some joined the military. But they were left behind, and no structured environment for human interaction took the place of school.

“When I was in high school, I had friends that I would see on a regular basis. I had classes with them, I’d see them at lunch,” explained Silvio, a 28-year-old from Washington. “You keep these people at a distance for a reason, because you know you may never see them again after senior year and you graduate. … I might have made close friends if I’d gone off someplace else, but I haven’t left where I am. I’m still here.”

For others, the post-high school social atrophy wasn’t as much a cliff as it was a slow drift. Several men used “drifting” and “fading” terminology to describe the gradual process of losing friends after high school. They couldn’t point to any particular breaking point that caused them to lose their friendships. Instead, they talked about how this slow drift happened in the background, often going almost completely unnoticed.

“I’m just trying to figure out what I want in my own life,” Deion, a 29-year-old from Ohio, said. “I guess [my old friends are] trying to do the same thing. They got their own problems, stuff they’re trying to do. We’ve really just grown apart and lost contact.”

The friendship drift only accelerates with age, especially as peers begin forming families. Men who started families described their spouse and kids becoming a top priority, which left them with less time and energy for friends. Meanwhile, many of the men who didn’t start families described how their friendships faded as their peers became fathers.

For instance, Jordan, a 43-year-old from Tennessee with no kids, talked about how this “life-ing” made sustaining adult friendships more difficult. “As adults, it becomes harder and harder to have those friendships, because you end up ‘life-ing’ and they’re ‘life-ing,’” he said. “Once you start having kids and spouses, because you only have X amount of hours in the day, you start prioritizing family over friends, and then you just lose touch.”

The story most of the men told could not be much clearer. When high school ended, no consistent communal structure took its place, and friendships faded away.

Work: Structure Without Friendship

While work could theoretically replace the structure of school—it was the one source of structured human interaction many men had left—it nonetheless often contributed to the social fragility and decay. Work was often precarious and unstable, with inconsistent hours, frequent job changes, and a perpetual risk of termination. As a result, such work mostly failed to facilitate close, lasting friendships.

Some of the men described their colleagues as “work friends.” But they clearly delineated between people with whom they were friendly at work and “close friends.” These relationships rarely extended beyond the workplace, and work friends were not seen as people who could be counted on during a time of need.

“I work with a very small team, so we are all friendly—you could say, to a degree, friends,” said Christian, a 27-year-old from Arkansas. “I’ve gone over to their house before, but I don’t talk to them too much outside of work. I don’t call them or text them and say, ‘What’s up?’ It’s mostly a work thing.”

But even the men who described making friends through work talked about how these friendships rarely last after they or their colleagues change jobs. They told us the same story time and again: A job change almost always led to a lost friendship. For some, the loss of these workplace relationships were seen as losses of genuine friendship.

“I got to a point where I felt like all my workplace connections were good friends, and then if someone left the job, you never heard from them again,” Benjamin, a 39-year-old from Nevada, said. “So I got to a segue where I just started not making as many close friends because I was worried that they would go away and then I’d never hear from them again.”

Men who experienced getting fired were punished twice over. Not only did it sever their connections within the workplace, it also triggered downward spirals which led them to cut themselves off from relationships outside of work. The experience of depression and self-imposed seclusion weakened their existing friendships and inhibited the possibility of cultivating new ones.

“In 2023, I was working at [large e-commerce company] … But I got caught up and I got let go,” said Manuel, a 27-year-old from California. “So that put me in a pretty rough spot. I was pretty depressed. Then I lost another job, and I just kind of secluded myself.”

Work, once a foundational pillar of a connected life for the working class, now contributes to its precarity. Despite being the one remaining structure for human interaction most of these men had, work both fails to be a source of relationships in the workplace and hinders relationship formation outside work.

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Single Points of Failure

Without the structure of school, work, or community to sustain relationships, most of the men we interviewed were left with tenuous ties—one friend, one role model, one community group. These fragile ties, in turn, created single points of failure in their relational lives. Relatively common life changes often made the difference between having friends and community or being almost entirely disconnected.

Many men described how moving severed the tenuous ties they had. Moving presented challenges on both sides: They experienced difficulties sustaining connections in the places they left and cultivating new ones in the places they moved to. Jorge, a 39-year-old who recently moved to Rhode Island, explained how moving ended his New York relationships:

In Manhattan, before I moved, I had … three other guys that used to hang out with each other. To this day, the only one that I know from there … He told me someday that he was going to come around here, and he still hasn’t texted me or nothing … I’m like, ‘Hey, if I already told you to come over and I already invited him, I’m not gonna keep begging him to come over.’

Other men identified changes in their kids’ lives as breaking their already fragile communal ties. Fatherhood had served as the core source of purpose and connection in their lives. But when their kids aged out of elementary school and became more socially independent, they became more disconnected.

“I cut all the bullshit out of my life,” said Jacob, a 47-year-old from Florida who works nights at a convenience store. “I focused on being a dad and being a goofball and being there, and now it’s like, ‘Oh, you [kids] aren’t coming this weekend? Okay, cool. Shit. What am I supposed to do?’ … I’m just gonna curl up and go to sleep.”

But perhaps the most common, and tragic, point of failure for men’s relationships was the death of a loved one. Familial relationships often emerged as the only bright spot in the lives of the men we interviewed, but, by the same token, these very relationships often were the only ones they had left. Several described the passing of a family member as the cause of their disconnection from community and relationships.

“But then my grandmother passed away … and right after that, my mother passed away. And when she passed away, we all kind of quit going [to church],” explained Douglas, a 40-year-old from South Carolina. “I still have a relationship with God. I still pray to him and talk to him all the time. I just don’t go to church that much.”

For these men, precarious lives made for precarious ties, which reinforced the precarity of their lives. Because the relationships that remained were loosely held and easily broken, the line between connection and isolation was often razor thin.

A Collective Responsibility

Men without college degrees have been left alone by society, yet the dark irony is that most saw it as their personal responsibility to rebuild their relational lives from scratch.

But relationships aren’t entrepreneurial prizes to be earned; they’re gifts to be given, received, and inherited within the context of community. By making a college degree the price of admission to living a good life in America, we as a society have let these men down. But we also have an opportunity—a responsibility, even—to lift them up.

We must address the post-high school friendship cliff by creating alternative structures for relationship formation during the adult transition. Policy should play a role here. We need more state service year programs like Maryland’s Service Year Option and vocational training programs like YouthBuild that create accessible, structured, and cohort-based pathways for relationship building during the transition into adulthood.

Policy alone is insufficient though. We also need mass experimentation to renew and re-embed rites of passage into manhood within the context of local communities. What if, by 2035, every region was home to a locally embedded initiative like Journeymen Triangle in North Carolina or The College of St. Joseph The Worker in Ohio?

We also must ensure work can again become a foundational pillar of a robust relational life for Americans without degrees. Here too, policy change is necessary. We need fair workweeks to make work more stable, living wages to make work more fruitful, and worker boards to make workers more powerful. We also need policies like paid family leave and an expanded child tax credit to strengthen the material foundations of working-class family life. A long-term vision for the flourishing of the working class that does not include stable work and stronger families is an empty one.

But because workplaces are often the only structured outlets for human interaction these men have left, we need to consider activating these workplaces—especially in the highly precarious retail and service sectors—to become pathways to friendship and community outside of work.

Take Walmart, for example. According to its website, the company cares about creating a “culture of belonging” for its 1.6 million associates (47% of whom are men). If that’s actually true, Walmart should prioritize partnering with community groups like the YMCA, men’s groups like F3, and local houses of worship. The rationale is simple: When men change jobs—which is a practical certainty—they can have another web of association to catch them.

Perhaps more than anything, we need to call these men into community rather than continue leaving them alone to figure it out. This begins with families—the one form of connection most working-class men still have—seeing it as their responsibility to get their isolated sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles more connected with friends and community.

Religious, community, and neighborhood groups need to step up too, both creating programs to support families and making dedicated efforts to intentionally invite disconnected men to participate and belong. The YMCA formed 175 years ago to foster the spiritual, social, and physical formation of a generation of alienated and isolated young men, and we need to inject the same spirit into our institutions today.

Most of the men we spoke to were yearning to be called into this type of communal contribution. This brings us back to Austin, whose aspirations were clear. “I would like to do something that would change my community, or something that would leave a mark,” he said. “I want people to say, ‘Hey, this person did something to change the community, and here’s the effects of it.’”

Austin, like so many working-class men, was ready to step up. Will we?

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In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, a government-wide effort chaired by Vice President JD Vance to root out fraud in federal benefit programs, catalyzed by the exposure of widespread abuse in Minnesota. The Trump administration says the problem is structural: Both means-tested social welfare like Medicaid and food assistance and earned social insurance like unemployment run on a federal-state split. Washington funds or underwrites the program and sets the rules, while the states administer it—a division of labor that rewards states with federal cash for allowing unfettered program growth.

For decades, the federal government’s answer to benefit fraud has been to pay first and investigate later—what the administration calls a “pay-and-chase” model that catches fraud only after the money is gone. Vice President Vance has said that the United States loses about $250 billion to fraud each year, but only recovers about $10 billion of it. The administration wants to put more effort into screening eligibility at the front end, before a bad claim is ever paid, alongside more aggressive investigation and prosecution of fraudsters, who are mostly providers running schemes that milk the programs from the inside.

Since the Task Force began in March, federal prosecutors have moved in waves. In Minnesota, the Department of Justice’s National Fraud Enforcement Division’s takedown of 15 defendants caught more than $90 million in fraud, including $46.6 million billed to Medicaid for children with autism. Eight people have been arrested in a Los Angeles hospice sweep, 15 charged in a $1.4 million Massachusetts benefits scheme, and 7 indicted across three states over fraudulent pandemic-relief loans.

The Trump administration is also widening the aperture from individual fraudsters to the states that house them, charging that lax oversight has let fraud flourish in programs meant for the needy. It has demanded more access to the data of federally funded programs, pressed states to verify eligibility more rigorously, and sought enrollee records—including to screen out the ineligible, among them immigrants here unlawfully. Democratic states have fought the moves in court. In May, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated audits of every state’s Medicaid fraud-control unit, demanding each show it is “effectively and aggressively prosecuting Medicaid fraud” or lose its federal money. The much bigger federal stick is the Medicaid program funding itself, which the administration had already begun freezing for states it judges noncompliant. Last week, the Task Force turned its focus to unemployment insurance, when acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling warned all 50 governors that the Labor Department would withhold administrative funds from states that fail to tighten controls.

The activists and states resisting all this, purportedly on behalf of beneficiaries, are in fact the safety net’s worst enemies. Generous welfare and social insurance programs depend upon a promise a people makes to itself, that the resources taken from those who work will reach those who truly cannot, and that the compact will hold when any one of us, in turn, falls on hard times. Social insurance puts that reciprocity into practice—calling upon neighbors and strangers as citizens of a nation, bound together in mutual obligation across the country and between generations. To take from that compact without a claim on it robs someone who has one. Fraud, as Vice President Vance has put it, has two victims—the taxpayer whose contribution is stolen, and the beneficiary whose program is looted by someone who was never owed a cent.

Fraud draws down more than taxpayer money. It draws down trust, the basic currency of the safety net. A program endures only so long as the public believes resources are going where they should—that benefits reach the people who qualify and no one else, whether the ineligible claimant is an immigrant without lawful status or a citizen gaming the rules. Once that belief is gone, widespread support for the most generous safety net curdles into frustration at one more institution betraying the people it was meant to serve. Fraud that goes unpunished invites more of it. The answer is to rebuild institutions worthy of the public’s confidence and to impose real consequences on those who plunder them for private gain—evenhandedly holding the small-time cheat and the big-time schemer to one standard, enforcing the rules without fear or favor, up the income scale and down it. That is the discipline any lasting compact demands of itself.

The case for policing fraud holds whatever the size of these programs. You can believe them too lavish or too stingy, but whatever their size, all should be able to agree that they must be honestly run—program integrity is prior to the fight over parameters. Yet it is ground that supporters of a generous safety net too often abandon, waving off fraud as a stalking horse for cruelty and treating any scrutiny of a program as an assault on the people it serves. That reflex fails the citizen who actually depends on a safety net that can hold, which is all of us, whether we need it now or simply recognize that we might at some point down the road. — Daniel

GOVERNING AFTER A REVOLUTION

Five years ago today, American Compass published Five Principles of Tech Governance:

A free and flourishing nation defends its children and provides a protective sphere within which they can develop into capable citizens.

A free and flourishing nation ensures that each citizen has a private domain inaccessible by the market and the state and obscured from public view.

A free and flourishing nation places its citizens in control of its technology, not the other way around.

A free and flourishing nation has the confidence to insist that its markets and media respect individual agency and promote common understanding.

A free and flourishing nation asserts its sovereignty over the markets in which its citizens participate.

These hold up remarkably well for the AI onslaught that has ensued, perhaps a reminder that principles are upstream of technology and we ought to establish them independent of tech progress. As we concluded then, and remains true today: “Technology leaders present their product designs and business practices as both necessary and inevitable, and any drawbacks as merely the price of progress. But permitting technology to operate in ways that undermine our nation’s social foundations and political freedoms is a political choice.” Read the whole thing.

Bonus link: Britain Announces Social Media Ban for Children (New York Times).

GOOD READS FOR YOUR WEEKEND (ER… MONDAY EVENING)

Vegas Was Once America’s Bargain Vacation. Now It’s a Luxury Destination: Like the U.S. economy broadly, Las Vegas increasingly relies on a smaller group of well-off people (Wall Street Journal). Sorry if we sound like a broken record on this one, but as the dynamic becomes increasingly prevalent, the reported stories are bringing it to life. “Executives told investors on the company’s recent earnings calls that they can make more money by charging fewer customers more” is a good summary of where the invisible hand is pointing, and no, this equates to neither a higher standard of living nor full participation in economic life for the typical American.

JD Vance on the Morality of the Trump Administration (with Ross Douthat, New York Times). Promoting his new book, Communion, the vice president again joins the “Interesting Times” podcast for a discussion about his own faith, life in the Trump administration, and the prospects for a peace deal in the Middle East.

The Paradox of Work (Rob Henderson). “People say they want comfort but feel better when tasked with challenges that match their skills,” writes Henderson. “Free time sounds appealing, but it has no built-in structure. You have to shape it yourself, and most people let time pass them by rather than use it to cultivate their skills, talents, or interests. Most people don’t have an inner Mozart just waiting to be unlocked.” This truth helps to explain the limits of “revealed preferences” in the market and the importance of constraints, obligations, and formative institutions for human flourishing. As we say in Reclaiming American Citizenship:

We reject naked consumerism. The folly of unquestioned deference to “revealed preference” in the marketplace has revealed how easily we can lose all sense of higher purpose, succumb to mind-numbing entertainment, and slide toward utter dependence on outside support. We choose instead a nonnegotiable commitment to agency, competence, self-determination, and the use of technology to enrich lives rather than monetize their decay.

Speaking of which…

The Document That Could Define Post-Trump Conservatism (Henry Olsen, Washington Examiner). Olsen offers a thorough analysis of the Citizenship statement. “The very American idea that all people are created equal, and that people’s self-government exists to ensure that equality in theory becomes equality properly understood in fact,” says Olsen, “has been gaining ground, here and around the world, for the past decade. Expect it to continue to grow, and expect Compass’s magnificent articulation of that idea to be cited and drawn upon for years to come.”

Bonus link: Remarkably, Olsen himself has been making this case for more than a decade, dating at least back to his excellent 2016 essay for National Review, “Trump’s Faction”:

Virtually every one of the major concerns that move Trump’s voters can be tied together under the idea that America is an entity that exists apart from voluntary arrangements of its residents, and that this entity obligates all of its members to act on behalf of all the other members. In this view, citizenship is not simply voting and paying taxes: It is a membership by birth in a body that demands things from everyone and in return protects and supports everyone.

…

The implicit understanding conveyed by many in the ‘never Trump’ movement is that the country is little more than a land mass containing individuals rather than an entity with obligations to, and capable of imposing obligations on, those who belong to it.

BAD STUDIES

One of the sadder habits of the legacy institutions clinging determinedly to their neoliberal dogma is the constant effort to buttress their faith-based commitments with “analysis” that takes the form of serious economics but, in substance, amounts essentially to an unpersuasive press release. A couple of fine examples have popped recently from center-left and center-right…

On your left, from the fine folks at the Yale Budget Lab, it’s “Lower Immigration Means Lower Productivity Growth.” Economist Abhi Gupta obtains this result by observing that restrictive immigration policy will change the country’s demographic profile, the changed demographic profile will have fewer businesses started, and fewer businesses started means less productivity growth. QED. As Gupta notes in Appendix C, Methodology, “the headline results capture solely the business-formation channel of immigration policy.” This is a very polite way to say that the headline is false. Gupta might accurately have published a piece titled “If Lower Immigration Leads to Fewer New Businesses, That Could Have a Barely Noticeable Effect on Productivity Growth, Other Things Equal, Which Of Course They Are Not.” At Breitbart, John Carney wades further through the mud.

Bonus link: Border Enforcement Does Affect American Workers’ Wallets (Wall Street Journal). Last week, we highlighted the Journal’s straightforward reporting on the many things economists had gotten wrong about the economic effects of immigration. This week, the editorial page runs a piece by former Bush administration Treasury and Labor official James Carter, who concludes, “when labor markets tighten, prices and wages respond. That isn’t ideology but simple supply and demand.”

Also notable: “A recent Federal Reserve working paper finds that unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly 30% of house-price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average metro area between 2021 and 2024. As that demand eases, so should price pressure.”

On your right, from the fine folks at Americans Advancing Freedom, it’s “Tariffs Tank Employment: Assessing One Year of Liberation Day Evidence.” This paper has problems. How bad is it? Well, they seem to have already taken it down from their website. Not to worry, though, your trusty Understanding America team had already archived a copy. Problems include a nonsensical methodology; writing that seems, well, not human-generated; failure to account for effects of immigration enforcement (beyond misusing the foreign- versus native-born BLS employment data); and peculiar findings like a slowdown in manufacturing employment, even though the level was falling twice as fast before Liberation Day as afterward.

We’ve inquired as to what happened to the paper and will update you on any further developments.

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UGLY BUSINESS

Spotted: In the New York City subway, “Have Your Best Baby” (PickYourBaby.com). The IVF+ service helps you “choose the best embryo for you.” Brought to you by the good people of Beverly Hills Fertility, just $9,999/mo. Free egg freezing, but the company keeps half.

And hey, here’s an idea: Free egg-freezing, but the company gets half. It’s called “egg sharing,” kind of like ride sharing, see? But if that’s not for you, there’s also a “Keep” option: “Self-fund your egg freezing and keep the eggs retrieved, with access to discounts.”

IN HAPPIER NEWS…

GM in Talks to Supply Weapons Parts to Lockheed Martin (Wall Street Journal): “General Motors is in talks with Lockheed Martin about making parts for the defense contractor’s weapons, according to people familiar with the matter. ... To replenish supplies, Trump administration and Pentagon officials have pressed weapons makers to accelerate production, while seeking to enlist other manufacturers, including GM.” Good. As Oren and Mark DiPlacido explained in Big Stick Economics, “suppliers for all the components of missiles must also make other things too, so that they have viable commercial businesses in times when large numbers of missiles are not being built.”

And a legislative fight to keep an eye on: Schumer Proposes Ex-Im Bank Revamp As Expiration Deadline Looms (Bloomberg).

SURVEY SAYS

A few poll results that caught our eye:

• Semafor: “Most Americans will celebrate the upcoming 250th anniversary of America’s independence, but Republicans are more likely than Democrats to plan on marking the milestone. Eighty-eight percent of Republican voters said they plan to celebrate, according to new Gallup polling, while 60% of independents and 54% of Democrats said the same.”

• Reuters: “Some 38% of respondents in the poll—including 40% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans—said they didn’t think the U.S. will exist as a single country 250 years from now. Just 62% thought their nation would last.”

• Brad Wilcox: “What’s best for the kids? Striking new numbers from Pew on work/family re: the kids: Only half (49%) of parents who both work full-time say it’s good for their children versus 85% of parents with mom at home who say their arrangement is good for their children.”

• Finbarr Bermingham: “Eye-opening findings in Bertelsmann Stiftung survey on the eve of EU leaders debate on China. 77% in the EU feel their countries need to reduce dependency on China ‘even if it hurt your economy in the short term,’ including 80% in Germany, 84% in France, 72% in Spain.”

CHECKING IN ON CHINA

Maybe all those EU poll-takers have a point?

• China Shock 2.0: Surging Chinese Exports Threaten Europe’s Economy, Raising Concern at G7 Summit (Associated Press).

• A Trade War Between the EU and China Seems Inevitable (The Economist).

• Hedge Funds Bet Against European Carmakers on Chinese Competition Fears (Financial Times).

But can they get more than a pinkie promise? Europe Rallies Around Tough New China Strategy Ahead of Key Summit (South China Morning Post):

From free marketeers to long-term interventionists, EU countries of all stripes are converging on the need for urgent action to prevent a Chinese-driven European deindustrialisation ahead of a key summit in Brussels, multiple sources said on Wednesday. A broad coalition of members now support the development of a tough new trade strategy that could involve multiple new instruments and a more rapid-fire, strategic use of existing weapons. One of the tools could be modelled on US President Donald Trump’s Section 301 tariff measures, which have been used against both the EU and China. The idea was first floated by French President Emmanuel Macron, and while there are still concerns over its compatibility with global trading rules, others have expressed interest.

But wait, The Economist’s market fundamentalists have a better free market plan: Couldn’t we just wait for China to change? For Its Own Sake, China Should Change Its Growth Model.

Meanwhile in the United States, the lack of a clear strategy continues to pose challenges. Rules against Chinese vehicle content are beginning to bite—U.S. firms are reshoring production, foreign suppliers are working to circumvent Chinese control—but companies like Ford that have gotten a bit too cozy with the Chinese Communist Party are now asking for exceptions. US Connected-Car Rule Prompts Ford, Other Automakers to Seek Licenses for China-Built Models (Reuters). How about a nice hot cup of “no”?

And, US Holds Off Blacklisting China’s DeepSeek, More Than 100 Firms Deemed Security Risks, Sources Say (Reuters). Is it too much to ask that the Department of Commerce move against obvious foreign security threats with anywhere near the alacrity it moves against American national champions? Ah well.

Enjoy the week!

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For two-thirds of the last generation, the United States presidency has been held by one man or another born in the summer of 1946. Of the two who broke the pattern, the latest (four years older than the others), became so obviously senile that he was ousted by tweet in the middle of an election.

The average age in the Senate today is nearly twice that of Thomas Jefferson when he penned the Declaration of Independence. The average age of a homebuyer in America has soared to 59, around the time normal people are settling into their role as grandparents. (The average age of first-time buyers is a more modest 40, by which time only the very efficient are welcoming grandchildren.)

This state of affairs has brought many liberals around to a kind of pessimism once monopolized by conservatives, and it has tipped many conservatives into a revolutionary fervor that was once the sole province of the liberals. The result is a massive, bipartisan backlash against the decrepit oligarchs who control America and her treasures.

But the only thing worse than being governed by the old is being governed by the young. This is the irresistible lesson of Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. In 215 light but repetitive pages, Moyn outlines an America in which young citizens are cut off from political control, financial security, and institutional prestige by an aging elite that clings to all three for its own selfish purposes. As the only viable solution he presents a heady mixture of socialist economics, identity politics, and state-directed feel-goodism.

Besides the fact that his goals are the wrong ones, there is one major error underlying Moyn’s belief that our problems will be solved by handing over the reins to a new, revolutionary generation: We already tried that.

Moyn treats traditionalism and rule by the elderly as essentially one and the same. He refers repeatedly to “elder conservatism,” as if it is an undeniable fact of nature that the aged will be the guardians of the permanent things—or, in another view, of the dark things inherited from a world before liberation—and the young the champions of progress and reform.

He is correct, of course, that the elderly today are jealous of their political, social, and economic power. They are deeply and desperately invested in the status quo. But that is practically the only sense in which the particular generation in question, the generation with a stranglehold on American public life, could be understood as “conservative.”

Boomerdom is not a gerontocracy in any traditional sense. It is not a reactionary order invested in the preservation of centuries-old ways of living, nor a traditional system by which elders pass on the wisdom they have inherited. It is a new kind of political arrangement run by and for a generation who refuse to accept that they are old—a collective fantasy of perpetual youth rooted in the formative experience of 1960s radicalism and enabled by the singularly fortunate economic lot the Baby Boomers inherited.

This is why, for instance, the stereotypical Boomer insists that hard work and grit (along with abstention from avocado toast) will overcome any material challenges faced by the younger generations. Never mind that the number of jobs requiring only a high school diploma has been slashed by more than half since the heyday of the boomers, or that the income gap between mid-career and senior workers has grown by 61% as the portion of the workforce over 55 nearly doubled. A great many of the elderly today cannot and will not accept these facts. To admit that the world has changed, that the America into which they were born no longer exists, would be to admit that they have aged along with it.

Moyn makes one glancing reference, two-thirds of the way through the book, to “the elder propensity to deny decline and mortality,” but he has remarkably little else to say about the subject. This blind spot is made apparent by one of Moyn’s more interesting policy proposals: “a delayed housing wealth tax, levied on death and used for the purpose of building more housing; under this plan, older people would have the option of selling sooner to avoid paying the tax.” It’s a nice enough idea in the abstract, but it assumes that Baby Boomers both understand that they will die and care about what is left for their families when they do.

Moyn brushes off conservatives’ worries about the indiscriminate importation of millions of immigrants as a means to delay the economic apocalypse entailed by an inverted population pyramid. Never mind that mass migration is the most obvious cause of young Americans’ challenges in the labor market, followed closely by offshoring. Never mind that both were facilitated specifically to underwrite the permanent cruise-ship lifestyle of the Boomer generation. Never mind that a foreign invasion force competes just as much for scarce housing stock as do elderly Americans, and with far less right to do so.

Moyn slyly points to works of fiction in which the aging are ritually euthanized as a means of relieving their burden on the public—and assures us that he would stop short of this particular measure. But there is another, far more humane way to reduce the load of an overcrowded society by roughly 50 million: simply send home the people who don’t belong here.

Likewise, Moyn ignores the breakdown of the family over the course of the twentieth century, perhaps the single most important element in the Boomer story. Assigning causation is often a matter of political allegiance, but it is undeniable that the elderly’s reliance on federal welfare programs is a direct replacement for what once had been familial obligations. This is an easier solution for a generation of senior citizens who do not actually want the role assigned to elders, but it is a profoundly difficult one for the young working families left holding a heavy bag. The real story of gerontocracy in America today is the story of 30 million women terrified of being known as “grandma.”

Such troubles are not worth fussing over. Instead, Moyn fixates on the so-called “climate crisis,” the fantasy of impending apocalypse by which elderly activists relive their glory days long after every cause has been worn out. This, he assures us, is the issue of the future, and (like the huddled masses of the world) the old are the only thing holding it back.

As these snippets might suggest, Moyn is desperate to ensure that nobody mistakes him for a conservative, despite the cross-partisan appeal of his basic premise. The book is thus chock full of fantastic liberal myths that have little or nothing to do with its driving thesis: that public school teachers are underpaid, that work requirements for Medicaid are unconscionably cruel, that the process of aging discriminates against black people. When one passage could be read as lamenting the decline of once-healthy civilizations, the author hurries to add that “population growth (or shrinkage) says nothing about cultural vitality.”

The silliness of Moyn’s Ivory Tower liberalism should not distract from the extremism of his actual agenda. Politically, his opposition to elder power is shockingly absolute. Twice in the span of seven pages he denounces the U.S. Senate as a “holdover” from the dark days of antiquity, when old men held political power by virtue of experience. A few pages after that, he dismisses the very idea that elders can be valuable as resolvers of disputes and repositories of hard-earned wisdom as a “magical belief.” A chapter later still, Moyn casually admits his belief that “eventually, the abolition of the old man’s titular branch of government, the Senate, is a must.”

This is because “the aims [of the framers of the Senate] were conservative and gerontocratic, which euphemisms like deliberative and stable often masked.” Moyn makes the same point about the Supreme Court, the “nine old men” who famously stood in the way of FDR’s most radical New Deal dreams. What actually distinguishes these two bodies in the American constitutional system is not their tendency toward age but their resistance to the impulses of the mob. Words like deliberative and stable are more than euphemisms; they are the foundations of good government and indispensable safeguards against the utopian schemes of Ivy League professors.

Moyn regards such constructions as an inconvenient quirk in the American scheme of government:

In any case, after it announced the one-person, one-vote principle on Baker v. Carr (1962), the Supreme Court has never taken it to its logical conclusion. Were it to do so, it would be forced to abolish the Electoral College and the Senate, both of which notoriously overweight the votes of some Americans living in smaller states, awarding them disproportionate power. While the Supreme Court insisted on equal districts within states, it never faced the dilution of voting power inherent in giving two senators to even the smallest states, a practice that also carries over to the Electoral College, which allocates spots based on the number of senators plus the number of representatives.

Faced with such passages, it is almost impossible to believe that the author of Gerontocracy in America is professor of law and history at Yale. Surely the occupant of such a post has some knowledge of the concept of federalism. Presumably, Moyn understands and simply disagrees with the system set up by America’s founders 250 years ago. If so, he should say as much and make his case for an alternative. But to feign ignorance of the whole logic of the American constitutional system is a bizarre and ineffective choice in a book meant to persuade.

Nor should we mistake Moyn’s objection to these constitutional safeguards as some kind of democratic purism. In fact, it is quite the opposite. When Moyn attempts to explain the disaffection of younger voters, who show up on election day at far lower rates than older cohorts, he can only guess that they want representatives who look like them, and that a state mandate should be implemented toward that end.

“If giving everyone the right to vote still leads to a democracy disfavoring blocs of the population,” he asks, “why not just provide a fixed or minimum amount of representation to the blocs instead of pretending that the process will do so automatically?” Of the use cases Moyn proposes for such a quota system, the only one that is even remotely feasible in an American context is in delegations to party conventions, where the idea could be interesting. To bring such quotas into actual public office, however, would entail a revolution the republic would not survive.

Some of Moyn’s proposals veer even closer to totalitarianism, including a suggested federal age limit on political donations. He admits that such a measure “is probably a nonstarter in practice in the foreseeable future,” since the Supreme Court has already found that age limits on political donations violate the First Amendment. “In the foreseeable future” would seem to suggest that the First Amendment, like the Senate, should ultimately be consigned to the ash heap of history. Later, he takes the principle a step further by proposing the removal or dilution of seniors’ right to vote, in which context the discussion of Baker v. Carr appears.

Moyn even criticizes philanthropy on the sole grounds that its ends are chosen by private citizens, not by the federal government. To solve this imagined problem, he would strip all tax benefits from any charity whose mission is not endorsed by the state—that is, by the party in federal power at any given moment.

Indeed, it is on questions of money that Moyn is most ambitious, and most confused.

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He is largely correct in his diagnosis of a tax system “set up to benefit older people preferentially and unjustly,” and a few of his proposed remedies may be fodder for bipartisan cooperation. He is correct that carveouts for senior citizens, regardless of actual need, give a handout to an established demographic at the expense of the young and struggling. Rep. Nancy Mace’s recent No Tax on Boat Loan Interest Act is a particularly egregious example.

Less absurdly, the tendency is obvious in disputes over property tax, which is locally determined and thus easily swayed by the incumbent class of owners. But (though he is ambiguous on the point) it seems like Moyn favors repealing all homestead exemptions, not just reforming them to resolve the gerontocratic tilt. That would throw out the baby with the bathwater; in fact, a stronger, more targeted homestead exemption would be a massive boon to young families in the housing market, as I have argued previously in Commonplace.

One measure Moyn will not consider is reforming Social Security. As Moyn notes, on its passage in 1935, Social Security made up just 0.29% of the federal budget. By 2025, that number had multiplied nearly a hundred times, to 22.5%. And that growing burden is being shouldered by fewer and fewer people: “where there had been 40 workers for every beneficiary in 1940, that figure dropped to 3.3 to one in 1980.” It has since dropped all the way to 2.7. Nor do benefits phase out for retirees who do not need them, so that struggling working families are left subsidizing wealthy retirees’ fourth and fifth annual cruises.

Such a setup is obviously unsustainable, and the knowledge that they are paying into a system whose rewards they will never reap is a major contributor to the outrage of younger generations at the reigning gerontocracy.

These numbers are not worth discussing, though. The real problem, Moyn informs us, is Boomer “hoarding”—a word whose variations appear no fewer than 28 times throughout Gerontocracy in America. Only in housing—where supply is sharply limited, the utility of the asset in question varies with the owner’s phase of life, and the windfalls of the last two generations have been wholly unearned—is the term really fair to use. Otherwise, it’s better known as “saving.” But even a professed socialist like Moyn would not be so foolhardy as to call for state seizure and redistribution of elderly people’s houses.

What Moyn will use the state to redistribute is jobs, and happily so. He seems to operate on a Carter-era assumption that growth has reached its natural end and that the only question left is how best the state might mete out a fixed set of economic privileges. Indeed, he treats “neoliberal” suggestions to the contrary as unworthy even of rebuttal. Thus, he devotes a great deal of energy to conceiving schemes to push Boomers into retirement, freeing up their jobs to go to younger occupants. Of these proposals, the most feasible is repealing the 1986 ban on mandatory retirement (an “ageist” practice), which may also have cross-partisan appeal.

Perhaps the most interesting, though, is “capacity testing”—that is, subjecting aging workers (or, as a pilot program, politicians) to a rigorous and standardized examination of their abilities. Moyn seems not to consider how such a change for the elderly might ripple out into other areas presently controlled by anti-discrimination law. But if the refusal of senile politicians to step down from office willingly is what leads to the reversal of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., then conservatives will rejoice at an accidental victory—even as left-wing Yale professors recoil in abject horror.

Of course, when such people are pushed into retirement, they will require financial support through their final years, a challenge made all the more daunting by the medical extension of the time between the loss of full capacity and death. The solution, Moyn cheerily informs us, is to tax everyone a whole lot more to provide for socialized elder care for all, replacing the already obscenely expensive partial welfare system.

The end result of such an arrangement should be obvious enough, and Moyn comes within half an inch of recognizing it. In the penultimate chapter he presents an image of state-controlled elder care from Michel Houellebecq’s 2022 novel Annihilation: an 80-something woman in a soiled diaper abandoned in a dark corner of a run-down public facility, ignored by the tax-paid staff as much as by her absent family. Moyn’s incredible takeaway is not that such schemes are inhumane, or unnatural, or even ill-suited to provide for people in their time of greatest need, but that “Americans don’t even have a welfare state that guarantees this much support.”

In one sense, then, Moyn’s contention is not that gerontocracy is an evil or unfair system, but that real gerontocracy has never been tried. If only young families and workers transferred more of their earnings to senior citizens, and did so at gunpoint, then everything would be hunky-dory. In a magical world where money appears ex nihilo, restricted only by the “hoarding” of this or that capitalist bogeyman (in this case, the elderly; elsewhere men, white people, U.S. citizens, heterosexuals, people with jobs and BMIs under 30), nobody would dream of describing it this way. But here in the real world, where the tax power exists downstream of lethal force and government must marshal limited resources for almost limitless needs, it is the only fair way to describe it.

A nation in crisis will not be rescued by a vibe shift. Moyn must know this, which is why he devotes so much of his attention to more radical solutions than bingo and pickleball (though attempts to make retirement more appealing are a key part of his program). But neither can he stomach the possibility that conservatives were right about anything. And so, faced with the option of a few difficult but constructive reforms (remigration, means testing Social Security and adjusting its retirement age for modern life expectancy) or a continued drive down the suicidal path of the last century, he takes the latter eagerly.

Neither Moyn (now 54) nor any of the original cheerleaders of the progressive-industrial complex will be around to see the misery or the violence this path entails. For this alone, Gerontocracy in America may be a fitting testament for Boomerdom as it nears an uncertain end.

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• Nobody to Call

• “‘The Vibes Are Not Good’,” Oren Cass, Commonplace

Note: This is the second of a two-part debate on the value of Trump Accounts. Ray Boshara arguing in favor of Trump Accounts is available here.

Trump accounts are an obnoxiously bad version of an inherently bad idea. The bad idea is that in modern advanced economies, good wages and good benefits will not be enough for middle-class security. Wage income must be supplemented, partly or entirely, by capital income, which allegedly will always outpace the growth of wage income. According to this theory, the model citizen in a modern democracy is a “trust-fund baby” born to inherited wealth. In the interest of fairness, the majority of citizens should be turned into trust-fund babies at birth by government redistribution through “child trust funds,” colloquially known as “baby bonds.”

Baby bonds are not new. Child trust fund proposals were debated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they were promoted by my colleagues Ray Boshara and Ted Halstead and I along with others at New America, the nonpartisan think tank I co-founded in 1999. In Britain, a child trust fund program was created by parliament in 2005, only to be shut down in 2011. In the last quarter-century, my early doubts about the idea have matured into full-scale opposition.

Despite feel-good statements like “every child can be a trust-fund baby,” not only existing Trump Accounts, but also any alternative baby bond proposal that has a chance of being enacted by Congress is likely to have the same five birth defects: child trust funds undermine the dignity of work, they encourage illegal immigration, their amounts are too small, their uses are restricted, and their balances will be used as excuses by politicians to cut Social Security and other public programs.

Child Trust Funds Undermine the Dignity of Work

A subtle but nonetheless harmful effect of all child trust fund proposals is the implicit delegitimation of income earned by labor, compared to income from the ownership of assets. In a well-designed, democratic version of a flourishing modern technological society, it should be possible to belong to the middle class, however defined, without owning title to any major assets at all, be they homes, small businesses, or big savings or investment accounts. During their working years, all able-bodied, sane adults should be employed and paid an adequate wage. Social insurance, paid for by broad, universal taxes, should maintain a middle-class living standard for non-workers: the young, the elderly, and their full-time or part-time family caregivers.

The goal is a middle-class stream of income for all, whether or not they own specific favored assets. This is not the “you will own nothing and be happy” dystopia attributed to Davos Man. This is old-fashioned, pro-worker Americanism. To suggest that full participation in the American middle class requires ownership of income-generating capital is to implicitly endorse the theme of get-rich-quick hucksters on TV and the internet: working for a wage is for suckers and losers.

Child Trust Funds Incentivize Illegal Immigration

In their present form, all children who are U.S. citizens are eligible for Trump Accounts, regardless of the citizenship or even legal status of their parents. Under existing judicial interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, the children of illegal immigrants who are born on American soil are automatically U.S. citizens.

Assuming that the Supreme Court rejects the Trump administration’s argument against “birthright citizenship” and upholds the traditional interpretation, Trump Accounts create a major new incentive to get across the border and are likely to prompt a massive expansion of the already large birth tourism industry that brings pregnant foreign nationals to the U.S. to give birth to American citizen babies.

A minimal Trump account of $1,000 would be a substantial share of the median annual income in Honduras, which is equivalent to around $10,000 a year in U.S. dollars, and in the Philippines, with its median annual salary of around $4,000 in U.S. dollars, to name only two of the countries that send the most illegal immigrants to America.

Child Trust Fund Amounts Are Too Small to Make a Difference to Most People or to Reduce Wealth and Income Inequality

Advocates of child trust funds have claimed for decades that they can reduce inequality among classes and races.

But without additional funds from parents, parents’ employers, or philanthropy, by age 18 the account would grow only to an estimated $5,389. Chump change. And it is difficult to imagine future lawmakers reforming Trump Accounts to make them generous enough to make a perceptible difference in either income or wealth inequality in the U.S.

Government Imposes Restrictions on How Child Trust Fund Money Can Be Spent

Almost all proposals for child trust funds in the last half century have included limits on the purposes for which money can be withdrawn after age 18 without financial penalties. Such restrictions in themselves prove the claim that child trust funds constitute personal “wealth” to be a lie.

Genuine wealth can be spent for any purpose you choose, subject to taxation. In contrast, if the government hands you money and then tells you that you can only spend the money it just handed you for particular purposes, then it is not your money. It is government money spent on a specific government program. But instead of being spent transparently, simply, and directly, the government money is routed through a tax-favored personal account to give the illusion of ownership without the reality. At best, a child trust fund account that can only be spent on one or a few things, at the discretion of the account-holder, is a government voucher.

A quarter century ago, during the earlier debate on this topic, the only advocates of child trust funds who to my knowledge proposed no restrictions at all on how the money could be spent at age 18 were Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott in The Stakeholder Society (1999). If rich kids could go on grand tours of Europe after high school or college, why shouldn’t less-privileged beneficiaries of child trust funds be able to do the same?

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As far as I am aware, all other major child trust fund proposals have imposed paternalistic limits on how the money can be spent once the beneficiary reaches adulthood. Trump Accounts reflect the fear shared by most baby-bond proponents that the ignorant and undisciplined masses might waste their child trust fund money on the wrong things. Between the ages of 18 and 59 and a half, withdrawals, in addition to being taxed at ordinary income rates, are punished with a 10% penalty unless they are used for one of six purposes: education expenses, a first-time home purchase, birth or adoption expenses, medical expenses, or disability.

The 1990s are calling and want their placebo populism back! Instead of increasing the power of the working-class majority to demand higher wages from employers, higher benefits from government policymakers, and lower prices from price-gouging monopolies and oligopolies, what can be called placebo populism seeks to buy the acquiescence of underpaid, insecure, powerless workers with cheap, knock-off versions of various badges of elite status, like modest homes mortgaged to the hilt and worthless diplomas from low-ranked colleges. The hope of cynical policymakers is that the proles who obtain these merit badges will believe that they have joined the bourgeoisie, even though they are still proles.

In the bubble economy of the 1990s it was possible, without being stupid, to hope that all Americans could leverage a starter home into a larger house later and any four-year college diploma into a well-paying job. It is impossible to believe this in the 2020s, when growing numbers of American college grads are working in jobs that do not require their degrees, and when even modest down payments on modest homes have priced many young Americans out of home ownership.

In 2025, the median down payment by first-time homebuyers in the U.S. was $35,856—around seven times the value of a Trump Account for a beneficiary at 18 whose “trust fund” lacks any contributions by parents or others to the initial small government grant.

What about the other uses of Trump Account funds that are not punished by government-mandated penalties for withdrawal before 59 and a half: birth and adoption expenses, medical expenses, and disability expenses? There are already multiple federal programs that help families with children in general and a federal adoption tax credit.

For medical expenses and disability expenses we already have public social insurance and private health insurance, including Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Even Milton Friedman, the patron saint of libertarians, favored, and Ronald Reagan proposed, catastrophic health insurance for all Americans.

Hedging against medical disaster or unexpected disability by means of insurance based on small, recurrent payroll taxes or private insurance premiums makes sense. If that fails, access in an emergency to public or private loans that can be repaid in small installments over time on non-usurious terms might make sense as well. What makes absolutely no sense is the bizarre idea that government should encourage individuals to amass financial assets that can be liquidated to deal with medical crises or disability. That’s the equivalent of encouraging people to forego automobile accident insurance in favor of hoarding bars of gold bullion as a precaution against wrecks.

And yet from the perspective of the small-government conservatives who hope to co-opt the idealistic rhetoric of universal capitalism, this seemingly irrational duplication of existing public programs is a feature, not a bug, of child trust funds. This in turn brings us to the next harmful feature of Trump Accounts as well as of other child trust fund policies that have been or might be enacted in the real world:

Child Trust Funds Are Used as Excuses to Cut or Eliminate More Efficient and Fair Public Programs

At first glance it seems perverse to build up, piece by piece, a growing, parallel framework of tax-favored savings accounts—child trust funds, education savings accounts, health savings accounts, IRA’s and 401(k)s—when public programs already exist to fund the same goods like public education, health care, and retirement. But there is a method in this apparent madness. At some point the privatizers and government-shrinkers of the Old Right plan to use rising balances in child trust funds and other private, specialized savings accounts to declare that Americans now have so much money for retirement and other purposes that it is safe to cut Social Security and various other existing public programs.

While Geoge W. Bush’s proposal to divert some payroll tax money away from Social Security into private retirement accounts in 2005 went nowhere, thanks in part to resistance from working-class Republicans, Trump Account supporters proudly frame them as a stealth form of Social Security privatization.

At an event hosted by Breitbart News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blurted out the truth: “In a way, it is a backdoor way for privatizing Social Security. Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out ‒ that to the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow, and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, that’s a game-changer.” And at the Milken Institute’s Global Summit in May, Texas Senator Ted Cruz declared: “Here’s the dirty little secret: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts.” This explains a curious feature of Trump Accounts—no withdrawals are allowed before age 18, at which point every account will automatically turn into an IRA.

To the five congenital flaws of all mainstream child trust fund proposals, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have added a sixth—Trump Accounts are incredibly, unbelievably, grotesquely regressive. The White House Council of Economic Advisers itself has modeled two scenarios assuming “moderate” returns of 10.3% before inflation. In one scenario, there is no contribution by parents or qualified others to the initial government seed money of $1,000. In another scenario, the maximum contribution of $5,000 a year is made by parents alone or with money from their employers. The result? At the age of 18, Tiny Tim Cratchett has a mere $5,389 in his Trump Account. Meanwhile, Richie Rich, born to wealthy parents, when he turns 18 has $303,787 in his Trump Account.

So much for Trump Accounts reducing income and wealth inequality. The official Trump Account FAQ page boasts: “Would wealthy families be excluded? No. There are no income restrictions for Trump Accounts. Unlike Roth IRAs, there is no income phaseout. Families at any income level can open an account and contribute.” Small wonder that Trump Accounts, instead of being openly debated in advance for years and voted into existence in stand-alone legislation, were hidden from public scrutiny in advance and smuggled into the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBB) Act of 2025.

In addition to undermining the dignity of work, incentivizing illegal immigration, providing negligible amounts for most people, using restrictions on their use to promote patronizing house-and-diploma placebo populism, and encouraging the stealth privatization of Social Security and other universal and means-tested public programs, Trump Accounts by design are a sleazy scheme by which American taxpayers subsidize the sheltering from taxation of the multigenerational wealth of the richest families. This is a program that only the selfish, unpatriotic, rent-seeking, tax-avoiding Old Money Right could love. Its repeal should be sought not only by progressives but also by populist conservatives for whom the idea of a “Republican Workers Party” is more than a cynical campaign slogan. The Trump Account version of baby bonds deserves to be strangled in the cradle.

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Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part debate on the value of Trump Accounts. Michael Lind’s response here.

What’s the point of capitalism if people don’t have capital? An ownership society without owners? An American Dream without the assets—a home, an education, a retirement account—that make the dream possible?

That’s unfortunately the situation for too many Americans, especially younger ones, who face unprecedented headwinds in finding their footing in this economy. Federal Reserve data show that, among those living with kids under age 18, average financial or investable assets stand at $700 in the bottom 20%, $9,200 in the next 20%, and $38,300 in the middle quintile. And they’re especially left out of the stock market, which has seen remarkable growth over the last few decades: average holdings are $11 for the bottom 20%, $2,265 for the next 20%, and $13,502 for the middle 20%.

Enabling newborns to invest is naturally the best way to counter that—exactly the intention behind Trump Accounts, a new type of traditional IRA established at birth with a $1,000 federal deposit for over 14 million newborns between 2025 and 2028 (and open to all children under age 18 but without the $1,000 deposit). Trump Accounts (also known as 530A accounts for the section of the tax code in which they reside) were dropped into the One Big Beautiful Bill and signed into law on July 4 of last year, building on bipartisan support for the idea over the last few decades.

Three features aim to maximize the critical “start-up capital” young adults will need: the funds must be invested in a broad-based index fund like the S&P 500, no withdrawals are permitted prior to age 18, and a wide range of nonprofits and government entities are encouraged to contribute.

Given these features, balances could be substantial. A Milken Institute paper by Michael Piwowar and Robert Shapiro, using Monte Carlo simulations, reports that the initial $1,000—with no additional contributions—could become $8,308 in 20 years, $69,024 in 40 years, and $574,397 in 60 years. They also observe that matching the initial $1,000 could double these values, something a few dozen employers and the states of Texas and Oklahoma have pledged to do. Furthermore, starting at age 18, contributions from lower-income workers would qualify for the new federal Savers Match, which could boost retirement savings by as much as 50%.

Will Trump Accounts Increase Wealth Inequality? Probably, but…

Because Trump Accounts are universal—actress Hailee Steinfeld’s and NFL quarterback Josh Allen’s expected child is eligible for the $1,000 federal deposit along with every child born to the poorest parents in the U.S—and because rich families are far more likely to save the maximum $5,000 a year in the accounts, a common critique is that they are likely to increase near all-time high wealth inequality.

And that critique appears correct! But it doesn’t change the answer to what I believe is the more important question: Are lower-income and middle-class kids more likely to be better off with a Trump Account than without one? Yes! For that reason, Congress and the president did the right thing by enacting Trump Accounts into law.

First, and for the record: after leading a wealth inequality research center at the St. Louis Fed for over a decade, I believe wealth inequality is a serious problem—a barometer for a range of economic, social and political ills in the U.S that Congress and others must address.

Yet the many issues driving wealth inequality—e.g., radical reductions of taxation on higher-income and wealthy Americans; taxing wealth-derived income at preferential rates; massive pension and homeownership tax breaks whose value rises with income; the top 20% owning the overwhelming value of stocks; trade policy, deregulation, corporate tax cuts, the erosion of unions—won’t really change because a few million better-off kids get $1,000 at birth and their parents and others may sock away thousands more each year.

In fact, and more fundamentally, if a slight uptick in inequality is the price we pay for a universal policy—one that, therefore, includes millions of households with genuine needs to build wealth—then that’s well worth it. Universal policies, too, tend to be more enduring.

Why Lower- and Middle-Income Kids Would Benefit from a Trump Account

It’s far from clear, however, that better-off families would save in a Trump Account, given the wide array of investment products available to them and the better tax benefits and flexibility of those products. But Trump Accounts could mean a lot to lower- and middle-income kids—the vast majority of whom will see nothing from the so-called “great wealth transfer” from Boomers to their kids and grandkids.

In addition to giving youth some start-up capital in an economy conspiring against them, let me offer three additional reasons why Trump Accounts are likely to be good for lower- and middle-income kids—and thus good for our society and economy.

1. Exposure to the Stock Market. One of the most exciting features of Trump Accounts is that they open up stock ownership to the bottom half of the population, which holds only 2.5% of the nation’s wealth and an even lower 1% of corporate equities and mutual funds.

Unpacking that at the household level, Ana Kent, a former wealth inequality researcher at the St. Louis Fed, found using Federal Reserve data that while a significant portion of Americans have some participation in the stock market, the value of stocks held by the bottom four quintiles is quite low:

Source: Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (2022) and Kent’s calculations. Note: Direct and indirect stock holdings, including in retirement accounts.

Kent further found that, looking just at households with kids under age 18, stock market participation rates are higher but holdings are even more concentrated at the top:

Source: Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (2022) and Kent’s calculations. Note: Direct and indirect stock holdings, including in retirement accounts. Income quintiles among households with kids under the age of 18.

Of course, enormous volatility in the stock market, combined with the S&P 500 being dominated by the so-called “Magnificent 7,” should give us pause in recommending it as a reliable savings vehicle. But the stock market has become one of the most steady routes to wealth creation in the U.S. over time. The S&P 500 has returned over 8% so far this year, about 17% in 2025, and about 10% over the last 30 years. And the best thing newborns have is time.

Moreover, we need new routes to wealth creation, especially for those lacking wealth from which to start. For decades, lower- and middle-class families have fairly reliably built wealth through homeownership and post-secondary education—but these assets are not necessarily wealth-building any longer.

A college degree, for example, as we documented at the St. Louis Fed, has had diminishing returns (especially wealth returns, compared to income returns) for younger generations, while other scholars have found that housing returns are becoming riskier and more cyclical, especially for black and Hispanic homeowners. Policymakers and others should address these declining college premiums—but why not let every American enjoy the more reliable gains from the stock market, what Invest America (which helped drive Trump Accounts into law) calls the “upside” of America?

And for those who, like me, care about reducing the racial wealth gap, we cannot ignore the stock market. As Ken-Hou Lin and Guillermo Dominguez found in 2023:

The contribution of stock-linked assets to the Black–White wealth gap has expanded in both absolute and relative terms, surpassing those of homeownership and business equity. Furthermore, a substantial disparity in financial wealth exists even for otherwise similar Black and White households. Although the disparity is larger among those with more economic resources, a gap remains among those with less. Lastly, our analysis shows that the combination of lower ownership levels and lower returns on financial wealth among Black households could account for a quarter of the Black–White wealth accumulation gap, net of differences in current net worth and household characteristics.

That is, to the surprise of many, Trump Accounts also hold the potential to narrow the racial wealth gap.

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2. A Magnet for a Shared, Community Asset. Among the most unique (though admittedly complex) features of Trump Accounts is the explicit encouragement of multiple contributors in support of a child’s future. Post-tax (already taxed going in, tax-free coming out) contributions of up to $5,000 per year total may come from families and others.

And then there are three possible pre-tax (not taxed going in, taxed coming out) contributions: the federal $1,000 deposit; employer contributions up to $2,500 per employee per year (some 40 major corporations have already pledged support); and, the “general contributions,” which encourage 501(c)(3)s, philanthropists, cities, states, and Tribes to contribute unlimited though equal amounts in pre-defined geographical areas or for certain birth cohorts.

This third route is what Michael and Susan Dell used to target their unprecedented $6.25 billion contribution: $250 to 25 million children ages two to ten in zip codes with a median family income of $150,000 or below. Ray Dalio made a similar pledge for children in Connecticut, while Trump Account evangelist Brad Gerstner pledged to contribute to all children under age 5 in Indiana, his home state.

This wide range of contributors into one account reflects a powerful idea pioneered by University of Michigan scholar William Elliott III and NYC Kids RISE Founding Director Debra-Ellen Glickstein: that Trump Accounts are not just or even primarily personal savings accounts, but a shared, community-driven, wealth-building platform. As Elliott summarized his research for me in an e-mail:

Trump Accounts embed an institutional reservoir logic in federal law, treating children’s savings accounts (CSAs) as civic infrastructure rather than a private financial product. The account is built to capture flows from multiple streams—federal seeds, employers, philanthropies, community groups, and families—and, in doing so, to convert asset streams into social capital streams. Properly designed CSAs cultivate bonding ties within families and neighborhoods, bridging ties across communities, and linking ties to powerful institutions like city governments, banks, and major employers. NYC Kids RISE illustrates how this multi-stream, community-driven model both raises balances in low-wealth neighborhoods and marks children as shared objects of community investment, turning what looks like an individual account into a community account that builds social capital as well as wealth.

And not only should Trump Accounts not be viewed as primarily personal savings accounts: they should never be the basis for privatizing Social Security (or any social insurance program). As memorably observed by Invest America’s Matt Lira, Trump Accounts are about how kids start life, not how they end it.

3. A Future Orientation and Hope. A third and final compelling reason to support Trump Accounts is that, as research shows, they are poised to change thinking and behavior in positive ways—even if families do not save or save very little. It’s the presence of the asset in the household that generates these powerful “asset effects.”

Nearly two decades of experimental research from SEED OK—led by Michael Sherraden, the field’s intellectual pioneer and author of the seminal 1991 book Assets and the Poor—have demonstrated the effectiveness of at-birth Child Development Account (CDAs), precursors to Trump Accounts. SEED OK research led by Jin Huang found that CDAs:

• Give parents new hope for their children’s future and may change how they interact with their children;

• Help mothers maintain or increase their expectations;

• Improve parent-child educational engagement;

• Enhance college preparation for their children’s postsecondary education;

• Reduce symptoms of depression reported by mothers, particularly disadvantaged ones; and

• Improve children’s early social-emotional development, children’s hope, and adolescents’ behaviors, regardless of parental saving behavior.

Elliott also found that CDAs cultivate college-going or “college bound” identities and reduce “wilt,” or failing to transition to college despite having the desire and ability to go. A low- and moderate-income child who has school savings of $1 to $499 prior to reaching college age is over three times more likely to enroll in college and four times more likely to graduate from college than a child with no savings account.

Finally, it’s worth noting that these positive asset effects are likely to be further “supercharged” by the multiple investors in Trump Accounts described above. Imagine a child knowing that it’s not just their family who believes in them, but their government, their local bank, a local nonprofit, a big-name donor, their parents’ employer, and others.

Moving Forward

My enthusiasm around having investment accounts at birth in law—an idea I worked on for over two decades in and with Congress—is not unqualified. Like with most ideas that find their way into law, there’s much I would have done differently and will work diligently to see changed in the future. That sentiment is shared by a quiet, though growing and bipartisan, set of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

First and foremost, every child should be automatically enrolled in a Trump Account, and the $1,000 should be automatically deposited for eligible newborns. All the benefits of Trump Accounts I just articulated mean nothing unless kids have accounts, as Sherraden and I have argued before. While an impressive six million-plus families have opted in already, that’s millions short of the number of newborns and children under 18 who are eligible.

We also need “progressive” deposits—additional deposits for kids in lower-wealth families, especially if we’d like to narrow racial and other wealth gaps and reduce the potentially inequality-enhancing effects of the accounts. Critically, once kids turn 18, we also have to ensure that any savings and withdrawals from Trump Accounts (which, officially, become a traditional IRA at age 18) do not impact eligibility for any means-tested public assistance program such as Medicaid, SSI, and student loans.

And, finally, the $1,000 federal deposit should be extended beyond 2028 so that Trump Accounts become a permanent part of the social contract for families with kids which, up until now, largely (though inadequately) focuses on income, cash, health, nutrition, and other support.

U.S. history is full of bold, new public policies becoming better over time, such as the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the G.I. Bill, which also aimed to broaden asset ownership but started out excluding minorities and women. Trump Accounts also can and should improve over time. The long view is critical in this line of work—but, thankfully, we now have a great place to start.

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For three decades, social democracy was the most successful product of a working-class movement that had long contained both revolutionary and reformist elements. Between 1946 and 1973, United States GDP grew by 3.8% annually, and by 2.4% on a per-capita basis. Unemployment averaged 4.8%, and real median family incomes rose at a rate of 2.8% per year, more than doubling over the time period. What’s more, this growth was stronger at the bottom and relatively weaker at the top, meaning income inequality fell substantially.

The Keynesian economic consensus in Western industrial democracies during this period produced strong economic growth, low unemployment, rapidly rising living standards, and government action to provide protection and security for the average citizen.

Reflecting these positive developments, the social democratic-oriented Democratic Party received high levels of electoral support. In the six elections between 1932 and 1948, Democratic presidential support averaged 55%. After the liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower won two terms in the 1950s, the Democrats again averaged 55% presidential support in 1960 and 1964. And during almost all of this period, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

But as the 1970s dawned, three factors converged and reinforced one another to undermine social democracy—and eventually lead to its death. First, the social democratic economic model lost effectiveness; second, the social democratic base got smaller; and third, the social democratic influence within the Left weakened.

Let’s start with the economic model. With the end of the post-war Bretton Woods system and the OPEC oil price shock of 1973, inflationary pressures that had been building up inside the U.S. and other advanced countries could no longer be contained, producing high inflation rates and high unemployment, or “stagflation.” Social democrats failed to develop an alternative to or extension of the postwar Keynesian system, leading to the end of the Keynesian consensus.

A conservative counter-revolution in economic thinking filled the vacuum. Conservatives, of course, had never been happy with the Keynesian consensus, as they were ideologically opposed to the idea that the unregulated market contained intrinsic flaws that only the government could correct. So when the Keynesian system wobbled, they seized the opportunity to reinstate their views and discredit the government’s role.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Leading the charge was free market economist Milton Friedman, who explained in his academic work how inflationary expectations could derail the Phillips curve favored by Keynesian economists. With his wife Rose, Friedman published in 1980 the enormously influential Free to Choose, a no-holds-barred polemic in favor of self-interested individuals making “rational,” unregulated decisions and against anything that interfered with this process, especially government action. As far as Friedman was concerned, the government’s economic role should be limited to little more than controlling growth of the money supply.

This economic philosophy was no mere reform or adjustment of the Keynesian system but a complete turnaround—a true counterrevolution. In short order it came to dominate economic policymaking in the U.S. and other advanced countries. Deregulation, privatization, and rapid globalization became the order of the day, while Keynesian fiscal policy, especially the central role of public investment, was shunted aside. In the U.S., this led to deregulation of the transportation, energy, telecommunications, and financial sectors.

The philosophy came to be termed “neoliberalism.” While initially promulgated by the Right, it came to be accepted on the Left, including within the ranks of social democrats. They more or less accepted this turn in policy making as inevitable and sought to focus their economic policy on defending welfare state programs and, where possible, extending them. This development undercut a key pillar of the social democratic project.

The second factor was the diminution of the social democratic base. Broadly speaking, the Left’s coalition between 1870 and 1970 was primarily based in the industrial working class, with peripheral support from reformist elements of the white-collar middle class and the agrarian sector.

But the industrial working class peaked in size by 1970 and experienced a precipitous decline afterward. The general pattern across Western countries has been a decline from 40-50% of the workforce to less than 25% in a very short historical time span.

To put these changes in perspective, consider that industrial employment in the United States, after rising for 150 years, is now back to the level it was as a percentage of the workforce in 1820, when 70% of employment was agricultural. Today, services constitute well over 75% of all employment, meaning agriculture and services have essentially swapped places, while industry has wound up back in the same place as it was 200 years ago.

Finally, as the industrial working class has shrunk it has also become less supportive of the mainstream Leftist parties that historically promoted social democracy. Most of this support went to parties of the Right, and especially of late to Right-populist parties. The Keynisian social democratic model of economics declined in tandem with the constituency that provided its support.

This brings us to the closely-related third factor in the long, slow death of social democracy: the dramatic weakening of the influence of social democracy within the broad Left. This was an inevitable consequence of the replacement of traditional working-class voters within the Left by educated and professional voters.

The U.S. has seen an astonishing rise in educational levels. In 1940, three-quarters of American adults aged 25 and over were either high school dropouts or never made it to high school at all, and just 5% had a four-year college degree. By 1960, the proportion of adults lacking a high school diploma was down to 59%, by 1980 it was less than a third, and by 2024 it was down to just 6%. Concomitantly, the proportion with a bachelor’s degree rose steadily, reaching 39% in 2024. Quite a change: moving from a country where only one in 20 adults had a college degree to one where nearly two in five do.

As the educated class has become more numerous, it has realigned toward Left parties—and realigned them in tandem. In the United States of 50 years ago, professionals were actually the most conservative occupational group. Now they overwhelmingly vote Democratic, while the broad working class leans Republican.

Across Western countries it is the working class, especially in former Left strongholds, that has swollen the ranks of Right-populist parties, while educated professionals have become fiercely loyal to the erstwhile social democratic parties. As they have become the foot soldiers and activists for these parties, the professional class’s influence has grown apace, amplified by their vast influence in the commanding heights of cultural production, including in the media, the arts, academia, and non-government organizations. This has turned the volume way, way down on the influence of the working class, formerly the beating heart of these parties.

Put these three factors together—the declining effectiveness of the social democratic economic model, the diminution of the social democratic base, and the profound weakening of social democratic influence within the left—and you have the recipe for the long, slow death of social democracy.

The Rise of the Brahmin Left

If social democracy has been on a long journey to oblivion, what has taken its place?

The best term for this phase change is the “Brahmin Left,” a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty to characterize Western Leftist parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin Left has evolved over many decades, but its influence spiked in the twenty-first century. The chart below illustrates this trend for the United States.

The chart does not show our most recent elections, but surveys indicate that education polarization spiked further in 2020 and 2024. Including those data would thus make the pattern even more striking.

Brahmin Left parties continue to favor redistribution, even as they have lost their working-class character and overriding commitment to an economic model of capitalism that could produce better market outcomes for workers (a phenomenon sometimes termed “predistribution”).

But what really defines the Brahmin Left parties—and marks their decisive break with social democracy—is a shift of priorities toward sociocultural issues of primary concern to their educated constituencies. These issues generally harken back to the movements of the 1960s around racial and gender equality, the environment, and cultural tolerance, and are of far less interest to most working-class voters.

The opportunity costs of this new focus meant that the economic concerns of blue-collar voters were necessarily reduced. It was much more a zero-sum game than social democratic leaders were initially willing to admit, even if over time this fundamental fact became glaringly obvious.

The second and most critical effect of the sociocultural focus was that catering to professional class priorities bred ever more reliance on these voters and the need to accommodate them as their preferences became more politically extreme. And that is exactly what happened.

Consider the four biggest changes in Leftist priorities in the twenty-first century. These are neo-racialism, mass immigration, gender ideology and transgender “rights,” and climate catastrophism and the rapid green transition. None of these were of, for, or supported by the working class but rather reflected the increasingly radical priorities of professional-class voters.

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Neo-Racialism

A key moral commitment of the twentieth-century Left was to make societies colorblind. It was unfair that racial discrimination could truncate the life chances of nonwhites, therefore the Left strenuously advocated for ending discrimination and unequal opportunity. They won the argument, in the process pulling social democrats and social democratic-oriented parties in their direction.

Americans today believe, as did Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a 2022 survey, 92% of respondents agreed with the statement that, “our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” This is what Americans deeply believe in: equal opportunity, not, it should be noted, equal outcomes.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century. Instead of treating the colorblind society as a noble ideal, these increasingly Brahminized parties lost faith. Prodded by increasingly radical professional class activists, they began to favor color-conscious remedies like affirmative action that went far beyond anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, and to oppose colorblind policies if they did not produce desired outcomes by race. Indeed, the very use of the term “colorblind” has become Right-coded, evidence of supporting racism rather than opposing it.

It contradicts logic and common sense. And it has led the Brahmin Left parties to take positions with little purchase in social or political reality that are offensive to the basic values most working-class voters hold.

Mass Immigration

Which brings us to mass immigration. Historically, social democratic political parties were suspicious of uncontrolled immigration, even as they opposed xenophobia and supported moderate levels of legal immigration. But in the twenty-first century, immigration surges abetted by the erstwhile social democratic parties have led working-class areas to move Right, both in Europe and the U.S.

The Brahmin Left on both continents refuses to see anything wrong with a de facto policy of mass immigration, which is considered an unalloyed good contributing to a more diverse society. Therefore, to oppose mass immigration is to oppose diversity, which can only mean that you are racist and xenophobic. It’s that simple.

This attitude has been a huge mistake because in fact there are rational reasons for voters, especially working class voters, to oppose mass immigration. Where are the Brahmin Left politicians who are willing to unapologetically proclaim the following fundamentals of a realistic immigration policy?

1. Huge numbers of people are willing to break the laws of rich countries to gain entry. If you do not enforce the law, you will get more law-breakers and therefore more illegal immigrants. If you provide procedural loopholes to gain entry into these countries (e.g., by claiming asylum), many people will abuse these loopholes. Once these illegal and irregular immigrants gain entry to these countries, they will seek to stay indefinitely regardless of their immigration status.

2. Tolerance of flagrant law-breaking on a mass scale contributes to a sense of social disorder and loss of control among a country’s citizens, who believe a nation’s borders are meaningful and that the welfare of a nation’s citizens should come first.

3. There is, in fact, such a thing as too much immigration, particularly low-skill immigration, and negative effects on communities and workers are real.

4. If more immigration is desired by parties or policymakers, from whichever countries and at whatever skill levels, that immigration should nonetheless be regular, legal immigration approved by voters, including working-class voters, through the democratic process. Backdooring mass immigration over the wishes of voters because it is “kind” or “reflects our values” or is deemed “economically necessary” leads inevitably to backlash.

These are the realities of the immigration issue, and each and every one of them has been ignored by the Brahmin Left parties during the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Gender Ideology

Social democratic and social democratic-oriented parties were able to absorb basic conceptions of women’s rights and sexual equality that emerged in the 1960s. The idea was that women and men should have equal rights and that there is no “right” way to be a man or woman—gender non-conforming behavior is just a different way of being a man or woman. Therefore, no one is born in the wrong body.

But then things changed. Perhaps nothing would surprise a time traveler from the twentieth-century Left as much as the adoption of transgender “rights” as a defining issue. Brahmin Left parties in Europe and very much here in the United States have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities.

In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.

Gender ideology now thoroughly dominates Brahmin Left parties. Nowhere has it been clearer that the priorities of radical professional class voters, activists and NGOs take precedence over those of the working class.

Climate Catastrophism

At the end of the twentieth century, climate change was an issue for social democratic political parties, but generally a peripheral one. A time-traveler from the year 2000 would be shocked to discover how the status of the issue evolved in the intervening decades. Far from peripheral, it became a core part of the Brahmin Left’s political identity.

The working class has not been impressed. In the United States, these voters view climate change as a third-tier issue, and overwhelmingly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate. Making fast progress toward net-zero emissions barely registers with them.

The Democrats’ assurance that the clean energy transition will deliver prosperity has fallen on deaf ears. Working-class voters—rightly—do not believe the green transition is delivering or will deliver prosperity, nor do they believe the end of the world is nigh if the green transition doesn’t proceed really fast. And Bill Gates thinks they’re right!

Conclusion

Could social democracy be resuscitated—rising Lazurus-like from its terminal condition? Is a working-class-oriented politics still possible that aims to both promote a dynamic capitalism and channel the benefits of that dynamic growth?

Perhaps. But a good part of the problem here is that Democrats, broadly speaking, have lost interest in the general goal of economic growth and a richer country. That goal has taken a back seat to others deemed more important, like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups.

The invaluable Deciding to Win report analyzed word frequency in Democratic Party platforms since 2012 and found a 32% decline in the appearance of the word “growth” compared to a 150% increase in the word “climate,” a 1,044% increase in “LGBT/LGBTQI+,” a 766% increase in “equity,” an 828% increase in “white/black/Latino/Latina,” and a 333% increase in “environmental justice.”

Getting from these priorities to a revival of social democracy will be very, very difficult. Of course, there is no law that says a working-class-oriented politics aiming to promote dynamic capitalism and channel the benefits to ordinary workers can only come from the Left. But that’s a story for another day.

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Reading the words, I was filled with that at once ethereal and confusing sense of déjá vu: “Who gets to decide the good life? Joe Biden? Donald Trump? How are they going to stop me?”

Jerusalem Demsas, editor of The Argument (tagline: “We’re Libbing Out”), was criticizing American Compass’s recent statement on Reclaiming American Citizenship. But we’d just published it last week. Where had I heard this argument before?

It was several years ago, debating Duke University professor Michael Munger on the issue of industrial policy. He was explaining why we should dismiss the idea of “The State” making investment decisions: “Remember to take out ‘The State’ and replace it with ‘People chosen by parties and elected by voting dominated by large corporate interests.’ In fact, you should replace ‘The State’ with ‘Donald Trump.’”

In each case, the rhetorical implication was that we should reduce the entirety of political decision-making in a democratic republic to the vesting of absolute power in an unpopular individual. The economic libertarian, with his blind faith in free markets, and the social libertarian, with her nonnegotiable commitment to radical autonomy, could allow no middle ground between unfettered license in their respective spheres of concern and a weirdly pat totalitarianism.

Oh, you think policymakers should try to identify and increase the returns in critical industries like semiconductors, where private capital, seeking to maximize profit, might underinvest? Well, that means you must want Donald Trump to make all of the country’s investment choices.

(That will seem like an absurd strawman. Here are Munger’s words: “Say it with me: ‘I think that corporate CEOs and professional investors should have all their funds taken away at gunpoint, and then all investment decisions, for the whole U.S. population, should be made by Donald Trump. He wants what is best for all of us, and he has a longer-term perspective.’”)

Oh, you think policymakers should try to reward success along well-defined paths through life? Who gets to decide the good life? Joe Biden? Donald Trump? How are they going to stop me?

This brings to mind former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s wise counsel, delivered at the 2022 American Economic Forum in Washington, that “libertarianism is a philosophy for stupid people.”

I think, probably, we can all agree that tyrannical monarchs are bad. But the history of political thought, at least back to Plato, concerns itself with the ways government can “do for a community of people,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

The U.S. Constitution offers the best framework in human history for accomplishing this. As its preamble emphasizes, the people of the United States ordained and established it “in order to form a more perfect union,” accomplish various important ends, and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Its elections, its separation of powers, its checks and balances, its federalism, and its Bill of Rights all work to ensure that decisions are rarely vested in one individual and almost always emerge from the intersection of, and competition among, a wide range of interests. When the people constitute a republic and specify the processes by which their government will exercise the powers they grant it, the resulting laws and regulations—that is, constraints—are not invasions of liberty, they are an exercise of liberty in pursuit of its blessings.

For all the bluster, Demsas knows this. She acknowledges, “it is the case that almost all policy decisions carry with them implicit nudges or even shoves towards some decision or away from another,” and goes on to say, “I think it should be easy to build housing, have health care, build abundant energy, and more. It should be easy to start a business and we should push back against the protectionism and occupational licensing that prevents people from living the lives they want to. That’s called liberalism.”

I think a lot of those things sound nice too, but on what basis might one advance the case for them in principle, without some conception of the good life, or advance them in practice, without some willingness to shape public policy toward chosen ends? I suspect she might have particular kinds of abundant energy in mind, and maybe even some processes and restrictions to constrain how and where it can be built. Who’s going to decide? Donald Trump? Joe Biden?

This incoherence is not unique to Demsas. To the contrary, she’s an outspoken representative of a way of thinking about politics and public policy that is widespread, perhaps even dominant, among the technocratic elite. When it comes to the values they want to advance and their vision of the good life, they have all manner of interventions and supports in mind. But they present these preferences as neutral and best for everyone, then attack any alternatives as oppressive and illiberal.

They are liberals in the weeds but libertarians between the screeds.

Unfortunately, this approach to politics is self-defeating. The ends to which today’s faux-neutral liberals are in fact committed, often rightly so, can only be achieved with the sort of substantive and constraining commitments that they want to decry. The real-world social and political equality of full participation in communal, economic, and national life depends upon that life taking particular shapes, buttressed by a particular notion of citizenship.

Demands that today’s citizens incur large costs for the benefit of children not yet born on some particular issue, say climate change, requires a public morality that imposes such intergenerational obligation broadly. Solidarity and a commitment to a strong social welfare system cannot survive an immigration policy that takes admission to the community out of the community’s control. No amount of NIMBY-shaming will persuade the majority of voters who already own homes that they should prefer “low housing prices” over “high home values” if their individual right to make their own meaning reigns supreme. The case for reform requires an appeal to the common good, and thus some definition of it.

Demsas provides a good example of this tension in a tweet that mocks an analysis focused on whether a family with a single earner can achieve middle-class security. A family with two earners could achieve it, she counters. Therefore, “he’s not asking ‘can this family cover it’ just ‘could dad cover it by himself.’” But 50 words later, in the same tweet, she says, “I also want a world where people can opt into being a single-earner household.” In that case, whether one earner could cover the costs himself is exactly the question she wants to answer, too. Why pretend otherwise?

My best guess is that all this cognitive dissonance stems from the gap between what the faux-neutral liberals perceive to be in their own best interest and what they know is best for the community. They want to have their cake and eat it too, claiming radical autonomy for themselves while achieving and living in a nation that is serving ordinary citizens well. Each goal has a moral logic in isolation, but one can only deny the tradeoffs for so long.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the saying, “Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.” I doubt that’s true. I think most people probably do want to be villagers, embedded in communities that both provide for and demand of them. But we’re left with an adverse selection problem, like in a hypothetical health insurance market where the healthiest individuals don’t want to pay premiums to support those who are likely to need the most care, so they exit, which raises the premiums further for everyone else, so more people exit… until only the costliest patients are left with insurance they cannot possibly afford and isn’t really insurance at all.

There will always be a set of people who have sufficient economic and social resources that they don’t need—or at least believe they don’t need—the benefits of the village and thus do not want to accept its burdens and constraints. But if they opt out, the remaining community has relatively more needs and relatively fewer resources, at which point yet more people will opt out. This is what we mean in Reclaiming American Citizenship when we say, “With their undermining of tradition, respect, and solidarity, American elites released themselves from their own obligations to their fellow citizens, degrading communal life for everyone else in the process.”

I’m not sure there is a real debate over whether we need to grapple as a nation over our understanding of the good life, how to achieve it, and within what constraints. That’s what politics is for. The debate is over whether we should be honest about those realities, and whether we should shape that vision and policy toward the interests of the ordinary citizen or the interests of someone else. If those questions don’t seem like especially close ones, well then, you’ll see why the common sense and clear necessity of Reclaiming American Citizenship makes some people quite mad. — Oren

THE JOURNAL REPORTS AGAINST ITSELF

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has spent decades insisting that immigration is an unalloyed economic good, and that anyone who says otherwise is innumerate or worse. So, it was a pleasant surprise to open its news section to find a report titled “Switzerland’s Radical Proposal on Immigration: Cap the Population” that lays out the opposite case. Ahead of this Sunday’s referendum on capping the nation’s population at ten million, the newspaper’s global economics correspondent documents what a generation of high levels of migration has delivered in Switzerland and other rich, developed countries: adverse impacts on lower-skilled native workers, stagnant productivity growth, higher housing costs, new strain on social services like healthcare, and an aging-population problem no amount of new arrivals can durably solve, since, well, the new arrivals age, too.

The whole debate, the report concedes, turns on a distinction the elite consensus worked hard to blur. Immigration reliably lifts top-line GDP, reflecting the basic arithmetic that more people mean more production and more consumption. But it has done little for GDP per capita, the more relevant measure of whether a nation’s citizens are actually better off. One Swiss lawmaker calls mass migration a sugar high, a metaphor Oren has used for the Biden-era immigration surge—and for what coming down from it will look like.

You should really read the whole thing, and imagine whether a report on U.S. immigration policy from the Journal’s national economics correspondent would contain the same substance, in the same just-the-facts register. But for our money, one of the most damning lines comes from a logistics executive: “The pressure to improve productivity in industries and the service sectors has disappeared.” That is the productivist critique, stated as plainly as we’d put it: mass migration is a subsidy to employers, forestalling investment in machines, new technology, and the workers already here. As one yes-voting centrist politician puts it: “We are buying growth with immigration. Businesses say they’d rather recruit in a bigger market, but we need to train people who are here.” The Swiss are about to vote on whether top-line GDP growth should be the north star of a nation’s immigration policy.

Here in the United States, as the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda has begun to reduce the cheap-labor subsidy many employers have long enjoyed, the answer is surfacing in two places at once: on the farm and in the nursing home.

On the farm, the technology that cheap, abundant labor long kept on the shelf is suddenly worth buying, as the New York Times Magazine reports in “From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I.” According to one California onion grower, one reason he’s sinking millions into new equipment is that “labor is expensive and hard to come by,” a reminder that immigration policy is, in fact, technology policy that can induce innovation and incentivize its adoption. And note who turns up to run the machines: a Georgia sod farmer says his autonomous harvesters, piloted from gaming chairs with joysticks, are drawing a younger workforce that “we didn’t even know was possible.” It turns out that “jobs Americans won’t do” can become jobs Americans will do remarkably fast, once the working conditions and wages improve.

In the nursing home, Bloomberg was out with a headline claiming “America’s Seniors to Face Healthcare ‘Calamity’ If Trump Expels Haitians.” At issue are some 350,000 Haitians, around 21,000 of them in eldercare, who are in the United States on Temporary Protected Status, which the Trump administration might strip away. Whatever one concludes about whether these Haitians should be allowed to stay, the report contains a startling admission: we have staked the care of our frailest citizens on the contingent presence of these workers holding a status with “temporary” in its name, working 16-hour shifts at wages no one has tried to make attractive to anyone else. The scandal is not that they might be forced to leave; it’s that we built a system in which their leaving would be a “calamity,” and then branded every effort to unwind that arrangement as cruelty.

An alternative, for industries facing workforce shortages, is to recruit and train domestic workers for the openings—something a growing number of companies, amid the reindustrialization push and the AI buildout, seem increasingly eager to do:

• The U.S. Needs Mechanics and Electricians. Big Business Is Spending to Create Some. (Wall Street Journal)

• Google Launches $50 Million Skilled Worker Initiative (Axios)

• Meta Launches ‘Workforce Academy’ to Train Workers to Build Data Centers (Wall Street Journal)

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GOOD WEEKEND READS (AND A LISTEN)

• The American Family Is at a Breaking Point. Our Politics Have Finally Noticed. “Society has treated parenting as a private endeavor. But what if raising children is also a public good?” An important question from Jia Lynn Yang in the New York Times.

• The Left Needs to Rediscover Its Patriotism. “A left that rejects a hopeful, empathetic love of the United States can never win the country to its side” writes Michael Kazin in The Atlantic.

• The Family Formation Crisis May Have Started With A Trade Most Americans Gladly Accepted. In the Daily Wire, Patrick T. Brown offers commentary on a recent new paper that further confirms that theory that many of our social ails stem from the rise of the smartphone in your pocket.

• Daniel joined Henry Olsen’s podcast, Conservative Crossroads, to debate the Cato Institute’s David Bier on whether the United States should mandate E-Verify to confirm workers’ authorization status upon hiring. You will not be surprised to see which side of the proposition Daniel defended, nor will you be surprised to learn that Bier’s arguments did not compel us to recant our support of mandatory E-Verify.

Enjoy the weekend!

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At a recent dinner with conservative college students, the conversation turned quickly to their generation’s disillusionment with not only the nation’s politics, but also its prospects for the future and their own prospects within it. They were admirably frank about the broader culture’s maladies, the dysfunction within their own subculture, and the difficulties that they and their peers faced in trying to build anything better.

I asked two of the students who had especially thoughtful and distinctive perspectives, Wyatt Olson and Bennett Gorman, if they would participate in a longer conversation for public consumption and I’m grateful they agreed. What follows is a consolidated and lightly edited transcript of our conversation in late May.

Oren Cass: Let’s start with what I understand the kids these days call a vibe check. How are you feeling about the state of the union today and your places within it?

Wyatt Olson: The vibes are not good amongst young Americans. Many of us feel disillusioned with the United States today and its trajectory: the high unemployment rate for recent college graduates, the obstacles to building a family or owning a home, and the divisive state of the political and social discourse. We have these unfavorable macro trends pressing down from above and then also the sudden emergence of many competing, trivial interests bubbling up from below.

There’s so much easy access to these dopamine-driven vices that have become socially acceptable. We have unfettered access to gambling, pornography, marijuana, nicotine, processed foods… and we are chronically online. It’s all dopamine-driven, short-term gratification in place of pursuing genuine fulfillment. The line between what is perceived as commonplace human behavior and outright addiction has been blurred tremendously.

Bennett Gorman: I agree that the vices have replaced more fulfilling pursuits, but they’re pushing on an open door, or filling a void. Coming of age in America today, there is limited optimism about what American means in our lives and how the future looks. Many of us are detached from the purpose, identity, and project of the nation.

One issue is that we’ve lost the worthy national enterprises that once inspired Americans with the confidence that they were part of something larger than themselves, some noble trajectory that we were aiming toward together. Even once-common phrases that captured some kind of collective ambition—worthy undertaking, noble endeavor, national enterprise, or even national life—have vanished from the American lexicon. Rather than an idea and an aspirational project, our sense is that the nation is just a flawed and floundering political system. Why would anyone want to put their love and faith in that?

Another issue is that many schools and universities and much of politics seem determined to cut down what makes this country special and valuable in the first place. Beyond just our national history, America represents the culmination of a three-thousand-year intellectual tradition that has improved the lives and knowledge of all humankind. Our nation has deep, rich, robust roots, but our education teaches that we were, and still are, oppressive and ignorant.

So we’re left with neither identity nor purpose. We can’t see that we are the vanguard of Western Civilization, that our nation embodies a set of doctrines and ideals that millions of people over thousands of years have fought and died for. When you take this all away, America is nothing but politics. And then people say we’re supposed to embrace the emptiness because dismantling power structures and a commitment to achieving equity in the form of equal outcomes are ends in themselves. But they’re not, and they cannot provide a basis for human flourishing.

OC: Of course, young people have always gotten caught up in vices. What do you see as most troubling today, and perhaps different from the typical boys-being-boys?

WO: I am most frustrated with the sudden emergence of widespread gambling and its societal acceptance. This particular vice is far easier to mask than others—a gambling addict doesn’t wear his choices on his sleeve as perhaps a drug addict or alcoholic would.

While growing up, I was an avid sports fan and would tune in to SportsCenter each morning before school. The reporters would offer insight into the games played the night before, an array of the best highlights were shown, and the relevant stats appeared on the screen. Now, I cannot tune into any game without immediately knowing the betting lines, spreads, and player props. Entire segments deliver the most up-to-date betting information.

It’s a direct conflict of interest for the same sports news corporations to also facilitate gambling on their affiliated sites, and it has normalized the act of sports betting. Live in-game betting options keep bettors hooked. Advertisements during breaks reinforce this. Your favorite athletes and commentators represent casinos and sportsbook companies in partnership deals, effectively integrating gambling into sports culture. Gambling is also permeating American culture more broadly, especially with prediction markets like Kalshi providing a platform for users to bet on the outcomes of virtually any event.

BG: I agree on the gambling issue, and would also focus on substance addictions—particularly marijuana. Even the shift from alcohol to marijuana amongst students our age is a reflection of the broader purposelessness. Say what you will about alcohol, but it makes people get out of their comfort zone and meet new people. Lower inhibitions encourage exploration and adventure. Weed tracks more toward complacency, causing some people (more so than with alcohol) to lie on the couch when they could be out in the world. In these cases, marijuana serves as a filler activity since the world doesn’t seem to offer much of interest anyway. With the loss of this drive to be active and to try new things in life, poor substitutes can come into play.

This is where you get the popularization of “goy slop” as a social media buzzword. It refers to something that people believe is unworthy or pathetic but do or use or watch anyway. It’s ironic that the phrase itself is emblematic of a generation that bandies about language without thoughtfully evaluating how dangerous it actually is—in this case, the casual use of a harmful antisemitic trope. But aside from the phrase itself, it’s an acknowledgment of the fact that some people believe the things they or others are pursuing lack substance and continue to do them anyway.

OC: How serious is the problem of radicalization and how much is just searching for the rebellious thing that will get the adults’ attention versus a growing and genuine hatred?

BG: It looks to me like a genuine shift in people’s beliefs, starting from a lack of grounding. People are searching for some set of beliefs that will provide substance and purpose and they go off in search of it on social media and with biased news that becomes a vicious cycle. They open themselves to more extreme perspectives, looking for something to invest in, and get pulled down the rabbit hole. And then it becomes a badge of pride, and I’ve seen friends reach this point where they expand their political views to something widely considered ridiculous and then announce that they have decided to become more extreme. They suddenly have genuine conviction in ideas that they themselves would have regarded as laughable a month prior.

The most worrying direction that I have seen people go, both online and people I know, is explicitly embracing racial and ethnic supremacism. When there’s no healthy identity to commit to, people will choose a perverse one. The idea that one racial or religious group is best and some other one is responsible for our problems is all over social media; that the thing to be defending and preserving is not the nation or the civilization but rather some sense of group purity. I saw a picture of soldiers from World War II—Americans, Brits, Italians, Germans, Russians, etc.—and it asked this question of why they were fighting each other, implying that the real enemies were people of different races within the respective nations. This is what happens when you devalue the idea that Americans as Americans had something to fight for.

OC: You’ve both touched on the idea that you and others around you feel pessimistic, unmoored, blocked from achieving what you might want to. Someone might say: “What’s wrong with these people? Here they are at one of the best educational institutions in the world in the wealthiest country in the world at the best time in human history to be alive... Maybe they should stop whining, get their act together, and go make what they want of their lives.” What is that person missing?

WO: If you’re looking at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, then yes, many young Americans, myself included, have been blessed with remarkably strong and consistent physiological protection, safety, and security. We do not know any other life. In that sense, we have no business being pessimistic and casting doubt on the very institutions that provide for those needs. But it’s called a “hierarchy” for a reason. There are three higher levels, and as a proud citizen of the United States, I know there were times when we did far better at fulfilling those needs. The notion of belonging is evaporating. Self-esteem is certainly lost. Self-actualization, or the life-long pursuit of virtuous fulfillment, in turn rests upon those more communal values. Material comfort may be a prerequisite for concentrating on the higher-order concerns, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee that they can be met.

BG: There’s a saying that if a person has a “why” they can bear any “how.” But even if the how isn’t particularly difficult, there’s little motivation to achieve it without any real sense of the why. There’s a simple lack of motivation amongst many people of our generation. And then of course when you can’t fill your life with purpose you’re bound to fill it with other things. The kind of radicalization I mentioned earlier is one way. Indulgence in useless distractions or vices is another. Because when people see there aren’t bigger things than themselves to pursue, why would they want to do otherwise?

Making what we feel we want of our lives is not the same as living a good life. To do that you need projects bigger than yourself to identify with and right now our country doesn’t provide any. I’m not advocating for some kind of victim culture here. I think many of us are on standby to work hard for something substantive, we just need that substantive thing, and it’s not fair to ask people to invent it themselves—the whole point is that it has to be bigger than a personal project.

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OC: Let’s shift at least a bit toward the positive, though depending on how you answer I suppose we might just end up more depressed... What is to be done? as Lenin asked. And in particular, starting smaller, what have you already seen that gives you any hope? Are there any helpful messages, messengers, technologies, institutions out there?

BG: I am actually optimistic. First, in my liberal arts college, I have been encouraged by the free exchange of thought and the possibility for good ideas to arise. On the national level, there is the opportunity to find something that will restore our country’s purpose and identity, reminding us of what the enterprise of America entails. One thing that I know has been talked about a fair bit is the idea of the frontier. The frontier in the abstract sense, not just the American West, has always been critical for us. Whether it was fully realizing Enlightenment ideas of dignity and freedom, westward expansion itself, spreading civilization and democracy abroad, pushing back against the forces of tyranny, innovating to economic prosperity, or planting the flag on the moon.

I think all of us long to participate in a kind of frontier, to make our mark in whatever small way and push the boundaries of civilization toward some good. We have options here, we just haven’t chosen one: scientific knowledge, medical advancement, continued exploration in space. We need some way to express our national character, some outlet for the American purpose to shine through. Honesty, there are so many advancements we are achieving, they just need to be consolidated into an American vision that draws a line from our past through the present to the future. I truly feel that with something like this we can have what our grandfathers did when they put up the flag and knew they were a part of an American project and destiny that was worthy and good.

WO: For me, the frustration is the motivation. Knowing what I perceive to be a fulfilling life, yet facing many roadblocks to achieving it, leaves me with an innate desire to build, or rebuild, this not only for myself, but also for the communities I belong to. Tackling the issues of AI, social media, personal devices and our relationship with the internet is of paramount importance. Equipping the American public with the proper skills for navigating a healthy personal life in the face of a rapidly changing, hyper-integrated world is the first step to harnessing purpose and patriotism in the United States.

Seek out communities that help develop your interests and identity. Take radical accountability for the actions in your life. Put yourself in “winning positions.” In my personal life, I often feel the most optimistic after having invested in human interaction and connection. Make small talk with the person sitting next to you at the cafe. File into the grocery store line with the cashier as opposed to the self-checkout. Ask them how their day was. I believe relationship-building is the best remedy to the current social and political landscape.

OC: This is all good advice, but I can’t help feeling you’ve both avoided the question to spare us all the despair. Most of what you’ve described is things we have to ask each individual to do, and that’s important, but there’s also a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” problem in solving purposelessness with “go find a purpose.” Have you seen anything out there from leaders or institutions in any part of our society that makes you think, “yes, please, more of that”? It could be just a phrase, an organization you’ve seen someone else get involved with, a policy proposal you thought really made sense?

Or if not that, what’s one thing you’d at least ask leaders to consider doing differently, that you think would help?

WO: I struggle to find a national leader or institution that has truly inspired me. I think that sentiment would probably be shared by many young Americans. The contemporary political and social climate has a negative feedback loop that seems mainly to consolidate political power. MAGA Republicans and Democrats both have special interest in serving a concentrated portion of their base.

BG: I’ve heard Trump invoke the idea of a “golden age” for America’s future. I think there was something to that idea that at least there is a vision to be achieved. But I haven’t seen that messaging translate into action or diffuse into our national life. There are also interesting ideas from other leaders, such as the emphasis on restoring fractured communities that I think is important to help revitalize our country. However, I believe that there is much more needed than a focus on prosperity alone. Most importantly, we need leaders that bring us together as a nation by reinvigorating a set of common values, ideas for a collective trajectory, and shared aspirations for the future.

The general malaise that my generation seems to be facing could be rooted in a lack of hope. We need leadership that understands that purpose shines through most clearly when there is coherence, shared responsibility, and nationalism. Much of politics is detached hopes and possibilities, but I think we need a more refined effort from national leaders to lay out a vision for America’s purpose, how individual citizens fit into that, then lay out a strategy for how it is pursued and brand it as such. Also, more about our history, more about our future, more about why we are doing the things that we are doing and how they fit into a shared identity and purpose.

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Excerpted from remarks delivered at American Compass’s New World Gala on June 2.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here tonight among patriots, among friends, and in a seminal year for the Republic and the liberty that we cherish together, the 250th anniversary of our nation.

Our Founders aimed at the most difficult of tasks—to bring forth in this weary world a novus ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages—and they succeeded. We are its heirs and beneficiaries. We must ask ourselves tonight if we are prepared to perpetuate and safeguard what they gave us, what God has given us in this time of test and challenge, for we are confronting new questions of technology and science that will test our commitment to the great moral covenant that binds us together as a nation.

The decisions we must soon make about the most powerful technology of our lifetimes—the technology of artificial intelligence—are among the most difficult we have yet faced as a people. The decisions will go far beyond questions of economics or policy. They are questions of labor and the family, of freedom and the value of human life. They are fundamental questions of our identity. They are questions about the nature of this republic given to us by God, and they come to us at a moment when that republic is in signal danger.

Two generations of feckless policy in Washington have inflicted economic destruction on the middle class, deconstructionist lessons taught in the academy have all taken their toll, and they have torn the moral fabric of our national life. The greatest test of our age and the highest task of our time is to repair that fabric and reclaim the moral vision that binds us together as a people. AI is only the proving ground—our moral covenant is the heart of the matter.

Can we keep this republic under God?

A Covenant Formed

I begin here because this is what makes America who we are. Our national motto proclaims that we are one nation under the Almighty’s providential care, and that has been true since the days of our earliest founders. Before Washington and Madison and Jefferson, before Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, there were the Puritans—those brave and venturing souls who crossed the cold Atlantic to found the city on a hill.

They left behind them a continent full of kings and bishops on which they chose to turn their backs. They left behind a whole world of ideas, the medieval world, which was controlled by one idea above all—that everything and every person has its place in the eternal chain of being, that nothing moves, no one rises. The prince was born to rule, the peasant was born to work, and each must remain in his place in the grand and eternal hierarchy.

Well, our forefathers thought differently. They read the Good Book differently. They read it to say that God called each man to be a saint, that he endowed each person with eternal import. “The poorest he in England hath a life to live as the greatest he,” they said. And they were willing to cross an ocean for that conviction, to go to a wilderness for it, to brave the great American desert, as they called it.

They dreamt of a commonwealth here in this place where every man might pursue his calling and work out his salvation, where men together might live in liberty under God. And they swore a covenant on the deck of a ship called Arbella. In the year 1630, they pledged their lives, their labor, and their very souls to the service of God and the freedom for which he had set them.

It was there in that moment that the United States of America was born. It was in that moment that they brought forth a new order for the ages. For the first time in history, a commonwealth was born not by conquest, not by blood, not by the divine right of kings but by the free consent of free men pledging to live together under the laws of God, to give themselves to his moral laws, to make them real in time and history, to make them the charter of a nation.

And this is the answer, by the way, to that question that has so occupied the conservative mind of late—are we a propositional nation or are we an ethnic one? Are we founded on a set of abstract ideas or according to a specific racial lineage? And the answer is neither.

We are founded on a covenant, on an oath that runs deeper than blood, on a pledge made at a particular time by particular people to themselves and their posterity, to live before God and under him. Every nation shares a moral order, that’s what makes it a nation. Societies are not bound together by abstract enlightenment principles that float around in midair, nor are they bound together by blood—certainly our nation has never been.

They’re bound together by moral beliefs, by a shared vision of what is right and what is good, what is just and what is honorable, what human life means, and why it is worth protecting. And that vision, call it our national religion if you like, determines who we are as a people and the life we lead together. That vision is what has made us who we are today.

Since that moment on that fateful Atlantic crossing all those long centuries ago, we have tried to steer the ship of our state according to the covenant faith our forebears left us, and the profound vision of liberty that it offers up. John Winthrop, the man who led the Puritans, put it best:

“The liberty we cherish,” he said, “is not the liberty common to the creatures to do whatever you choose, to go wherever you list. It is not the so-called freedom where the strong oppresses the weak and the rich steals from the poor and the elite rules over the rest. That is the freedom of the belly, the freedom of the beasts.” The old world knew all about that liberty. They lived it. Our forefathers crossed the Atlantic to escape it and in search of something better.

They looked for the liberty, as Winthrop said, between God and man. This is the liberty that protects the worker and his wages, the liberty that cherishes the widow and the orphan, that turns on consent and sees rights not as privileges to be won by the hand of the strong but as gifts given to each from the hand of God. “This is a liberty,” Winthrop said, “to do that only which is good and just and honest.” And that’s the liberty that we have loved and lived together as a nation from the first.

By that vision we’ve shaped our whole society and our economics.

A Covenant Kept

That history is relevant now for a reason. I know there are those, particularly in my party, who say that we built the greatest and most prosperous economy in the history of the earth by letting nature take its course, by letting the free market and the gods of capitalism do what they will. It is simply not so.

We have chosen time and again to shape our economy, no less than our society, by the moral vision of liberty. We have chosen to put people before money. We have chosen to protect the working man as well as capital. We have chosen to shelter the poor. Just consider when Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 in the midst of the great war that nearly unmade us. He offered 160 acres of public land to any citizen willing to work it.

What did he not do? He did not create a new landed gentry of the West. He did not permit the capitalists of New York or Philadelphia to have serfs beyond the Mississippi any more than he was willing to allow the South to have slaves. No, he acted on the moral principle that in a republic, every man deserves to earn his own way, by his own labor, through his own calling. Lincoln embraced the moral architecture of the covenant.

Or, when Samuel Gompers and the early labor movement demanded a limit to the hours in a workday. The mill owners heard an economic argument, but the truth is the men appealed to theology more than economics. They said that a man is not a machine, that he has a family and a soul and a Sabbath, that his hours do not belong finally to the man who signs his check but just as much or more to the God who made him. The eight-hour work day was the outcome. It was covenant economics.

When the industrial reformers worked to end child labor, they appealed to moral liberty. When they fought for workers’ pensions, they appealed to our moral principles. When they created social insurance to guard against the ravages of the industrial economy, they looked to our moral covenant.

It is that great covenant that has made us the wonder of the world, a mighty republic with a middle-class economy and a politics of We the People. It is that covenant we must renew today. For we hear now in this age the old voices of the old form of liberty better known as license. AI is not inherently evil. It’s not inherently anything. It’s a tool, but it is the most powerful tool of our lifetimes. And the question before us tonight is, whose hands will hold it, and to what ends? For such a tool of power can serve liberty or it can serve license.

It can serve our moral covenant, the freedom that is good and just and honest, the freedom that uplifts the worker, that shelters the child, that disperses opportunity to the many. Or it can serve the liberty of license, the freedom of the belly and its passions, the freedom of the strong to take what they can and bend the weak to their will.

Let me be blunt. Left to itself, artificial intelligence will not choose moral liberty. It will choose the passions. It will choose appetite. It will gather power into the fewest hands the world has ever seen and call the result progress. That is the rule of the strong over the weak. That is the dissolution of our moral covenant. It is the oldest temptation in the history of humanity, now just dressed up in silicon.

Make no mistake about which liberty so many of the barons of big tech have chosen. Listen to how they talk of disruption, of moving fast, of breaking things, of a world to be remade by whoever is bold enough to seize it. You strip away that jargon and the sometimes-good intentions, and you’ll find the temptations of an old creed that says the strong should rule because they are strong, that the future belongs to whoever is powerful enough to make it, that might, in the end, makes right.

That is not progress, it is the state of nature. That’s the law of the jungle, scaled now to the cloud and bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is the very thing John Winthrop and his hearty band of Puritans crossed an ocean to escape, a world in which no covenant stands above the will of the powerful.

So we must choose. Together as Americans across this country, we must choose. In deciding how to govern this technology, we are not merely writing policy. We are renewing or surrendering the moral basis of our life together.

The covenant does not keep itself. Every generation must swear it again. We will swear it, or we will break it over artificial intelligence.

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A Covenant Renewed

We do not have to imagine the stakes because they’re right there in front of us. We are watching a handful of companies assemble a concentration of capital, of information, and of political power without precedent in the American experience. The covenant is being tested in real time, and the choice is ours—for now.

We can already see the shape of our fate if we make no choice at all. We are becoming a country in the shape of a “K.” A small upper arm of the K is rising: The developers, the engineers, the investors, the founders of the firms with the compute and the capital. The economist’s curve and the executive’s bonus and the venture capitalist exit. All of them bend in the same direction. All of them are bending up.

A long lower arm of the K, however, is bending in the opposite direction. The truck driver, the paralegal, the local newspaper editor, the recent college graduate, all of them are being pulled down. The country is sorting itself onto the two arms of a single letter. The upper arm grows fabulously rich. The lower arm gets quietly replaced. …

I suggest to you that a republican and democratic people cannot accept it. But who will speak for them? That’s the question of the hour. Who will speak for them?

Neither political party in our country has offered a defense of our moral covenant that the nation needs. For too long, working Americans have been given a choice between a party that believes their values are bigotries to be unlearned and a party that believes their wages are externalities to be minimized.

There’s a party of the faculty lounge and a party of the boardroom, a party that tells the working man his church is the problem and a party that tells him his pension is too expensive. Neither party has spoken for him. Neither party has been worthy of him.

President Trump made this point over and over again in his national campaigns, and the Republican Party establishment has tried to ignore him. Artificial intelligence is the issue in our day that is going to force the old parties to confront their failure.

True to form, these two voices are offering two similarly unfulfilling answers on AI. One voice sounds beholden to the Silicon Valley elite. It’ll tell you that artificial intelligence is the greatest tool in human history and the proper role of government is to step out of the way and just let the future come.

The other voice sounds beholden to the petty grievances of identity politics. It may warn about the dangers of artificial intelligence, but it has no vision for how to use them for the working man. It’s more concerned with plotting where that working man ranks on the hierarchy of intersectionality than with the needs of his family. It does not have to be this way.

Conservatism is not the defense of a particular economic arrangement. It is the defense of the permanent things of moral order, of the dignity of the person, the family, the individual, the poor. Those permanent things are the covenant handed down.

Left to itself, artificial intelligence could dissolve every one of them, but we will not leave it to itself. We must not. We must act. We must pursue another way rooted in our Founders’ moral vision. Let me just suggest three lines of effort, three fronts on which we must act, and act soon.

First is labor. …

Every industrial transition in America has carried with it the same worry that the machines would eventually take all the work. We have forestalled that eventuality every single time in American history by choosing to bend the technology to the citizen, and not the other way around. We have demanded that technology serve our highest ideals, and we must do so again.

Some thinkers among the tech elite believe they’ve got the answer. They call it universal basic income, a monthly check to keep displaced workers fed and quiet and content while a few people grow richer than anybody in human history has ever imagined. What a hollow answer. What a terrible idea.

A republic of free citizens cannot be built on a check. Remember Samuel Gompers and the eight-hour day. Work was never only about wages. It was about dignity, the soul, the Sabbath, the conviction that a man is not a machine. Pay a man to do nothing and you’ve not solved this problem. You’ve deepened it, and you’ve degraded him.

Decades of research show that meaningful work ranks right alongside faith and family and friendship as one of the pillars of a happy life. We do not reach new heights of flourishing by putting Americans on a stipend. We reach them by honoring their labor. We must regulate—yes, I did use that verb—regulate artificial intelligence in the economy to ensure that it aids the worker but does not displace him.

Take autonomous vehicles for example. I’m for every advance in technology that you can put into a cab with a commercial driver who makes their living on the road. Everything you can do to make his life better, I’m for it. But I am against replacing the commercial driver. We should prevent AI from taking over jobs that only humans ought to do, such as dispensing medication, providing personal counsel, or arguing in court, to name just a few. These are not anti-technology principles, they are about putting people ahead of money. This is covenant economics.

The second line of effort involves data centers. …

The companies that build these facilities are some of the wealthiest enterprises ever to operate on the face of the earth. They are wealthy enough to bring their own power. They are wealthy enough to protect residential rates. They are wealthy enough to safeguard local water. The president was right to ask them to do all of these things. And they should be prohibited from building further until they agree to do so.

The third front is protecting our children. The most dangerous frontier of artificial intelligence today is not the boardroom. It’s not even the battlefield. It’s in your home. It’s in the bedrooms of your children and in the palms of their hands. … Documents leaked from Meta last year showed that the company’s own internal guidelines had explicitly authorized conversations with minor children that Meta itself described as “sensual.” That’s their word. Meta approved this in writing, behind closed doors, of course. They approved it. Why? To maintain engagement, to keep their user base, to drive revenue.

Here is the old liberty of the strong in its plainest and ugliest form, the freedom of the belly and the passions, the feeding of the weakest souls among us. The Puritans had a word for a man who would trade a child’s innocence for engagement and revenue. That word was not “entrepreneur.” And a moral people should not grant behavior of this sort to go forward. …

Reclaiming Our Citizenship

Behind every one of these fronts—labor, data centers, children—there is a deeper question. Who decides? Who will set the terms of the artificial intelligence era? ...

I’m for the republic. I’m for the citizen. I am for labor, the community, and the family. I’m for the worker. I’m for the small town. I’m for the constitutional inheritance that says this country belongs not to a board and not to a bureau, but to the people of the United States.

And let me offer a word to my own party, because the Republican Party has a choice of its own to make, a choice that may well define its identity for the next half century. We can be the party of the boardroom. We can be the party of the donor and the share price, the party that measures a man by his market value and a policy by what it does to a stock. Or we can be the party of the covenant, the party of the good, the just and the right, the party of the worker and the family and the small town, the party that remembers our commitment to justice for all, to the sanctity of the individual, to the dignity of labor, and yes, to the priority of the poor.

But we cannot be both. We must choose. A party that bends the knee to money and power will not in the end act to defend the things that money and power cannot buy. So I’m asking my party to choose, to stand with our moral covenant and not with the barons, to be once more the party of the American who works with his hands and prays on his knees and asks only that his country keep its faith with him.…

We are not raw material on the hands of those who build the machines. We are persons made in the image of God. Just days ago, Pope Leo XIV pressed this very message, issuing an encyclical that called on all people of goodwill to reject the temptation to build a Tower of Babel, as he put it, rather than a city that promotes human dignity. Will Americans understand that message? We’ve been living by it for 250 years. For we know in the end that license is not liberty at all. …

On the deck of that ship in the year 1630, a company of free men and women swore an oath to live before and under the Almighty. Their covenant is still ours to keep, and its terms have not changed. The technology is new, but the choice is old, and the people who must make it, a free people governing themselves under God, are still here. The republic is still ours, and we shall keep it.

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Josh Hawley is the senior United States senator from Missouri.

From time to time, throughout American history, the question of whether the United States should remain a republic or evolve into an empire reenters political discourse. It is upon us again, though perhaps not in the way many expected when President Trump returned to office.

Adventurism and democratic evangelism dominated American foreign and defense policy for much of the post-Cold War era. Forever wars, expanding alliance obligations, and an obsession with dominating the global commons produced limited strategic gain at immense cost. Many Americans came to associate these doctrines of the “liberal world order” with stagnation and hardship: depleted public trust, rising fiscal strain, and a growing sense that Washington attended more closely to the world stage than to conditions and interests at home.

The America First movement challenged all that. But while the second Trump administration has accomplished a number of significant doctrinal shifts toward greater realism and restraint, its actions signal a continued—and in some cases growing—imperial ambition. The pursuit of empire was unwise even when America stood alone as the world’s hyperpower and could afford to make such mistakes. In the current environment, constrained by limited resources and sharp tradeoffs, facing a peer competitor with ambitions of its own, the United States risks overextending itself in ways that could prove catastrophic for its citizens.

Though we are teetering on the edge, all hope is not lost for restoring a republic that prioritizes its citizens first. What is abundantly clear is that choosing the republic requires ruthless discipline in both doctrine and implementation. We lack that discipline now and must quickly regain it. A republic can survive the discomfort and fallout of difficult tradeoffs. It cannot survive more of the same bad decision-making rebranded under improved doctrine.

Foreign Policy in a Republic

A set of core tenets has distinguished the American inclination toward a republican foreign policy.

First, a disposition against interventionism and long-term foreign entanglement is essential. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned that, “against the insidious wiles of foreign influence the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” He further opposed “permanent alliances” because they subordinate national sovereignty to a foreign power’s interests, creating webs of interdependency that are difficult to untangle. Those concerns are reflected in updated form today in the new National Security Strategy, which notes, “For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.”

Second, when defining the national interest, it is important to start within our borders and look incrementally outward to the strategic environment. In this model, the republic is always the core from which the dynamics of the strategic environment ripple outward, posing the question to the policymaker: “How does what is happening out there hurt or help what is going on in here?” John Quincy Adams described the dangers of flipping this model around in his famous speech as Secretary of State in 1821. He said:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

It is antithetical to the American republic, or any republic constituted by its citizens to serve their interests, to stand on the world stage first, and look back home second. The strategic environment becomes distorted, assaulting the senses with all manner of problems and no standard by which to assign importance.

Finally, respect for the Constitution’s separation of legislative and executive powers on matters of defense and foreign policy is essential. The principle is not an abstract one. Rather, it guards against strategic folly. James Madison illustrated this point well in a letter to Thomas Jefferson about the war power, saying, “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislative.” The ways of war evolve. The means of technology and communication advance. But the appetites, or impulses, of man are innate to the human condition. The Founders foresaw this and intentionally sought to establish guardrails to prevent the appetites from ruling.

The Temptation to Empire

The core tenets of republican statecraft are simple enough, yet American statesmen enthusiastically disregarded them over the past 30 years. The “unipolar moment” after the Cold War’s end was intoxicating and imbued U.S. policymakers with the hubris to pursue a modern, ideological form of American empire.

The policymakers of the post-Cold War era rejected the traditional dispositions against intervention and foreign entanglement and, perhaps more damning, the restraints that could prevent such engagement from ballooning uncontrollably. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the myriad other interventions sold as part of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), did not come with carefully crafted missions, objectives, or exit strategies. Moreover, as both the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly redefined the enemies, the scope of the military campaigns, the levels of diplomatic and humanitarian engagement, and the definition of success, the legislative branch sat largely on the sidelines. Congress engaged in no serious conversations about revoking or amending authorities or funding until the 2018–19 calls for ending U.S. support to the Saudi Coalition in the war in Yemen. The trillions of dollars spent on the GWOT-era conflicts did not produce a coherent and sustainable counterterrorism strategy, did not establish sustainable democracies, and distracted the U.S. from preparing for the emerging great-power rival coming around the corner.

The rejection of restraint went far beyond the GWOT. Since 2000, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has accumulated 14 new member nations. In theory, as proponents of expansion have argued, a larger alliance means a more powerful military deterrent. In practice, as has been well documented by now, decades of underinvestment by allies left the U.S. shouldering the bulk of NATO’s costs and defense expectations, which thus increased far faster than any actual capacity gains.

The GWOT interventions, NATO expansion, and other projects to deepen America’s global relationships set the expectation that the United States could respond at the drop of a hat to any bat signal coming from anywhere in the world. The demand for U.S. support to Ukraine is the latest example. While the U.S. had no formal treaty obligations to Ukraine and Congress took no vote to enter a conflict on Ukraine’s side, the U.S. began providing military and foreign aid in 2014 and dramatically increased direct material support from U.S. weapons stockpiles in 2022 after the start of the Russian invasion. The executive branch acted in purely reactionary fashion, reflexively elevating Ukraine’s needs to the first-order priority. Rather than provide a check or voice of caution, the legislature enabled the executive through multiple billion-dollar supplemental appropriations. Concern for the impact on American citizens and U.S. short- and long-term strategic flexibility was placed well below the interests of a foreign nation, or never considered at all, in the minds of many of our nation’s decision makers.

Time after time, Congress has allowed the president to usurp its exclusive or shared role in U.S. foreign and defense policy. From making war to making treaty commitments, the executive branch is now fully accustomed to bypassing Congress. Presidents of both political parties started new wars in the Middle East and Africa under the auspices of existing authorizations or a dubiously expansive reading of the powers of the president as commander-in-chief under Article II. Documents that further entangle the U.S. globally, like the Paris Climate Accord or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which clearly constitute treaties, become law by executive fiat and impose commitments on the United States without Senate advice and consent. Congress sits back, protecting itself politically while the republic suffers structurally.

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Doctrinal Strength, Decisional Shortcomings

At the outset of the second Trump administration, expectations were high for a genuine and pivotal shift in American grand strategy. The expectation was that the United States would adopt a narrower and more disciplined definition of the national interest. The promise was realism and prioritization: an acknowledgment that the unipolar moment had ended, that tradeoffs could no longer be avoided, and that the preservation and welfare of the republic and its citizens had to return to the center of strategic thinking.

In the formal doctrine of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, the administration accomplished a meaningful course correction. Those documents demonstrate both an understanding of the political forces that returned President Trump to office and a broader recognition that the assumptions underpinning the post-Cold War order no longer hold.

The National Defense Strategy is especially significant in moving the United States past the failures of overextension in defense commitments and military interventionism, defining rebalanced allied relationships and a revitalized defense-industrial base as priorities which directly support America’s core national interests. It assesses the nation’s defense priorities looking from the homeland out into the strategic environment. Protecting the homeland in our near abroad comes first. Action by China in the First Island Chain is highlighted as the greatest threat capable of penetrating American security at home if unchecked.

This is a strategy which grapples with the structural realities inherited from the last three decades, squarely rejects the modern quest for American empire, and makes the health of the republic the core priority.

But doctrine alone is insufficient. Grand strategy ultimately succeeds or fails in implementation, not publication. On that score, the second Trump administration increasingly presents an obstacle to the project it promised to advance. The United States is running out of both bandwidth and luck.

For decades, America’s advantages allowed policymakers to postpone difficult strategic choices. Military dominance, healthy munitions stockpiles relative to the scale of active conflicts, reserve-currency status, and the lack of a peer competitor were taken for granted and gave politicians the false confidence to accumulate global commitments without full consideration of the consequences. That margin for error is shrinking. Demands for America’s attention and entrenchment across the Middle East, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the Indo-Pacific compete and trade directly against one another. At present, the fiscal and resource constraints are moving quickly from theoretical to mathematical, at which point neither political charisma nor savvy messaging can obscure them.

Reality is politically agnostic and will eventually become unavoidable. The political leaders in charge when the breaking-point crisis hits will find themselves with few good options and a lot to explain.

The central shortcoming of the second year of President Trump’s second term is not an intellectual failure to recognize the dangers of overextension. It is an instinctual inclination to revert back toward the same tendencies that the doctrinal shift was meant to correct.

The clearest and most prominent example is the administration’s decision to go to war with Iran. The strategic contradiction is impossible to ignore. A prolonged conflict with Iran consumes massive quantities of munitions, operational attention, naval assets, intelligence resources, and political bandwidth at precisely the moment the administration’s own doctrine argues such resources must be preserved for higher-order priorities. The decision went against the administration’s own recognition that the Indo-Pacific and homeland defense should remain the nation’s principal focus and came despite the well-known readiness and industrial base constraints the administration was already encountering in the Ukraine problem set.

The same contradictions are increasingly visible in the Western Hemisphere. The administration is correct that the near abroad matters profoundly to American security and sovereignty. A republic-centered grand strategy should naturally prioritize stability and deterrence within the Western Hemisphere over distant theaters abroad. But the “how” is again most important. Reverting to interventionism and regime change because it is the most familiar precedent lacks strategic clarity.

Even initiatives intended to solve structural problems reveal the lack of commitment to implementing stated strategy. The Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) Initiative attempts to rebalance the burden of support for Ukraine by asking European NATO allies to assume financial responsibility for further military aid. Conceptually, this aligns with the administration’s strategic doctrine. Yet PURL is exacerbating U.S. defense-industrial base constraints by placing more demand on a broken system that will not be able to meet U.S. and European demand simultaneously. The U.S. defense-industrial base does not lack demand. What it lacks is structural integrity to support demand, and the policy guidance that U.S. requirements must take first priority over allies and partners. We are seeing this already as an adjacent consequence of the Iran war. The U.S. is essentially bumping European allies out of the queue for high-value munitions systems which Europe intended to purchase for Ukraine because expenditure in Iran and stockpile shortages pose a real threat to U.S. readiness that cannot be ignored.

Taken together, these examples expose the vulnerability of the current moment. Washington increasingly understands the need for strategic restraint in theory while continuing to struggle with it in practice. The gravitational pull toward empire did not disappear simply because policymakers began announcing republic-centric doctrine. It remains deeply embedded within the political, military, and bureaucratic instincts of the American government.

Implementing a doctrine that reprioritizes our republic imposes the temporary pain of ripping off the band-aid. But at least it is honest. Prolonging the inevitable pain unnecessarily harms both the United States and its allies, and also leaves more room to backslide into the comfortable but perilous status quo ante.

A Somber Hope

The Trump administration cleared an important intellectual hurdle. After decades spent trapped in the flawed assumptions of the early 1990s, it forced Washington to confront the realities of scarcity and strategic limits. Prioritization has claimed its place in the conversation. The disconnect between that progress in theory and the continued errors in practice only underscores the challenge of turning the ship of state.

The window for course correction remains open, but barely. Not only preserving doctrinal gains, but also translating them into better policy and a lasting shift from empire back toward republic will require a rapid increase in discipline from our political leaders. Agreeing on republican virtues is much easier than renouncing imperial ambitions.

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But just as we have highlighted that a low unemployment rate and low-to-no net job growth is perfectly sensible and a good sign in a period of aggressive immigration enforcement, it’s worth noting that something must now be amiss.

How can a labor market add more than 500,000 jobs in three months, in a period when net immigrant participation in the workforce is supposed to be flat or declining, and the native-born prime-age population hasn’t been growing, and labor force participation isn’t increasing, and the unemployment rate stays unchanged? We have fairly good data on most of those variables, and fairly poor visibility into immigration flows. So it would not be unreasonable to worry that a dropoff in immigration enforcement is a driver here.

But for some better news on enforcement in the labor market, let’s hand the mic to Daniel:

On June 2, the U.S. Trade Representative published findings that 60 economies—together the source of more than 99% of American imports—have failed to exclude goods made with forced labor from their markets, and proposed new tariffs in response: 10% on trading partners that have committed to a prohibition but not enforced one and 12.5% on those without a commitment, the latter of which includes China, Japan, and India.

Much of the coverage has treated USTR’s determination as a simple pretext, little more than a respectable justification for tariffs it otherwise wants to levy. After the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs President Donald Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in February, and with the stopgap tariffs that replaced them set to expire in late July, the administration has been searching for a firmer legal footing to reconstitute the tariff wall.

But whatever the motive, the standard the investigation aims to enforce is sound, and it long predates the present scramble for a durable tariff authority. The policy concern it addresses is the one a factory worker understands and an economics degree somehow obscures. Capital moves not to where labor is most productive but to where it is most easily exploited. Cheap labor paid in proportion to its output is just unproductive labor; what the capitalists want is productive workers they can still pay poorly.

Forced labor is the most extreme form of that arrangement, the kind no trading partner will defend in the open. Goods produced under coercion undercut goods produced by workers able to advance their own interests—in the exporting country and in ours. That concern is not the administration’s alone: when USTR opened the investigation in March, it drew prompt support from the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers, and the United Auto Workers, as well as domestic manufacturers competing against goods produced under duress.

Nor is the concern a new one. In 1999, President Bill Clinton famously imperiled WTO negotiations with his assertion that there should be, “core labor standards, and then they ought to be a part of every trade agreement, and ultimately I would favor a system in which sanctions would come for violating any provision of a trade agreement.” As the New York Times noted at the time, “other developing nations abhor the idea… And the system, they say, would be abused by the United States and other countries to do away with one big competitive advantage that the developing nations enjoy: the ability to pay workers less.”

For the Trump administration, two laws are doing the work—a modern tool and a much older standard. The authority the administration invoked is Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the same provision the first Trump administration used to impose tariffs on China over its intellectual-property practices; tariffs that remain in full effect. The standard it enforces is older. Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 bars the importation of goods made with convict or forced labor, and its prohibition of convict-labor goods dates back to the Tariff Act of 1890. Its sponsor, House Ways and Means Chairman William McKinley, said the ban was meant to prevent the admission of “convict-made products of the world to free competition with our free labor.” The worker-protection rationale was there at the creation, not added in hindsight. The International Labor Organization (ILO) counts the United States among only a handful of governments to have imposed and enforced a comparable ban. In other words, the Trump administration has reached for a 1974 tool to make the rest of the world honor an American principle that Congress established in 1930.

The choice of Section 301 also matters for whether the tariffs survive. The emergency-powers tariffs were struck down in February, when the Supreme Court held that the statute behind them—which lets the president “regulate” imports—does not authorize tariffs. Section 301 works differently: it carries a built-in procedure. Before imposing a tariff, USTR must open an investigation, consult the governments involved, take comments and testimony, and issue an on-the-record determination that the targeted practice is unreasonable and burdens American commerce. Those steps are why the first Trump term’s Section 301 tariffs on China survived years of litigation and a change of administrations, and they are what a court will look for now. The forced-labor action is moving through the same machinery (investigation in March, hearings in spring, determination on June 2, comment in July). The durability has to be earned step by step.

The clearest sign that this is more than a convenient rationale is that the administration has been writing the same standard into its trade agreements. Each of the nine Agreements on Reciprocal Trade that USTR has finalized over the past year includes a labor article built from a common template. Every signatory must bar imports made with forced labor and must protect the labor rights recognized by the ILO—enforcing its own labor laws, applying real penalties, refusing to weaken those protections, and expressly applying the protections in the export-processing zones where the race to the bottom is usually run.

Most of the agreements reach further and tie the partner to U.S. enforcement. For example, Guatemala must recognize American forced-labor determinations under Section 307 and, presumptively, turn away the flagged goods, making the signatory an upstream check on the supply chains—polysilicon, cotton—through which Chinese forced-labor inputs are laundered into goods bound for the United States. The forced-labor tariffs, in turn, give Washington fresh leverage to hold those partners to what they have signed.

This builds on the Trump administration’s first-term trade policy. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement—the deal that replaced NAFTA—included a labor chapter that requires Mexico to guarantee workers’ rights to organize and bargain, and paired that promise with a Rapid Response Mechanism that allows the United States to act against a violation at a single factory. Both the Biden and the second Trump administrations have enforced it in earnest, bringing dozens of cases since 2021 that have won reinstatements, back pay, and independent-union elections at plants exporting to the United States. USTR credits the mechanism, with the reforms it forced, for helping nearly double Mexican manufacturing wages since 2020, from $2.30 to $4.20 an hour. That’s good for Mexican workers and the American workers who compete with and might sell to them. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has told Congress that the administration will press Mexico and Canada to further strengthen enforcement of both countries’ forced-labor import bans during this year’s USMCA review.

The new forced-labor tariffs are the leading edge of a larger ambition: a trade policy that makes capital compete on how productively it employs workers, not on how easily it can exploit them, and that restores a level playing field for Americans. Forced labor sits below the floor of where anyone believes the competition should occur, so its exclusion is the natural place to set a standard the rest of the world can be made to honor. These tariffs make good on a promise the 1930 Congress wrote into the tariff code and never fully kept: that an American worker should not have to compete against someone who was never free to say no. — Daniel

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL

The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has smacked down a district court’s temporary injunction against Texas’s App Store Accountability Act, which requires age verification and parental consent before a minor downloads or makes purchases within an app. The district judge had accepted Big Tech’s argument that the law violates the First Amendment, writing: “The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.”

The appeals court rightly rejected that absurd construction, explaining: “App listings propose commercial transactions, regardless of whether any monetary payment is made. In fact, the ‘payment’ for apps that are purportedly ‘free’ is access to user data and private information.”

The analysis closely mirrors the argument that American Compass’s Brad Littlejohn made in a policy brief last month, Age-Gating for Contract, Not Content:

In the digital economy, data is the most valuable currency, which is why so many apps choose to offer their services for “free”; in reality, these terms of service still represent an exchange of great value to app developers. Given the common law principle that a contract exists where the parties have exchanged something of value, there is every reason to treat app terms of service as contracts—contracts that minors are not competent to consent to.

Read Brad’s brief for further background on the importance and promise of this approach to protecting kids online.

And for a rollicking discussion of this and many related issues, check out this terrific episode of The Center Edge on The Post-Human First Amendment with Brad and Lex Politica’s John Ehrett.

Next, your regular reminder that efforts to hook children on obviously harmful technology were an explicit and oft-stated (in internal documents) goal of Silicon Valley’s largest and most profitable companies. In ‘Teachers Are Going to Hate It’: How Social Media Apps Hooked Teens at School, the New York Times takes the latest dive into the discovery from the lawsuits that 1,000+ school districts have filed against Meta, YouTube, and others:

“Teachers are going to hate it,” an employee wrote in 2022 to an internal group focused on child safety, referring to a new feature prodding users to post within the next three minutes. “Kids already have smartphone addiction in class.” In response, a manager said the team’s job was to support as well as challenge the business. Competitors, she said, were doing the same thing. “If we assume teens are going to do this anyway, we’d rather them be here on TikTok,” she wrote.

Let’s not put all the blame on Big Tech, though. Schools have also proven themselves incapable of resisting the Ed Tech craze. No one is holding young people accountable for their own behavior. And also, You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually, writes Freddie de Boer in a barnburner on the free pass everyone is giving students who use AI to cheat:

I blame them and you should too, if you want the best for them. Blame them as a form of respect, blame them and then help them, blame them and then build something better, blame them while also burning down the credential mill and the surveillance software and the whole rotten edifice that gives people excuses to cheat. But do not, for the sake of your own self-image, for the cheap pleasure of feeling forever young and forever on the right side, pretend that nothing bad happened and no one did anything wrong.

Maybe the only hope is that we get all the way to the bottom of the slippery slope and, sitting miserably in the mud, decide to pull ourselves up and start climbing again. If so, we could celebrate as good news that we seem just about there: University of California Professors Are Begging Schools to Reinstate the SAT (Wall Street Journal). “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields. … UC has finite resources and can help only so many students.”

YOUR GOOD READS FOR THE WEEKEND

• First of all, if you haven’t already read it, be sure to peruse American Compass’s new statement on Reclaiming American Citizenship. As we explain:

The younger American men and women seduced by the political fringes are rightly outraged by the squandering of their inheritance, made all the more infuriating for its carelessness. Taking for granted and demolishing a social order is easy compared to building and cherishing one. But which are they doing? One side decries America itself and proposes to replace it with a state-dominated collectivism that has never worked. The other adopts a performative nihilism that despairs of progress and embraces transgression and conflict as ends unto themselves. Both are dead ends.

Decline is a choice, and we can choose otherwise…

• Writing on AI Slop, Alastair Roberts provides a good example of true citizenship stripped away and what we must do to reclaim it.

• In his conversation with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at Tuesday’s New World Gala (a good listen for the weekend!), Oren pushed on the question of whether we could rebuild our industrial base by focusing only on a few strategic industries: “Are capabilities just synonymous with those critical outputs or are there capabilities we need to be building here? Not because the thing you make with it is particularly high value today, but because if you needed to shift to a war footing, I don’t know, maybe it’s the whoopie cushion factory that also makes the tourniquets.”

• Trade attorney Nick Phillips extends the case in The Case for Flat Tariffs at American Affairs:

The expert consensus is right that tariffs should be strategic. But it is wrong about what strategy requires. A tariff regime designed around planners identifying products for protection will always arrive late, play whack-a-mole with circumvention, ignore key parts of the value chain, and target the current generation of technology instead of the next one.

The more strategic move is simpler, dumber even: tariff everything. Create a durable preference for production in the United States, across the whole industrial base, and let entrepreneurs, engineers, and manufacturers discover where the next breakthroughs will come. The scalpel has its place, but the blunt force object is the tool for this job. For those who really want to “rebuild our manufacturing and our resilience,” it’s time to start hammering.

That might be a bad idea if markets break easily in the face of disruption, but in fact their ability to solve for new constraints is one of their most powerful features. It’s always funny to watch the same market fundamentalists who trumpet this power, in almost any context, suddenly lose their minds at the prospect of a tariff or immigration enforcement. The economy will grind to a halt, prices will skyrocket, crops will rot in fields… and then it doesn’t happen, because, in fact, markets are great, and when constrained in ways that better align the private and public interest, their results can serve us all.

• In the New York Times, Christopher Smart extends this case to the Middle East: The Strait of Hormuz Is Getting Less Dire by the Day. “Just as the Covid-19 pandemic and President Trump’s tariffs forced a significant rewiring of global supply chains, the Strait’s closure has prompted a similar adjustment. … Desperate buyers always manage to find new sellers when the old ones can’t deliver. The longer the world lives without the Gulf’s supplies, the easier it gets.”

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RESHAPING THE INDUSTRIAL COMMONS

Good observations from James Thorne at RealClearPolitics about Bessent and the Hamilton Standard: “He sees the economy not as a series of quarterly data points, but as a system shaped over time by production, energy, capital formation, and national power. That synthesis, of theory, history, and practice, places him firmly in the Hamiltonian tradition, and makes him a natural architect for translating President Trump’s economic doctrine into operational policy.”

How’s that going? “The stealth manufacturing boom continues,” notes the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, Greg Ip. Why stealth? Probably because no one wants to admit it might be happening.

No, instead we get pieces like this one from the Financial Times: Donald Trump’s Pledge to Unleash a ‘Golden Age’ of US Manufacturing Sputters. Their evidence is lower levels of investment and employment, but both had already been trending downward before President Trump took office. So while it’s true that efforts to turn around 40 years of deindustrialization did not yield an instant “mushroom cloud of explosive growth,” to cite one complaint, the better question is whether the ship is turning.

Putting aside the computer industry, where both the CHIPS Act and the data center build-out are causing large swings, investment in manufacturing structures has started to show significant growth. The decline in manufacturing jobs has reversed—indeed, we’re now on a five-month run of stable or increasing employment.

Not helpful, on the other hand: sending shipbuilding offshore. The Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request included $1.85 billion (with a b) for a feasibility study on sending advanced warship building to Korea and Japan. Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) has led the fight against this approach and last night the House Armed Services Committee adopted his amendment blocking the proposal from the National Defense Authorization Act. The issue is a good one for an enterprising senator to take up as well.

RESHAPING THE LABOR MARKET

Berkshire Hathaway and Japanese Builders See the Same Opportunity in U.S. Housing (Wall Street Journal). “What does Berkshire Hathaway see in America’s home builders that investors in public markets have missed? Maybe the same thing as Japanese firms eyeing the industry: a chance to boost innovation in one of the least productive parts of the U.S. economy.”

That’s good news. But while the story highlights the shocking fall in labor productivity over the past 50 years, there’s no mention of actual workers, or wages, or the purported labor shortages that afflict an industry that struggles to offer good jobs. Actual innovation that boosts productivity in the sector would be good news for workers, for homebuyers, and for the businesses building them. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. And it underscores the importance of ignoring proposals to instead address the challenge by importing more cheap labor.

We see the same thing on farms, in The Cheap Foreign Labor Regime Blocking Agricultural Intelligence (American Intelligence). “American firms built much of the underlying technology. American universities produced the foundational research. American workers could be trained to operate it. But the United States will not lead unless it dismantles the cheap labor regime that has allowed agriculture to skip the last revolution while pretending it is ready for the next.”

Far from doing that, today America’s Farms Depend More Than Ever on a Troubled Visa Program (New York Times). “The Trump administration is allowing in more agricultural guest workers under the H-2A program, but preventing abuses is proving difficult.” Who would’ve guessed?

Daniel would. If you haven’t already, you must read his recent Commonplace essay, From Human Bondage to Open Borders, on “the Mudsill Theory of a two-tiered labor system.”

Maybe even the EU is starting to get it: EU greenlights controversial return hubs in ‘strictest-ever’ new migration law (EuroNews).

BUT WHO GETS IT ON CHINA?

Also in his remarks at the New World Gala, Secretary Bessent emphasized the FCC’s important work banning Chinese drones and routers from the American market:

I think that we’ve repositioned the direction of travel for a lot of these industries. I think they’ll go and do it. FCC, a couple months ago, said no more Chinese routers and no more Chinese drones. That’s a perfect example. We cut off China, we gave a market signal, and now can’t believe how many new router and drone companies there are.

More of this, please.

Meanwhile, though…

Canada continues to demonstrate its comparative advantage in spite. Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan is warning on Canadian television: “I do believe that Canada should be cautious about becoming dangerously dependent on China in certain industrial areas at the cost of Canada’s long term industrial and innovation muscle.”

250 years later, the EU may be learning our lesson about the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. “Spain is withdrawing its support from a French-led initiative to boost the EU’s trade defenses against China, its economy and trade minister said this week” (Politico).

And remember everyone making fun of the Liberation Day tariffs on obscure countries? Well, they’re not laughing now, per the Financial Times. “Alarm is growing in Brussels that the billions of dollars Chinese companies plan to invest in Morocco could turn the north African nation into a launch pad for heavily subsidised goods that threaten to swamp European industry.”

This, in particular, is an all-time line: “EU officials said it could be difficult to distinguish genuine Chinese industrial collaboration with Morocco from attempts to circumvent EU import tariffs.”

And yes, here in the U.S., many still don’t get it either. Sources: Stephen Curry signs $400M deal with China’s Li-Ning (ESPN). “Li-Ning and several other Chinese companies have been identified by the U.S. government and human rights groups as using forced labor to produce their goods. Li-Ning merchandise was banned in the United States in 2022.”

Does Steph Curry really just not have enough money? Or does he just not care? Someone should ask his coach, Steve Kerr, who enthusiastically speaks out on all manner of social justice issues, so long as they don’t harm the NBA’s opportunities in China.

This is a classic example of a “cultural problem” for which there is indeed a policy solution, outlined in American Compass’s A Hard Break from China:

Policy: Cultural Export Controls. For a unique set of cultural exports, “the people are the product.” U.S. law should designate a class of products and services where the creation of intellectual property, performances, or products is connected to the participation of specific individuals such as actors, singers, athletes, or other entertainers. U.S. law should prohibit revenue-generating exports of such products and services and licensing of associated brands and content to China—including films, musical recordings, broadcasts of sporting events, personalized footwear and apparel lines, and live performances. In many cases, free, unauthorized, or pirated versions of these products will still circulate in China, but this is a feature of the law. While American producers will lose the incentive to kowtow to CCP censors, some American cultural influence and soft power will still reach the Chinese market and create demand within China for greater openness to the free world.

In the meantime, rooting for Steph Curry is a choice. And fortunately, so is imposing Section 301 tariffs on countries around the world for their failure to keep forced labor out of their supply chains.

Enjoy the weekend!

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• Reclaiming American Citizenship, American Compass