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The American family continuously evolves. People are marrying later, and having fewer children. Gay people get married. People can publicly swear off marriage altogether without being ostracized. But in politics the attachment to the traditionally nuclear family seems unwavering, and especially this year. As Republicans are losing support among women, more candidates are leaning on their wives and daughters to soften their image. So strong is the pressure that one candidate in Virginia posed with his friend’s wife and daughters and left the impression he was married.

Why is there this enduring notion that there is just one version of the “ideal family”? In this episode of Radio Atlantic we talk to Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist and author of Screaming on the Inside. Grose pinpoints the origin of the American fixation on the nuclear family. And she explains how the candidates’ evoking of this ideal gets in the way of supporting policies that might actually help families

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I think it’s fair to say that the family has been deployed in this election in more overt ways than usual. A great example: the very tight, very closely watched race for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. The Democrats are hoping to flip the seat.

Their candidate is Eugene Vindman, an Army veteran and lawyer. But not only that: He’s a dad.

Eugene Vindman’s daughter: This is our dad.

Eugene Vindman: I’m Eugene Vindman.

Eugene Vindman’s son: And he is running for Congress.

Vindman: And I approve this message.

Daughter: Just say hi, Dad.

Vindman: Hi, Dad.

Rosin: Vindman’s adorable, red-headed daughter gives him the sitcom-dad treatment. She jabs him in the ribs, and his wife and son laugh. It’s all very cute, and it’s all part of a very explicit strategy.

In a place like exurban Virginia, Republicans are vulnerable, especially with women voters. The gender divide between the two parties is big and growing. So in Vindman’s other ad, he takes on his opponent, Derrick Anderson, for being a MAGA extremist and, particularly, on this one important issue.

Campaign ad narrator: When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Derrick Anderson said the Supreme Court got it right. He’s wrong because now, women face criminal prosecution and life-threatening complications.

Rosin: In campaign ads across the country, Republicans and Democrats are fighting for the hearts and minds of women by showcasing the women—more specifically, their wives and daughters.

Dave McCormick: When we call a family meeting, the first vote’s always the same: 6 to 1.

Dina Powell: 7 to 1.

McCormick: I want one thing and our six daughters want something else—6 to 1.

Powell: And me, 7 to 1.

Matt Gunderson: I believe abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I don’t want politicians dictating health care for my daughters.

Jaymi Sterling: When Larry Hogan married my mom, he became a father to three strong, independent women. As pop-pop to four granddaughters, we know you can trust him too.

Larry Hogan: I’m Larry Hogan, and I’m proud to approve this message.

Rosin: To bring it back around to that Virginia race: The Republican in that race, Derrick Anderson, doesn’t have a wife or daughters—or any children—just a fiancé.

News clip: Derrick Anderson, an unmarried GOP candidate in Virginia, posed with his friend’s wife and kids to give the impression he is a family man. The photo was used in a campaign video. But, again, they are not his family.

Rosin: He posed with his friend’s wife and children in front of a house and a lawn in a holiday-card configuration that very much left the impression that this was his family. Which begs the question: Why, in an era of declining marriages, delayed marriages in parenting, all different kinds of marriages, is the ideal of a traditional family still so strong?

Why would a candidate pull a risky move like that, rather than just say to the voters, I’m not married yet?

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

“Cat ladies,” “our dad in plaid,” “Mamala”—judging from this week’s VP debate, both sides are fighting for who has a lock on being more pro-family.

But that fixation didn’t start in 2024. It has deep roots in American history. And, weirdly, the more the American family shifts and changes, the more certain segments of society cling onto it for dear life.

Certain men are drifting conservative, while women are drifting more liberal. And the irony is, that’s affecting the actual American family. Fewer people are falling in love and starting a family.

So I wanted to understand this gap between the ideal family that shows up in politics, on Instagram, on TV and the living, breathing, actual American family.

And the perfect person to talk to about that is Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist and author of the book Screaming on the Inside. She writes about these stories we have about gender and family, what she calls scripts. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So, Jess, one of the things I deeply appreciate about your book is how you make explicit these scripts that we’ve inherited about what the American family should be, what it should look like. I feel like these are things we don’t even think about. We just think, Oh, yeah. That’s normal. That’s what it should be.

Can you talk about what some of these scripts are and where they come from, where their roots are?

Jessica Grose: So even these ideas of the nuclear family—so mom, dad, 2.5 kids, house, all that—that was allegedly the main and only form of family ever in the United States. It was never true for everyone, even at its peak.

There was lots of sex outside of marriage. There was lots of divorce. There was lots of separation that didn’t become a divorce. There were single parents. There’s all sorts of different family structures. But where does it come from? Shorthand is: The Industrial Revolution created a real divide between the domestic sphere and the public sphere.

So in preindustrial America, everybody was in and around the home: moms, dads, extended family, servants if you were wealthy. And kids worked.

The Industrial Revolution happens. They create this sort of separation between the workplace and the home. The home was seen as women’s domain. The workplace was seen as the male domain. And even now—where the majority of women work, the majority of mothers even with young children at home work—we still are stuck in these sort of old-fashioned scripts that, if they ever were true, were true for maybe a hundred years.

Rosin: Which is amazing to me, how enduring these scripts are and how much they pervade our sense of how things should be and what is normal, and particularly in the U.S., and particularly in American politics. It seems like in every era, the script takes on a slightly different form. We’ll just, for shorthand, say: in every political era. So how do you see them showing up now? Like, what is the ideal American family, as reflected in the current political dialogue?

Grose: I would say that it is pretty uncontroversial now for women to work. It is still valorized in some places for women to stay home, and it’s still unacceptable in some sort of cultural enclaves.

But I would say, in American culture writ large, it’s pretty uncontroversial for a woman to work. However, they are still expected to do the majority of domestic tasks, which many of them—us—don’t love. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Grose: And I think in this political era, marriage and long-term commitment is still so normative that—and I’m so curious about what you think about this—I think we will see a married, gay president before we see a single president.

Rosin: Yes. I mean, it’s funny you should say that, you know, it’s normal for women to work. What surprises me is—we’ll take the “childless cat ladies” moment: I understand that everybody made fun of vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance for saying, “childless cat ladies.” He got a lot of grief for it. But it is a little bit amazing to me that that would even come up, that you could still vilify a single, working woman.

Grose: Yeah, that’s why, you know, a lot of conservative commentators will say, The culture is so anti-marriage. The culture is so anti-family, you know, Democrats and liberals are trying to destroy the American family, when, you know, every pop-cultural thing is about marriage.

I mean, look at not even just modern things, like Bridgerton—hugely successful Netflix show about the marriage plot, right? The idea that somehow now the goal for most people still isn’t marriage and kids is demonstrably untrue based on polling. Whether or not they actually accomplish that and it happens for them—that’s another story. But still, do most people want to get married and have children? Most young people, yes.

Rosin: And is that statistically true?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: On the left and the right?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. Then I want to run this theory by you because that’s what I thought was true, that on the left and the right, the desire to be married is the same. But there’s something splitting in the—

Grose: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s the same, but I would say it is the majority on both.

Rosin: It’s the majority on both.

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So I want to try and locate what is splitting between men and women. Because if men and women both still want to get married, and yet there seem to be just wide divergences about what that looks like—what the marriage looks like, what the ideal looks like—I just want to locate where the split is.

So I wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The End of Men” and then turned that into a book, like, over a decade ago. So I’ve been tracking this gender divide for a while. Back then I would say it was nascent. Like, you could see that women were pulling ahead in sectors of the economy, and men were resisting adapting. And I wasn’t really sure how it would play out, either in the economy or in the marriage market.

And I would say, you know, a decade-plus—it’s gotten more extreme. And what’s gotten more extreme is that men have hunkered down in their attachment to traditional male–female roles, which is, like—that’s not obvious. It’s not how it rolled out in many other countries. And just one more part of this theory is that women are then resisting that. Like, it’s a reactive cycle. Like, the more that men dig in—in corners of the internet, in the culture, in politics—the more women resist.

Grose: I think that is true for some. I mean, if you look at the polling, there is definitely a gender divide in terms of how liberal women have become and that there are just simply more conservative men. That is true.

I think the education part of it is really important, because I think college-educated men have, for the most part, accepted more egalitarian structures. They, you know, need their wives to work. I mean, the idea that you’re going to be a two-income family, I think, is, for most people who have children, just a necessity.

Like, you cannot, you know, support in any sort of real way multiple children on one income in most parts of the country. So I think, however they feel about it, they need the money.

Rosin: You’re resisting the broader research about diverging worldviews, it sounds like. So where do men and women diverge then?

Grose: Well, no. I’m not resisting it. I just think it’s concentrated among men who are already conservative. So I think those men are becoming more polarized and more conservative.

But I’m not sure, again. Based on the sort of polling about these, it’s like: So the way the question is asked and by whom and in what way—there’s just so much noise in this data. So I definitely buy that there is a subset of young men—and there are maybe more of them—who were already conservative, who are pushed to more extreme versions of conservatism.

Does that mean that in Gen Z, we’re just going to have this massive gender divide, and no heterosexual people will ever get married again, which is what the Washington Post argued in an op-ed? I don’t buy that—for many reasons, number one being: I just think thirst outweighs politics.

Rosin: Thirst? (Laughs.)

Grose: Horniness. Desire.

Rosin: Oh, thirst. Desire. Yes. To get married.

Grose: Yes. To get married.

Rosin: I mean, that’s cute.

Grose: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I mean, very cute. I know you love your husband. I’ve seen you post many wonderful things about him, but—

Grose: I’m a normie. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.

Rosin: It’s okay. You’re a normie and a romantic, as far as I can tell.

But there are countries where it hasn’t rolled out that way. I mean, there are countries—say, South Korea, to some extent Japan—where the pressures on women, combined with their increasing presence in the workforce, combined with the unyielding social and cultural pressures, has actually resulted in lower marriage rates, refusal to marry, and lower birth rates.

Like, that is a real thing.

Grose: It is a real thing, but we’re just so much less homogenous, culturally and racially and religiously, than those countries, and our attitude towards women working is much more advanced and always has been. So, you know, I don’t see the future for the United States as a South Korea.

Is it possible that the future for the United States could be more like Germany or one of the other Western European countries where the birth rates are really pretty low? I think that is more of a realistic possibility.

But there is a lot of variation. And I think young men, in my experience in reporting, do want to be more involved in their children’s lives. Like, they don’t see it necessarily as “unmanly.” The thing that they do see as unmanly is earning significantly less than their wives.

That always does seem to be the sticking point. So I do think we have successfully—for some, not for everybody—made caretaking seen as an acceptable thing for men to do.

Rosin: Across social classes?

Grose: It depends. It really depends. I think we live in such a big country. We live in such a specific country, regionally. I think that that does cut across class to some extent.

I often think about this Republican pollster that I interviewed, and she was talking about how paid leave is popular for everyone. Like, men really want it too. And she described talking to a rural dad who had an hourly job, and he was talking about how his wife had a C-section, and she really couldn’t lift anything, and he really wanted to be there to help her. That was not seen as unmanly or whatever to him. Like, that was extremely desirable and what he really wanted, and he couldn’t afford to take the time off work, because he’s an hourly worker. So he doesn’t work; doesn’t get paid.

So I think about that a lot. I think it just really depends. But I do think more women going to college and college graduates, for the most part, out-earning non-college graduates—I see that as a potentially bigger problem.

Rosin: Right. You just have women in the middle class who are just out-earning the marriageable men around them.

Grose: Right.

Rosin: After the break, we go back to politics and talk about how these gender dynamics are affecting the upcoming election.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so back to this election. The gender divide just keeps getting wider and wider in the U.S. between Republicans and Democrats. Given all the statistics you just said about marriage and family, what would you mark as the origin point of that growing divide?

Grose: Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. I literally saw a graph today that showed that the divide really became a yawning gap starting in 2015 among young people. Even the fall of Roe didn’t move the needle the way Trump and his rhetoric moved the needle.

Rosin: Really?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: That’s surprising.

Grose: I mean, he is so uniquely repellent to young women. And who can blame them?

And I wonder if also—I mean, and this is more speculation—the outpouring of #MeToo, which I think is an immediate cause, was a response to Trump being elected, in many ways. And perhaps, seeing that sort of outpouring of storytelling and upset, and then seeing that nothing really changed, right? Like, can we point to sort of any demonstrable policy outcomes of #MeToo? Harvey Weinstein’s in jail. But sort of on an individual level, is young women’s daily experience of sexism markedly different? I don’t know.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Grose: And then seeing, like, We did this whole movement. We marched in the streets. And what’s changed, socially and culturally, you know? We’re now—what?—the third generation post-sexual revolution, post-women really flooding into the workplace and colleges. And so I wonder if that is sort of another frustration.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Grose: Well, cultural progress has stalled somewhat for women, right?

Rosin: I see.

Grose: So you know, obviously Roe was overturned. But it’s like, my mom was one of—her medical-school class was like 5 to 10 percent women, right? And so I was raised in a community where my mom was one of the few full-time working moms, right?

And now my daughters are being raised in a community where, I think, all of their friends’ moms work full-time.

I do think that there is possibly a sense among young women—it’s like, Well, I saw my grandma. My grandma was working. My mom was working. Why, culturally, am I still doing the majority of the work? Why am I still more mature than all of these boys? Why are the expectations on me to be different, a certain kind of way, still what they are when we’ve been fighting for this for so long?

Rosin: I see. That makes some sense to me, that we had for the last, let’s say—it’s not even that long, but let’s say—50, 60 years been making progress on quantifiable issues, like wages, workplace participation, certain kinds of social acceptability, and now we’ve landed at the difficult, murky cultural issues, and those do seem stalled in many ways.

Grose: That’s exactly what I was trying to say.

Rosin: So digging more into this election, the interesting thing to me in this election is that everyone is fighting over the “normal” territory, like who’s weird and who’s normal. And while it’s novel that Democrats are making headway, it does actually make me a little nervous when people start defining normal—like, collecting around normal, because we all kind of know who they mean and who they’re excluding.

So to start with just the low-hanging fruit—that’s J.D. Vance. In 2021, when he was running, this is when the “childless” situation came up. And he used the word normal. He said: “Is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”

This is a policy view that some people in the conservative world like, that people with children should have greater voting power, sort of greater influence in how the country is run.

Grose: One of the things that I find saddest is that there are a lot of policies that pro-family liberals and pro-family conservatives agree on, or at least can come to the table to talk about—child tax credits being the main one, but paid leave is pretty universally popular. I think childcare will never happen, because that is something that they can’t agree on, because many conservatives feel the government should not have a role in supporting children being cared for by anybody but their own parents. But, you know, that’s another topic.

There are a lot of low-hanging fruit of policy that we could come to a somewhat bipartisan agreement on, but when you frame it as, you know, quote-unquote, “normal people,” “parents versus everybody else,” it just makes it impossible.

Rosin: Yeah, what’s confusing about J. D. Vance is sometimes he talks about the family issues in this culture-war-ish ways, like the Vance who talks to Tucker Carlson about cat ladies, but then there’s the J. D. Vance who, in mixed company, talks in a lot more measured ways about being pro-family. Like, maybe he could come to an agreement on child tax credits.

Grose: Well, you know, listen—I don’t know what is in this man’s heart. I have never spoken to him. But I suspect, based on the things he said before he became pro-Trump and the things that he said after he became pro-Trump, that this is calculated. I don’t know that it’s a sincere belief. I just don’t know.

He has, you know, explained his sort of change and revelations, and he’s converted, and he’s moved to a different mindset. And that’s, you know—maybe that’s genuine. I don’t know.

I mean, to me, it’s just bad politics, because there are a lot of people without children who vote Republican. So why are you alienating voters? Like, that’s number one: Don’t alienate huge groups of people.

Like, it’s just a bad idea. But I do think, number one, if it is not genuine, it’s to appeal to, you know, his potential future boss and all of his followers. And if it is genuine, I think it is pushed further and deeper by reading and listening to sources that just echo a very narrow idea and push you further into the same talking points, and surrounding yourself with the same people who only believe these things and sort of gets you into sort of more extreme territory on these issues.

Rosin: Yeah, I suppose that’s other whole version of J.D. Vance, which is the very-online version of him.

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Like, when he’s gone on conservative podcasts in the past and talked, for example, about how childless leaders are “more sociopathic.” This is the kind of language that comes from certain corners of the internet.

Grose: Yeah. And if you hear him talk on all these podcasts that people were furiously clipping, it’s clear when he speaks to this audience of conservative bros, it’s almost unintelligible to people who are not versed in their shorthand. Well, one thing they often say about parents versus nonparents is that nonparents don’t have quote-unquote “skin in the game.”

And it’s just like, What do you mean? They’re part of society. They’re in the community. They’re using parks. They’re using roads. Like, they do have skin in the game. Like, they do.

Rosin: I just want to say: I am the parent of three children. I love my children. I find this argument to be absolutely absurd because people who have children are narrowly focused on their family and their children. And anybody who doesn’t have children is probably spending a lot more time thinking about the community, making more-logical decisions about broader issues and what should be done. Like, I would not pick a busy parent of three kids to be the one to make, like, broad social policy and decide what our future is.

You’re welcome to write me all the hate mail you want, parents. Again, I have three children, and I love them all. But I find just, like, the base idea that parents are more invested or intelligent about the future to be absurd.

Grose: Well, actually, the part of it that bothers me more is the idea that parents are more moral than nonparents. In statements defending them—both Sean Combs, [who] is accused of really vile sexual assault, and then Justin Timberlake, who was pulled over for driving under the influence—they said that they were family men. And they use that phrase, “family men.” And it’s like, Who cares?

Rosin: Right.

Grose: It has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes they are alleged to have committed.

Rosin: Yes. Absolutely.

Grose: And that it’s even in the year 2024 used as some kind of defense—or, you know, moral superiority or whitewashing or whatever it is—is, like, insane to me.

Rosin: I mean, I think this is why I love in your book this surfacing of the scripts, because there’s just an unconscious, assumed “family equals good.” And so you can just call that up in any moment that you need to. It’s just so—exactly. He could be a terrible father. I wouldn’t, I mean—Puff Daddy—I wouldn’t want him to be the parent of a young girl.

Grose: Donald Trump is a family man. Like, Who cares?

Rosin: Yes. That’s, like, a data point about someone, like their age. It doesn’t say anything about their moral worth or goodness.

Grose: Well, my spiciest take, which is: I just think that we still have a first lady or first gentleman in the year 2024 is absurd. This is an unpaid job. Why? For what? Pay someone to do that job, and stop making the president and the vice president our mommy and daddy. Like, What Freudian nonsense is this? Like, I don’t like it at all. (Laughs.)

And I hate the focus on, you know, the scrutiny. I felt so bad for the scrutiny on the Bush twins and Malia and Sasha Obama. Like, Leave the kids alone. Leave Barron Trump alone. Let him live at NYU. I don’t care what he’s doing. Like, I hate it. I hate all that.

And that is the one thing I agree with Melania Trump about. Like, Leave them alone. Just leave them all alone. Do not bring this sideshow into the government. Like, it has nothing to do with the job of being president, and it shouldn’t.

Rosin: Right. Right. So what is the Democratic vision of families? Like, what do we actually see from the left?

Grose: Well, I do think it is, again, these cultural scripts, and these were around when you wrote your book. For college-educated people—and now there is an association with college education and being a Democratic, liberal voter, so that’s an association that exists—children are seen as the capstone. So you get married. You get a good job. You then have kids.

And I think that there is more room in conservative cultures to have kids when they come. And there’s also a lot more pressure not to have, in religious circles, to not have sex before you’re married, and if you do get pregnant, to get married. And that association has actually loosened over time. But it’s still, I think, somewhat of the attitude—that, like, You should have kids really young, and even if you can’t fully financially provide for them, that’s okay. You’ll figure it out.

I think that is, you know, not the norm [among the] college educated and especially urban, college educated. I mean, if you look at the average age of first-time moms in places like New York and San Francisco, it is now, you know, pushing 35. It’s like 33.

Rosin: Right, so it’s not childless cat ladies. It’s just, like, “delay the children and also have a cat” lady.

Grose: Well, delay the children because you’re getting educated and because living in cities is really expensive. I mean, I think I would like just to generally push back on the negative framing of all of this. It’s like, It’s good that women have access to education. It is good that it is much more unusual for people under 19 to have children. Like, these are all things that we saw as unalloyed societal goods, right? Like, and now there’s sort of this funhouse mirror of, like, No. It’s bad. Now it’s bad. It’s like, Well, is it? Is it just: We have new challenges because of these changes?

And so I sort of just always want to make sure we’re framing it that way, that it’s like, There’s new challenges. Yes. We do have to think about the birth rate more. We do have to think about how hard it is for people to start wanted families. We do have to think about, you know: Are people not meeting people that they want to have children with anymore, and why is that? And it’s so complicated.

I can’t, I mean—I just don’t think that there is some crisis of the liberal family. I just don’t buy that. I think many liberal men and women in their 20s have anxiety and dread about having children, but people have always had anxiety and dread about having children.

For my book, I read the diaries and letters of women going back hundreds of years, and their emotions were identical to what people feel today about having children. It’s scary. It’s, you know—the greatest responsibility you can have is for other humans. The only difference now is many people have an actual choice about whether to become parents. It is somewhat socially acceptable to not have children. And it’s like: The second it is even barely socially acceptable to not have children, there’s this huge backlash and panic and fear. And I think we should be really highly suspicious of that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Grose: Like these feelings are not new. People have always felt this way. Why are we—

Rosin: —so afraid of them?

Grose: So afraid of them, saying these emotions are aberrant and not, you know—if having children is the right thing for you to do, these are normal feelings to have on the journey to get there.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

In terms of political theater, that is, if you could mandate something, what would it be? Would you be like, You’re never allowed to talk about a politician’s family? You would ban the term, you know, first gentleman, first lady. Like, what would Jess Grose’s rules of political theater be?

Grose: Oh, it would definitely be: We never talk about anyone’s family. We just never talk about it. We only talk about their policies. We do not parade them around at conventions. We do not blow up their Instagrams. Like, it’s ridiculous. Like, I just—it only turns negative, I think. And I think it’s, especially to minor children, unfair.

Rosin: Yeah. And I think in a deeper way, what it does is perpetuate the script that the only person who can be in charge of us, our leader—the only person we can trust, the only person of good character—is a person with a so-called normal family.

Grose: I agree with that.

Rosin: All right. Well, we’re in full agreement. Jess, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Grose: Anytime.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Morgan Ome. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Photo-illustrations by Vanessa Saba

Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.

Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends. According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication. Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.” He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.

Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed. Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni. He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called her a “slut,” a “whore,” and an “unfit mother” in front of her co-workers. Brittni had stayed in the marriage for the sake of their two daughters, but Marcus’s outburst convinced her that there was no saving it. In the spring of 2022, she filed for divorce.

That summer, soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned but before Texas’s abortion “trigger ban” went into effect, Brittni got a positive result on a pregnancy test. Certain that she did not want to have another child with Marcus, Brittni texted Noyola and Carpenter to talk about her options. Noyola and Carpenter allege that Marcus disapproved of the friendship; he would sometimes hide Brittni’s car keys to try to prevent her from seeing her friends.

Brittni kept her pregnancy test a secret from Marcus, but according to Noyola and Carpenter’s suit, he learned about it when he riffled through her purse and discovered a Post-it note with the number for an abortion hotline and, on her phone, her texts with her friends. Marcus took photographs of the texts. The next day, he looked through her purse again and found a pill that can be taken to induce abortion.

Later, Marcus confronted her, Brittni told her friends. She wrote in a text message that he had demanded that she give him her “mind body and soul” and act “like his wife who loves him.” If she didn’t agree to give him primary custody of their daughters, Brittni wrote, he would “make sure I go to jail.” Brittni was surprised by Marcus’s reaction, her friends’ suit alleges; he’d never been opposed to abortion. Now he was accusing her of killing a baby and threatening to go to the police. (Noyola and Carpenter have denied all the claims in Marcus’s lawsuit, and he has denied all the claims in their countersuit.)

In fact, Marcus had already filed a police report. Soon, he obtained legal representation. Jonathan Mitchell, a conservative activist and attorney and the former solicitor general of Texas, became his lawyer in the case. Mitchell is often cited as the brains behind Texas’s 2021 “bounty law,” which provides a reward of at least $10,000 to plaintiffs who successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” abortion. The Silva case follows a similar logic: Marcus is, in effect, seeking a reward for reporting his ex-wife’s friends to the state.

Mitchell declined to comment for this article. But his work on the Silva case and the bounty law, among other matters, reflects a tactic that conservatives have recently embraced in a range of social battles, including those over abortion, LGBTQ issues, and school curricula. Across the nation, Republican-controlled state legislatures and conservative activists have passed bills and embraced legal strategies that encourage Americans to monitor one another’s behavior and report their friends, family members, and neighbors to the authorities. Call it the Snitch State.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is]

Texas has been particularly hospitable to rules that promote such monitoring in service of advancing conservative ideological goals. Perhaps it’s a matter of necessity: Despite right-wing victories in court and at the ballot box in recent decades, public sentiment on a variety of cultural issues has drifted leftward. And so, in an effort to impose their values, Republicans have turned to invasive forms of coercion.

Most Americans, including most Texas voters, believe that abortion should be legal in some form. The architects of this new anti-privacy regime do not. Republican legislators in Texas have proposed numerous additional restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, including bills that would punish employers who help their workers get abortions, outlaw abortion funds that help women seek the procedure in another state, and circumvent local district attorneys who refuse to criminally prosecute abortion providers. Some proposed measures would restrict access to contraception. One would criminalize speech by making it illegal to provide “information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug” and forcing internet providers in Texas to censor such information.

It’s hard not to conclude that the people pushing for bills like these want women to be scared to even contemplate having an abortion, let alone seek one out. They have said so themselves; in 2021, for example, the anti-abortion organization Texas Right to Life said it was “optimistic that,” in light of the bounty law, “the day is soon coming when abortion will not only be illegal, but unthinkable.” Even expressing support for abortion rights could be considered suspect. Indeed, the Silva lawsuit seems to foreshadow this reality: It alleges that Brittni and her friends “celebrated the murder by dressing up in Handmaid’s Tale costumes for Halloween,” as if their costumes indicate liberal views on abortion that deserve sanction by the state.

[From the October 2024 issue: What abortion bans do to doctors]

As of this writing, no one has yet been successfully sued under Texas’s bounty law, and other measures that seek to turn citizens into informants have faced challenges in court. (If reelected, former President Donald Trump is likely to appoint more federal judges who would look favorably upon such measures.) But these policies have chilling effects whether or not they are strictly enforced. The mere threat of having one’s privacy invaded and one’s life potentially destroyed is sufficient to shape people’s speech and behavior. American history shows us where this could lead.

The roots of this political style lie in the state-sponsored efforts of the first and second Red Scares. During the first, in the years following World War I, a wave of anarchist violence provided a predicate for suppressing free speech, as well as a justification for mob violence against people perceived to be disloyal to the government. But it was during the second Red Scare, in the 1940s and ’50s, that the informant emerged as a paramount figure in American politics, when the federal government’s attempts to block Soviet espionage metastasized into a national panic. Dozens of states passed laws criminalizing speech deemed subversive. Private employers, unions, and professional groups adopted loyalty oaths and administrative tests that inquired about personal beliefs and past associations.

According to the constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stone, from 1947 to 1953, more than 4.7 million people were scrutinized as part of the federal government’s loyalty program, leading to about 40,000 “full-field investigations” undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The bureau relied on allegations from informants, many of which were “unsubstantiated hearsay—mere gossip, rumor, and slander,” Stone writes. The accuracy of the allegations hardly mattered; federal investigators often did not take the time to verify informants’ claims. As a result, people policed their own thoughts, actions, and relationships out of fear that someone might tell on them.

Soviet espionage and expansionism were both very real threats. Many Red hunters, however, were not merely trying to prevent the establishment of Soviet-style communism in the U.S., or to protect U.S. atomic secrets. At a moment when liberalism appeared to be ascendant, conservative beliefs about economics, labor, race, gender, and sexuality could all be imposed in the name of “fighting communism.” As historians such as Ellen Schrecker and Landon R. Y. Storrs have argued, the second Red Scare was, in this way, successful at constraining the radical possibilities of New Deal social democracy. The power of organized labor was curtailed, and the potential for a more generous welfare state was limited. Even in books, films, and television shows, Americans sought to avoid topics and storylines that might be interpreted as left-wing.

Black workers—who were asked questions like “Have you ever danced with a white girl?” and “Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?”—were among those who “suffered disproportionately” from loyalty investigations, Schrecker has written. Homosexuality, or perceived homosexuality, was also punished. As the historian David K. Johnson writes in The Lavender Scare, at one point during the Truman administration, “in the State Department alone, security officials boasted that on average they were firing one homosexual per day, more than double the rate for those suspected of political disloyalty.” Ruining someone’s life with an anonymous accusation was, for a time, a relatively simple matter.

During the second Red Scare, communism was frequently described as a plague that infected and transformed unwilling victims. Modern conservatives use similar rhetoric to justify fighting “wokeness” or “the woke mind virus,” presenting liberalism as a civilizational threat that justifies extreme measures to suppress it—particularly, these days, in the name of protecting children. But whereas conservatives in the ’40s and ’50s depicted the Soviet Union as a dystopian cautionary tale, their counterparts today openly venerate the oppressive tactics of illiberal societies abroad. In March, for example, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tenure as “a model for conservative governance.” In September, Trump praised Orbán from the presidential-debate stage.

The contemporary crackdown is different in another crucial respect: Although many of the people targeted during the second Red Scare chose to withdraw from public service or public life in the face of invasive surveillance and constant suspicion, that is much harder to do in the 21st century. Today, many of us share intimate details of our personal lives online with friends, loved ones, and, often, total strangers. Whether we intend to or not, thanks to the data economy, we are all our own informants, sharing our location, reading habits, search terms, menstrual-cycle dates, online orders, and more. In exchange for using online services and social-media platforms, we make ourselves more visible to those who would become the eyes and ears of the state.

If you live in a part of the country where your very person could attract unwanted attention from the state and its informants, abstaining from social media or even withdrawing from public life may not guarantee safe harbor. Sometimes, you just need to leave.

Karen Krajcer grew up in a conservative religious family in Houston before moving to Austin, where she and her husband raised their kids. When their eldest child, who is trans, was in first grade, she came up to Krajcer in the kitchen and said, “Mom, I’m a girl.” Krajcer replied, “You don’t have to be a girl to like girl things.” “I know,” her daughter said. “But I’m a girl who likes girl things.”

“She just held my stare,” Krajcer told me. “And I realized that I didn’t understand what she meant, but that I’m her parent, and it’s my job to find out.”

Then, one day when she was in fourth grade, Krajcer’s daughter asked if she was going to die. “She’s not prone to questions like that,” Krajcer told me. “She wasn’t talking about self-harm or suicide. She was afraid.”

It was February 2022, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott had ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of minors who were receiving gender-affirming medical care. “The Texas Family Code is clear,” Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a legal opinion that Abbott used to justify his order. “Causing or permitting substantial harm to the child or the child’s growth and development is child abuse.” Abbott called upon “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to tell the government about families who were known to have trans children, so that they could be investigated for abuse. These families were now surrounded by potential informants: teachers, friends, neighbors—even extended family.

Photo-illustration by Vanessa Saba. Source: Bernd Eberle / Getty

Professional medical groups, including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, objected to the order, noting in one legal brief that “the medical treatments characterized as ‘child abuse’ in the Abbott Letter are part of the widely-accepted treatment guidelines for adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, and are supported by the best available scientific evidence.”

The portrayal of gender-affirming care as child abuse nevertheless led to a rash of reports. People called DFPS to report students “even if they’re just simply going by a nickname, or different pronouns,” Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, told me.

DFPS representatives appeared at Texas schools to pull students out of class for questioning, and showed up at children’s homes to speak with their parents. “As an investigator, when you go in to speak to a child, as easy as you try to be and as kind, it’s traumatizing; it just is. It’s invasive,” Morgan Davis, a former Texas child-welfare investigator, told me. Davis, who is trans, eventually resigned in protest of the order. A DFPS employee testified in court that, unlike with other kinds of investigations, she and her colleagues did not have discretion to set aside cases involving trans kids despite finding no evidence of abuse.

One DFPS employee who herself has a trans daughter asked her supervisor for clarification on the new policy. Would she now be considered an abuser for obtaining health care for her daughter? And if so, would her child be taken from her? According to a lawsuit that the ACLU filed on behalf of the employee and her family, she was put on leave hours later, and told the next day that she was under investigation. A state investigator came to her family’s home, seeking access to her daughter’s medical records.

The order threatened to separate trans children from their parents, which could lead to expensive legal battles for families who wanted to keep custody. Tracy Harting, a lawyer in Travis County who has been involved in child welfare for more than two decades, immediately grasped the cruel irony: If trans kids were taken from their parents, she told me, they would be entering a foster-care system “that’s already overrun with kids who were actually being physically and emotionally abused by their families.”

In response to the ACLU’s lawsuit, a judge blocked enforcement of Abbott’s order in March 2022, and two years later, a state appeals court upheld the injunction. But an exodus of families with trans children was already under way, particularly after Texas outlawed gender-affirming medical care for children in 2023. “I don’t want to live in this state of terror anymore,” one mother who left for Colorado told Texas Monthly.

[Listen: Radio Atlantic on when the state has a problem with your identity]

Krajcer and her family, who live in Oregon now, felt the same way. Although her daughter was not undergoing any medical interventions, Krajcer still feared that she could be reported to the authorities by someone who disapproved of her gender identity. The implications of staying in Texas, Krajcer said, were too terrifying to contemplate. “What happens if I’m out in a rural area and our trans daughter breaks her arm? Am I going to be able to take her to the ER for basic medical care? Or is there a chance that a nurse or a receptionist or just a person sitting in the waiting room could turn us in?”

“I imagined being led into some small windowless room for my monitored child visitation,” Krajcer said, “and looking at our children and knowing that we could have gone, that we could have left, but we didn’t.”

In August 2023, Michael Troncale, then an English teacher in Houston, was upset about what he saw as the “anti-trans propaganda coming from the right wing in Texas.” Wanting to show support for his transgender students, he put up a poster in his classroom that said trans people belong.

No one seemed to mind at first. But two months later, a school administrator told him that a parent had complained that the sign was “divisive.” Troncale didn’t know who the parent was, or if their child was in his class.

“ ‘Look, I’m sorry, but our legal team says you can’t have this up, because it’s a political message,’ ” Troncale says he was told. “I didn’t consider it political.”

Perhaps he should have. In the past few years, Texas conservatives have undertaken a campaign of censorship in schools that longtime educators told me is unprecedented in its breadth and ferocity—part of a nationwide backlash against what conservatives perceive as left-leaning books and ideas, many of them involving LGBTQ and racial issues. A major means of enforcement for this campaign is tattling: Parents and students alike are encouraged to report the teaching of forbidden ideas, so that those who teach them may be punished.

The recent spate of regulations against so-called critical race theory in K–12 schools exemplifies this logic. (Actual critical race theory is an academic framework conceived of by the Black legal scholar Derrick Bell; it is not generally taught outside higher education.) In 2021, Texas passed House Bill 3979, which included the provision that educators cannot “require or make part of a course” the idea that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Using language designed to sound egalitarian, the law purportedly safeguarded all students’ psychological well-being: Educators, it stipulated, cannot teach students that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”

When Representative Steve Toth introduced the bill, he said it was “about teaching racial harmony by telling the truth that we are all equal, both in God’s eyes and our founding documents.” The alternative, he suggested, was communist indoctrination, “a souped-up version of Marxism” from which children needed to be protected.

In practice, though, H.B. 3979 and the similar Senate Bill 3—which went into effect three months later, replacing the House bill—constitute a de facto government ban on material that conservatives oppose, and essentially mean that the feelings of a certain category of student are the only ones that matter. In 2023, a school-district trustee in Montgomery County asked for “personal ideologies” to be “left at the door.” One parent, she said, had told her that their first grader had been so distressed by a poster celebrating racial inclusivity that he moved classrooms. Another trustee suggested that displaying LGBTQ flags in schools might be illegal.

Texas’s recent cascade of book bans has also been framed as an attempt to protect children from distress. “Parents have the right to shield their children from obscene content used in schools their children attend,” Governor Abbott has written. But parents already have the right to tell their kids which books they can and can’t read; what Abbott is calling for is the right to control which books other people’s children read.

[Read: Book bans are targeting the history of oppression]

Matt Krause, a former attorney for the Christian conservative law firm Liberty Counsel, was a Texas state legislator in the fall of 2021 when he sent a letter to superintendents inquiring about “books or content” in schools that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” He attached a list of roughly 850 books, requesting that the school districts tell him how many copies of each they had. Krause—who later acknowledged to The Dallas Morning News that he did not believe he had read the books in question—had no power to order any books banned, but his list, and his invocation of the language in H.B. 3979, helped spur an avalanche of challenges across the state.

According to a lawsuit filed by library patrons in Llano County, one woman, who would later be appointed to the county’s library board, sent an email to a county official with the subject line “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.” Attached was a spreadsheet of books from Krause’s list that were in the libraries. Another concerned citizen, who herself would also later be appointed to the library board, was more direct about what she found objectionable: In an email to allies, she referred to Krause’s list as the “16-page list of CRT and LGBTQ book[s].” Indeed, the titles on Krause’s list, many of which deal with topics such as racism, LGBTQ rights, and abortion, highlight the political nature of his effort.

Soon, the Llano County libraries began removing some of these books from their shelves. One librarian alleges that she was fired after she refused to remove targeted books. She is now working as a cashier to make ends meet while she sues the county over her dismissal. (The county has denied any wrongdoing.)

After a court ordered the books returned to the shelves, county officials appealed the order and considered shutting down the libraries altogether rather than allow community members to access the material. (County officials said the removal of books had nothing to do with their content. They ultimately decided to keep the library open, and an appeals court later ruled that some of the books must be returned. That court is now reconsidering its order.) The officials are represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the same attorney who is representing Marcus Silva. According to Axios, Mitchell has also reportedly drafted hypothetical bounty laws that would provide financial remuneration to those who snitch on librarians for keeping banned books on their shelves—or even just for expressing pro-LGBTQ sentiments.

In 2024, the purpose of banning books is not to keep children from accessing disturbing material—the internet exists—but to use the power of the state to stigmatize certain ideas and identities. Nelva Williamson, an Advanced Placement history teacher from Houston, told me that she sees efforts like Krause’s as part of a right-wing response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the earnest desire of many young white people to learn more about the country’s history of injustice. At the core of the backlash, Williamson thinks, is a fear that children will leave their parents’ politics behind. “They just put CRT as an umbrella over everything,” she said.

“What is included in the obscenity standard is actually very vague,” Jeremy Young, a historian who runs PEN America’s anti-censorship program for education, told me. “And this is something that you’ll see across these bill types. The vagueness is the point; the vagueness is the way that the bills are enforced. Which is to say, when a bill has very vague definitions, it can be either overenforced or underenforced, depending on the person doing the enforcing.”

Texas legislators cannot embed themselves in every classroom to monitor whether forbidden concepts and books are being discussed and assigned. But they can rely on informants. According to NBC News, a chief deputy constable in Hood County, recently spent two years attempting to bring criminal charges against a group of school librarians after activists filed a complaint alleging that their libraries were carrying obscene books (the county district attorney ultimately said there was not enough conclusive evidence to charge the librarians). In October 2021, Rickie Farah, a fourth-grade teacher in the Dallas area who had previously been named Teacher of the Year, was reprimanded by the school board after a parent complained about a book that her child brought home from Farah’s classroom—This Book Is Anti-racist, by Tiffany Jewell. Farah contested the reprimand and kept her job. But her colleagues got the message: Even allowing a student to encounter a book that a parent disapproved of might lead to consequences.

Higher education has also been a target for Republicans, who see universities as sources of “woke ideology.” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has argued that “tenured professors must not be able to hide behind the phrase ‘academic freedom,’ and then proceed to poison the minds of our next generation.” A 2023 bill to end tenure at state universities was rejected, but the legislature instead passed a law that gives politically appointed university overseers broad leeway to terminate tenured faculty for reasons of “professional incompetence” or “conduct involving moral turpitude.” Thus, in Texas, academic freedom may now be contingent on the political approval of state officials.

In 2022, Lauren Miller, who lived in Dallas, was pregnant with twins and suffering from such severe nausea that she found it difficult to eat and had to go to the emergency room twice. When one twin was diagnosed with a genetic disorder that is almost always fatal, she and her husband struggled to get clear guidance from medical professionals. No one would even say the word abortion out loud. “We would have genetic counselors—so, people who don’t even give abortions; they just counsel on options—get midway through a sentence and then just stop, just scared to say more,” Miller told me.

Then one genetic counselor, who had lived and worked in New York, let slip that in cases like these, doctors would usually perform a procedure called a “single fetal reduction.” Miller asked what that meant.

“She immediately clammed up and she started apologizing; you could tell she was scared,” Miller said. “It was truly like we had Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and, you know, other politicians, Texas Supreme Court justices, just sitting in that room taking notes, chewing on a pen cap right there with us.”

Miller decided to have the single fetal reduction—aborting one fetus—to protect her health and that of the other twin. Afraid to leave a paper trail, she told friends in a group text of the diagnosis, but not about her plans. She had a quick, careful phone conversation with a friend who was a gynecologic oncologist, who recommended a doctor in Colorado. As she spoke over the phone with the Colorado doctor, Miller noticed that he made sure to say explicitly that he was not in the state of Texas.

At a party with friends that fall, Miller and her husband were careful not to mention that they were going to Colorado. “Who was there who would overhear and report us because they want that $10,000?” Miller said. “We didn’t know everybody who was at the house that evening.”

They also worried about the logistics of their trip. “The first question,” Miller said, was “what kind of digital footprint are we leaving? Do we leave our phones behind? Do we drive? Do we do everything in cash?” Because of her severe nausea, she didn’t think she would make it 12 hours in a car from Dallas to Colorado, and she was concerned about driving through rural Texas on her way to get an abortion at 14 weeks pregnant, especially if she ended up in an emergency room. She decided to fly.

Miller was perhaps more fearful than she needed to be about her trip to Colorado. The Texas bounty law has not been used against people who travel out of state, and women themselves cannot be punished for having an abortion—only people who help them can. Still, given the political climate in Texas, her cautious behavior doesn’t seem irrational. What would the ultrasound tech back in Dallas say or do when they noticed there was only one heartbeat instead of two?

The procedure went well. Miller’s severe nausea subsided, and the remainder of her pregnancy was smooth. She delivered a healthy baby in March 2023. As it turned out, Miller’s doctor in Dallas, Austin Dennard, had also recently fled Texas for an abortion because of a pregnancy complication of her own. Miller recalled that at her first appointment with the doctor after her abortion, Dennard simply said, in a formal tone, “There is only one heart rate. I will note in your file that there is an intrauterine fetal demise of one twin.” The two women later joined a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sought to set clear standards for exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. This past May, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling leaving the vague exceptions language intact.

Such lack of clarity can have a chilling effect. “There’s a lot of confusion,” Damla Karsan, a Houston ob-gyn, told me. “People aren’t sure what they can and can’t legally say.” In December 2023, Karsan was personally warned by Paxton against performing an abortion for Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was ultimately forced to leave the state to get an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with the same genetic condition as Miller’s. (Karsan was also a plaintiff with Miller and Dennard in the Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit.)

Still, rules that provoke this kind of fear and uncertainty around private choices have flourished primarily in conservative enclaves; when I spoke with teachers in more liberal and diverse areas of Texas, they seemed less afraid of being reported to authorities. Areas like Llano County, where support for Trump is strong, have so far been most successful in their efforts to root out subversives and promote self-policing. For the time being, abortion laws like Texas’s, as restrictive as they are ambiguous, don’t stand a chance outside Republican-dominated states; women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox can still travel elsewhere—if they can afford it—to legally receive the care they need. Similarly, families with trans children can move out of state, and library patrons can go to court when books are removed from the shelves.

But for how long? In September, Texas sued to overturn federal privacy regulations that prevent investigators from seizing the medical records of women who leave the state to get an abortion. And just as the influence of the federal government supercharged the first and second Red Scares, it could very well, under a Republican president, expand the reach of the Snitch State nationwide. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, suggests adopting a measure that would allow for a political purge of anyone in the federal government who is not obsequiously loyal to Trump. The former president, and conservative legal elites, have called for the traditional independence of the Justice Department to be disregarded, which would allow Trump, if reelected, to use the immense power of federal law enforcement to target abortion providers, political dissidents, and even local prosecutors who do not use their discretion as the administration demands.

In his foreword to Project 2025’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership, Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that “pornography”—which he describes as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children”—“should be outlawed,” and that “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” He adds that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” Roberts also describes gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and echoes the legal language used to ban “critical race theory” in places like Texas. The policy blueprint outlines a plan for forcing states to report abortion and miscarriage data to the federal government, referring to the harrowing experiences of women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox with the dismissive euphemism of “abortion tourism.” Presumably, executing these plans would depend on a steady supply of willing informants.

Conservatives have long railed against the chilling effect of “cancel culture.” But by encouraging people to tell on their neighbors, Republicans have, in effect, constructed a legal framework for socializing the means of cancellation. Having routinely mocked left-wing college students as “snowflakes” for their use of content warnings and their desire for “safe spaces,” Republicans have now institutionalized their own opposition to points of view they dislike with laws that punish those who disagree with them. They have attempted to subject teachers, librarians, and educational administrators to harsh punishments should they express—or even make available—ideas that conservatives deem offensive. They have attempted to criminalize the parents of trans children, and have forced pregnant women to flee their home in order to receive lifesaving care. All of this has been done in the name of “liberty,” to combat what Roberts has called the “totalitarian cult” that is the “Great Awokening.”

The first and second Red Scares created oppressive societies in the name of preventing America from becoming one. The version of “liberty” being promoted by right-wing legislators and activists today rings just as hollow, a stifling political and social conformity enforced by the fear that someone, somewhere, might report you.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Right-Wing Plan to Make Everyone an Informant.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.