Hyundai has a lot riding on a patch of rural Georgia. In October, the South Korean auto giant opened a new electric-vehicle factory west of Savannah at the eye-watering cost of $7.6 billion. It’s the largest economic-development project in the state’s history (one that prompted the Georgia statehouse to pass a resolution recognizing “Hyundai Day”). For now, workers at the so-called Metaplant are building the company’s popular electric SUV, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, and soon more EVs will be built there, too. And to power those vehicles, Hyundai is set to open a battery plant at the site, and is spending billions to open another one elsewhere in Georgia.  

Hyundai’s plan will allow the Ioniq 5—and other future electric cars already in the works—to qualify for tax credits implemented by the Inflation Reduction Act. American-made EVs are eligible for rebates that can knock thousands of dollars off their price, making them far more appealing to consumers. But Hyundai’s nearly $13 billion investment may soon hit a snag. In his second term, President-elect Donald Trump has said he will make those tax credits history. If he follows through on that promise, EV sales will surely slow, and Americans will buy more gas guzzlers that will produce emissions for the decade-plus they’ll be on the road. The problem is worse than it might look: The auto industry is investing more than $300 billion to meet the Biden administration’s EV goals. Most automakers are hemorrhaging money on EVs, and revoking these incentives may give them an excuse to roll back their plans to introduce electric cars, which would give consumers more clean-driving options.

Even if Trump cracks down on EVs, Hyundai might be uniquely well-equipped to keep Americans interested in going electric. The Hyundai Motor Group’s three brands—Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis—have emerged as a distant second to Tesla in EV sales this year. But their electric cars come with price tags, battery ranges, and high-tech features that are hard to beat. Hyundai’s Ioniq 6 sedan retails for about the same as a Tesla Model 3, but can recharge more quickly. The company’s cars also allow Americans to go electric in ways they could not previously: Before the Kia EV9, families looking for a truly spacious three-row SUV had no good electric options. “As the EV scene is about to possibly get shaken up to its core,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the consulting firm AutoPacific, told me, Hyundai’s eclectic lineup “is something Tesla lacks.” In spite of Elon Musk’s bromance with Trump, the most important EV company of his second term may turn out to be Hyundai.

It may sound weird that Musk has cheered on Trump’s desire to claw back EV incentives, but Tesla is rare in that it is profitably building EVs at scale. It can weather the loss of tax credits better than others. If the EV tax credits evaporated tomorrow, start-ups such as Rivian and Lucid Motors would face major headaches. They’re still in the early, money-losing stage that Tesla was in for almost two decades: They lack the economies of scale to sell EVs at high volumes and cheap prices. Their EVs are still on the expensive side, so they’ll need all the help they can get to cross the “valley of death.” That’s even a problem for big legacy companies. Ford is already backtracking as electric sales fail to meet expectations and costs keep mounting; it’d be hard to justify more EVs without government help to win over new buyers.

A scant few companies’ electric efforts could be fine without the incentives. Besides Tesla, there’s General Motors. It has spent the year implementing a surprise turnaround of its electric operations after a disastrous 2023, and it’s also making more and more affordable EVs—while approaching profitability as well.

Then there’s Hyundai. Besides Tesla, it is perhaps the only major car company in the United States making money off EVs, and it is bringing out new electric models at a frantic clip. Hyundai’s EV push has been a rare bright spot for an industry buried under mounting losses and strategic blunders. In 2024, Tesla’s sales have slipped, perhaps in part because the company’s lineup of EVs is starting to feel a bit stale: Besides the Cybertruck, which starts at nearly $80,000, Tesla hasn’t introduced an entirely new model since 2020. Tesla has promised again and again that it will release an electric car for less than $30,000, but it has failed to deliver as it now pivots to robotaxis.

By comparison, Hyundai’s EVs are starting to outclass Tesla’s. Take the Kia EV3. The high-range compact car, which is already on sale in Europe and South Korea, will likely start at about $35,000 when it comes to the U.S. in 2026. At the recent Los Angeles Auto Show, all three Hyundai brands showed off new models, which will each be able to access Tesla’s previously exclusive Supercharger network straight from the factory. In doing so, Hyundai’s brands will sell as many EV models with Tesla’s plug type as Tesla does. On the other end of the spectrum, Hyundai has an EV that simulates the engine sounds and gear shifts found in a high-performance gas car, with none of the emissions. Meanwhile, they do other things Teslas are barely starting to do, such as power entire homes in an emergency. Tax credits or not, “we generally believe this is going to be what the customers will demand,” José Muñoz, Hyundai’s global CEO, told me.

Hyundai has come a long way from the early aughts, when it was a punch line in hip-hop music. To the degree that Hyundai cars were enticing to American buyers, it was because they were generally cheaper than a comparable Honda or Toyota (but usually not as good). Hyundai’s glow-up isn’t just about EVs. It’s about bringing Tesla levels of technology to the “traditional” car industry. In recent years, Hyundai has poached some of the industry’s top design and engineering talent to become a leader in both areas; acquired Boston Dynamics to get into the robotics space; inked a deal to provide Hyundai EVs for Google’s driverless Waymo taxi service; and established itself as the first brand to sell new cars on Amazon.

The irony of Hyundai’s transformation is that the South Korean government aided in it with the kind of regulatory support that Trump may now cut off for the United States. That included incentives to help the country build out its own battery industry, leaning on Korean tech giants such as LG, SK On, and Samsung to wean itself off China, which dominates the battery sector. And with roughly 8,000 jobs just at the Georgia Metaplant, the U.S. seems to be benefiting from Hyundai’s renaissance as much as its home country. Perhaps the economic rationale for preserving the EV incentives may save them. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, has been a big cheerleader for Hyundai’s investments in his state; most of the investment under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has gone to Republican districts.

If Trump does nix the EV tax credits, Hyundai should still be in a good place. Its decision to make EVs and their batteries here should keep their costs down, DeGraff told me. That’s especially true as Trump threatens tariffs, which could hit cars made in Mexico and South Korea.  But without EV tax credits, Hyundai can only do so much to keep selling electric cars. Hyundai has especially benefited from a loophole that makes it much cheaper to lease EVs, and without those discounts, buyers may decide that the known headaches around charging and range anxiety aren’t worth the trouble. DeGraff said that his firm, AutoPacific, has found that three-quarters of potential buyers say tax credits are an important consideration for EV buying. Ultimately, Hyundai’s big EV investments in America will test this question: Are Americans still willing to go electric if they aren’t heavily subsidized to do so?

In the end, they probably will if they’re getting a good deal—and that’s where Hyundai is poised to do well. “Affordability will continue to be the main make-it-or-break-it [factor] for EV shoppers, especially if we see a wave of new tariffs applied to literally everything outside of the automotive space that will consequently squeeze Americans’ wallets even tighter,” DeGraff said. Trump almost certainly is bad news for EV sales, but he alone will not dictate what cars Americans buy. During his coming presidency, car companies will have even more of an onus to make EVs that Americans will want to buy regardless of whether they care about the environment. The promise of Hyundai is that it has quietly figured out a road map on how to get there: Regardless of tariffs or tax credits, it’s hard to resist a sweet deal on a good car.

I. Supply and Demand

Here, in the third decade of the 21st century, the most sought-after ammunition in the U.S. arsenal reaches the vital stage of its manufacture—the process tended by a young woman on a metal platform on the second story of an old factory in rural Iowa, leaning over a giant kettle where tan flakes of trinitrotoluene, better known as the explosive TNT, are stirred slowly into a brown slurry.

She wears a baggy blue jumpsuit, safety glasses, and a hairnet. Her job is to monitor the viscosity and temperature of the mix—an exacting task. The brown slurry must be just the right thickness before it oozes down metal tubes to the ground floor and into waiting rows of empty 155-millimeter howitzer shells, each fitted at the top with a funnel. The whole production line, of which she is a part, is labor-intensive, messy, and dangerous. At this step of the process, both the steel shells and the TNT must be kept warm. The temperature in the building induces a full-body sweat in a matter of minutes.

This is essentially the way artillery rounds were made a century ago. Each shell is about two feet high and six inches wide, and will weigh 100 pounds when filled with the explosive. At the far end of the production line, after the shells are filled and fitted with a fuse—or, as the military has it, a “fuze”—the rounds, hundreds of them, are loaded on railcars for the first step in their journey to war. Each train carries such a large concentration of TNT that there’s a solid concrete barrier, 20 feet high and 20 feet wide, between the rails and the building. The finished shells are delivered from plant to port by rail and by truck, under satellite surveillance.

The young woman works in the melt-pour building. It is the tallest structure on the grounds of the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, which sits on 30 square miles of prairie, forest, and brush in the southeastern corner of the state, not far from the Mississippi River. Built in 1940, it’s a relic. It’s also currently the only place in America for high-volume production of 155-millimeter artillery shells, the key step of which is known as LAP (for “loading, assembling, packing”)—turning empty shells into live ordnance. The building looks perfectly mundane, like many old factories in rural towns. There’s only one clue to what’s going on inside: giant chutes, like water slides, slope down to the ground from the upper floors. These are for escape, although one doubts that anyone could clear the blast radius of a building where TNT is stored in tons. There hasn’t been a serious accident at the Iowa plant in years, but 70 names are inscribed on a memorial at the entrance for men and women killed on the job, most of them by explosions.

The Iowa production line is at once essential and an exemplar of industrial atrophy. It illustrates why the richest military on Earth could not keep up with the demand for artillery ammunition after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. At that time, the U.S. was manufacturing about 14,000 shells a month. By 2023, the Ukrainians were firing as many as 8,000 shells a day. It has taken two years and billions of dollars for the U.S. to ramp up production to 40,000 shells a month—still well short of Ukraine’s needs. A big part of the reason is that we still make howitzer rounds the way our great-grandparents did. There are better, faster, safer ways. You can watch videos online of automated plants, for example, operating in Europe. Some new American facilities are starting up, but they are not yet at capacity.

The problem isn’t just howitzer shells. And it isn’t only that the U.S. can’t build drones, rockets, and missiles fast enough to meet the needs of Ukraine. America itself lacks stockpiles of the necessary components. A massive rebuilding effort is now under way, the largest in almost a century, but it will not—cannot—happen fast. And even the expanded capacity would not come close to meeting requests the size of Ukraine’s, much less restore our own depleted reserves. Take drones, for instance. In December 2023, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called for the domestic production of 1 million annually to meet war needs—and Ukraine has met that goal. In the meantime, the supply of drones provided by the U.S. to Ukraine has numbered in the thousands, and many of those have not fared as well on the battlefield as Ukraine’s homemade, often jerry-rigged models and off-the-shelf Chinese drones. Other allies have stepped up with materiel of many kinds—artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft—but fighters in Ukraine are still coping with disabling shortages.

At stake here is more than the fate of Ukraine. As a new administration prepares to take power—led by a man, Donald Trump, who has been hostile to Zelensky and his country’s cause, and who admires Russia and Vladimir Putin—the future of American aid to Ukraine is at best uncertain. It could very well diminish or even come to an end. But the obstacles the U.S. has faced in trying to supply Ukraine during the past two years have revealed a systemic, gaping national-security weakness. It is a weakness that afflicts the U.S. military at all levels, and about which the public is largely unaware. The vaunted American war machine is in disarray and disrepair.

“Shocking is not overstating the condition of some of our facilities,” said Representative Donald Norcross, chairing a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on munitions manufacture a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ted Anderson, a retired Army officer who is now a principal partner of Forward Global, a defense consultancy, told me, “You would stay awake all night if you had any idea how short we are of artillery ammo.”

In 2023, the U.S. Army Science Board expressed concern that the nation’s industrial base “may be incapable of meeting the munitions demand created by a potential future fight against a peer adversary.” Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and one of the authors of the Science Board’s report, immersed herself in this world of procurement and manufacturing for nearly a year. “When I was done,” she told me, “the only thing I could think was It’s a miracle the U.S. military has anything that blows up, ever.”

II. What Happened?

This is not just a bump in the road, and it is not just about munitions. The U.S. military, the richest in the world, confronts a deep, institutional deficiency. If that truth is hard to accept, it’s partly because the reality is so profoundly at odds with our history. In December 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on America to become “the arsenal of democracy.” He had the foresight to gear up the arms industry almost a year before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The war machine then performed astonishing feats. The Navy outbuilt every other country in the world combined, launching more than 1,000 new warships along with fleets of cargo vessels, troop carriers, and tankers. Production of aircraft was even more astonishing. In all the years prior to 1939, only about 6,000 aircraft had been manufactured in America. Over the next five years, American factories rolled out 300,000. They also built 86,000 tanks and more than 2 million trucks. Production of ammunition accelerated so fast that by 1943, there were 2.5 billion rounds on hand, and the volume was creating storage problems. American arms won the war.

A Chrysler factory in Detroit producing M3 tanks rather than cars or trucks, 1941 (Library of Congress)

That mighty manufactory was scaled back markedly when the war ended, then geared up once more during the Korean conflict and the Cold War. By 1961, it was again such a colossus that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.” This is how many of us think of it still: menacingly big, cutting-edge, professional, vigilant, lethal, and outrageously expensive. The Pentagon’s nearly $1 trillion annual budget is more than the defense spending of the next nine biggest militaries combined. It is a preposterous sum that pays for an industrial infrastructure that includes mining operations, chemical plants, factories, storage depots, arsenals, ships, trains, aircraft, launching pads, and research labs. It is less an industry than an ecosystem. Today it is global and so complex and mutable that it has become nearly impossible to map.  

[From the April 2023 issue: Jerry Hendrix on the end of American naval dominance]

Leaving aside an enormous privatized service sector that supports government operations, the military’s industrial infrastructure has three overlapping parts. The first and oldest is the military’s own organic industrial base: factories, depots, and arsenals scattered all over America. Some of these, particularly those considered most vital or secret, are owned and operated by the military itself. Most, like the Iowa plant, are so-called GOCOs (government owned, contractor operated). This organic industrial base supplies the basics: ammo, vehicles, equipment.

The second part of the industrial war machine is the corporate manufacturing sector, dominated today by the Big Five contractors: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon. These companies enjoy profitable deals to develop and build sophisticated weapons systems.

The third, and newest, part of the war machine is the tech sector, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and a large number of smaller firms. These are responsible for the software and hardware that have become a crucial element of modern war—drones and associated technology, as well as AI and systems for electronic surveillance, communications, data analysis, and guidance. The rapid evolution of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war, where automated attack and defense strategies change almost daily, illustrates how vital the tech sector has become.

Together these sectors support what remains the most potent fighting force on the planet. But the foundation is crumbling. Much has been written about the Pentagon’s devotion to big, expensive, and arguably outdated weapons platforms: fighter jets, bombers, guided missiles, aircraft carriers. Little notice has been paid to the deterioration of its industrial base, which underpins everything. There are plenty of reasons for what has happened. Strategic planning failed to foresee a sudden demand for conventional arms. The post–Cold War “peace dividend” put most military contractors out of business. Budget wars in Congress have created funding uncertainty that dissuades long-term investment in arms manufacture. As for munitions, much of the dirty and dangerous work of making them has been outsourced overseas, to countries where labor is cheap and regulations—environmental, safety—are few. Meanwhile, in every kind of military manufacture, from the most to the least sophisticated, we depend for raw materials and components—uranium, chemicals, explosives, computer chips, spare parts, expertise—on an expansive global supply chain, in some cases involving the very countries (China, Russia) we are most likely to fight.

III. A Case Study

The howitzer round, a relatively simple munition, illustrates the problems we face. The howitzer itself is a centuries-old weapon, a mobile firing tube bigger than a mortar and smaller than a cannon. It is often mounted on wheels and is usually used in groups. It is convenient for throwing substantial shells over an army’s own forces and into the ranks of a nearby enemy. A 155-millimeter howitzer shell has a blast radius of more than 150 feet, sends fragments even farther, and can damage or destroy vehicles and fortified positions.

Today’s howitzer round has a variety of parts, each requiring its own production process. The steel casing is made with a specially formulated alloy called HF-1 (the initials stand for “high fragmentation”), designed to withstand the tremendous pressure of being shot out of a cannon but also frangible enough to shatter into shards when it explodes at the target. Most of this kind of steel is imported from Japan and Germany, but some of it also comes from China. Into each steel casing is poured explosive material—what the military calls “energetics”—that today is generally TNT: 24 pounds of it per round. Currently, no TNT is manufactured in the U.S. Nearly all of what we use is imported from Poland and is made with chemical precursors from other countries—including, again, China. To increase U.S. production tenfold would require 2.4 million pounds of TNT monthly, which is why the military is shifting to a newer explosive, IMX, that will ultimately replace TNT entirely, but not anytime soon. The U.S. already has stockpiles of this material, and more of it is being made: The Army has nearly tripled its IMX order from the Holston Army Ammunition Plant, in Tennessee.

Then there’s the need for copper, a band of which is wrapped around the base of each shell to seal it tightly inside the firing chamber; this enables the shell to spin out of the rifled tube, improving its accuracy. To propel the round, there is another energetic at its base, nitrocellulose, which is manufactured at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, in Virginia. Its chemical ingredients are imported from all over the world. To ignite the propellant, each round has a primer, essentially a small brass cup and a copper pin with its own small amount of explosive powder. At the tip of the round is the fuze, which contains a battery that is activated when the round begins spinning. The small mechanical and electronic components of the fuze determine when and where the round explodes, whether on impact or in the air above the target. Each of these components must be mass-produced, and each has its own complex manufacturing story.

Rolls of steel (left) stored at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (right) (Hannah Beier / Getty; Aimee Dilger / SOPA / Getty) At the Scranton facility, 155-millimeter howitzer shells drying on a conveyor belt (Aimee Dilger / SOPA / Getty)

Making energetics, in particular, is expensive, difficult, and, traditionally, a major source of pollution. In the U.S., old Army-ammunition plants figure prominently in the more than 600 military facilities the EPA has designated as Superfund sites—priority cleanup areas. Today the Iowa plant is clean enough that the land around it is used for recreational hunting and fishing and is considered a haven for some endangered species. But in years past, after the plant was steam cleaned to prevent the buildup of explosive dust and residue, the streams in nearby Burlington ran pink, which is the color TNT turns when exposed to sunlight. The plant is still regularly steam cleaned, but with strict and expensive runoff controls—the cost of environmental stewardship is steep. So, on top of other obstacles that stand in the way of a rapid surge in production—not just of howitzer shells but of any military ordnance and equipment—you can add the legitimate demands of “good government”: environmental regulations, safety regulations, and all the built-in safeguards against waste and fraud.

One more thing: Workers capable of handling jobs at the military’s industrial plants don’t just walk in off the street. “Generally, it takes two years for an average line worker in munitions to be effective,” the Science Board report noted. “For energetics, that timeline is extended to seven years.”

Ramping up existing plants, like the one in Scranton that forges the steel casings for howitzer shells, is done by doubling and then tripling the number of eight-hour work shifts. This has been accomplished in the two years since the invasion of Ukraine; generous overtime benefits and new hires keep plants running around the clock. But the facilities themselves are antiques. A small fire broke out at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in September, forcing the evacuation of the affected building. No one was injured, but the incident raised concerns about vulnerability. Portions of the plant date back to the 19th century. Originally built to maintain rails and railcars—it still sits astride a rail line in the city center—it became a giant steel foundry during the Korean War. Today many of its union workers are long-tenured and are second- and third-generation employees. Its dark and cavernous interiors could be sets for a Hollywood horror movie. Inside are giant vats where heavy billets of HF-1 steel are melted down and stretched into elongated cylinders. Glowing bright orange, they descend on metal rollers one by one to a noisy production line as they gradually cool to a dull gray. Each is then reheated until malleable inside a large device that pounds and tapers the top, creating an aerodynamic, bulletlike contour. To work as intended, the casings must exactly fit the firing tubes, so they are inspected and measured repeatedly along the line. The casings are then buffed to a high sheen. Much of this is hands-on work. Suspended from a wire, each shell passes through a spray-paint station, where the bright surface is coated a dull, army-issue green.

In Iowa, where the casings go for the LAP stage, shells are hoisted one by one onto an assembly line. Workers engrave ID numbers and the initials TNT on each. The shells are then stacked in neat rows on carts that hold about 50. A funnel is placed atop each, and workers guide the carts into a long wooden shed that stretches a few hundred yards to the melt-pour building. On the way, the shells are heated and cooled repeatedly, curing the metal for the TNT pour. One at a time, the carts are rolled into position beneath the melt-pour kettle, two stories above. The slurry flows down through the steel tubes to completely fill each shell. From there, the shells are rolled through a covered walkway to a building where each round is separately X-rayed. Technicians behind computer screens scan each image for imperfections in the pour.

This painstaking process is eliminated in newer plants in other countries, where TNT is inserted with a more efficient method called “screw extrusion,” one very thin layer at a time. The process virtually eliminates imperfections. It is not new. The modern form of the process was developed in the 1960s, and is yet another example of how static U.S. production methods have remained. The Army opened part of its first automated shell-production facility in Mesquite, Texas, early this year, and a new LAP plant is under construction in Camden, Arkansas. Crucial expansion of energetics production is under way at Holston, and of propellant production at Radford. Most of these projects are years from being completed. They will require skilled workers and customized new equipment. And once they are all fully operational, which could take years, they will need a lot of energetics. For that, in September 2023, the Army signed $1.5 billion in new contracts. Some of the contracts have gone to companies in the U.S., but others have gone to firms in Canada, India, and Poland.

The Pentagon hopes that this expansion will bring production of 155-millimeter howitzer shells to 100,000 rounds a month by 2026—up from the current level of 40,000 a month. NATO countries are also expanding production. All of this will help, but it will also increase competition for scarce minerals and explosives. Poland, for instance, has its own 144-mile border with Russia, and is engaged in its own military buildup. It may be one of the world’s largest manufacturers of TNT, but it isn’t going to sell all of it.

Ukraine is also desperately in need of missiles (Javelins, Stingers), anti-missile systems, and rocket-launching platforms such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, better known by its acronym, HIMARS. These are far more sophisticated weapons, and for most of them, American manufacture has been at an all-time low. Production of Stingers, chiefly an anti-aircraft weapon, was off and on until 2023, when the manufacturer, Raytheon, called in retired engineers and production was fully resumed. Production of Tomahawks, the Navy’s premier cruise missile, is anemic. When American ships began striking Houthi targets in Yemen in January, they fired more Tomahawks on the first day than were purchased in all of last year. The Navy has stockpiles, but clearly that rate of use is unsustainable. And missiles are far more complex than artillery rounds. They require a greater variety of scarce explosives as well as highly intricate electronics. While one howitzer round draws on about 50 different suppliers, a single missile depends on as many as 500, from dozens of countries.

[From the June 2023 issue: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg on Ukraine’s fight against Russia and the future of the democratic world]

Imagine, as the Science Board did, that America was drawn unexpectedly into another significant war. If we are years behind meeting the demands of Ukraine, how would we fare if we had to provide naval support and ground troops to defend Taiwan? Or if a NATO country was invaded by Putin’s Russia? Or if an expanding Middle East conflict draws the U.S. in more deeply? Worried about possible abandonment of Ukraine by Donald Trump, the Biden administration has stepped up deliveries of weapons and equipment—inevitably prompting concerns about the adequacy of our own stockpiles.

A Ukrainian soldier fires a howitzer against Russian troops, 2024. (Tyler Hicks / The New York Times / Redux)

America’s lack of preparedness crept up on the country gradually. Ammo production reached a low after 2001, when the 9/11 attacks shifted the military’s focus to al-Qaeda and other nonstate enemies. Arms manufacture had already slowed. Factories were closing. The brevity of the Gulf War, in 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s army was swept from Kuwait in five days, had reinforced a belief that stocking and maintaining prodigious supplies of weapons and ammunition was no longer needed. Even the years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, after 9/11, mostly involved intelligence, surveillance, and the small mobile infantry units of Special Forces. There was a brief upsurge in the production of heavily armored vehicles to counter mines and roadside bombs in Iraq, but even that long war did not halt the overall downward trend. An official Army history of the American weapons industry, completed in 2010, noted that “the current industrial base is the smallest it has been.” And it has continued to shrink.

IV. The Last Supper

The hollowing-out of America’s arms-manufacturing capacity is partly a granular story about factories and supply chains and the labor force. The size and complexity of the industrial base are important to understand. But the forces that shape manufacturing efforts in Iowa and Pennsylvania and elsewhere trace back to Washington, D.C. They involve politics, policy debates, military doctrine, expert predictions, taxpayer money, and, ultimately, the application of national will.

The way we’ve envisaged—and planned for—future wars has led us down a dangerous path. There were always voices warning of the need to anticipate the possibility of a protracted ground war somewhere—and warning, too, of the strain that such a war would place on U.S. arms production. For instance, in his 2020 book, The Kill Chain, Christian Brose, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, considered how a U.S. clash with China over Taiwan—“peer competitors fighting with most, if not all, of the same weapons”—could easily erode into a brutal stalemate. Testifying before Congress in 2021, Admiral Philip Davidson, then the retiring head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, cautioned that such a conflict could occur within the next six years—the so-called Davidson window.

But U.S. military doctrine emphatically was not focused on fighting or supporting a major ground war, and the prospect of such a war in Europe in the 21st century seemed especially unlikely. So did the potential need for millions of conventional artillery rounds in an age of missiles. It would be as if, after World War II, there had been a sudden call for mounted cavalry. “There was always some bit of a protracted-conflict scenario,” Bill LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told me, using strategic jargon for bloody fighting on a massive scale with no end in sight. “But the idea that we would be spending or sending to another country 2 million rounds of 155”—the howitzer shells—“I don’t think was really thought through.” And if someone had raised the possibility, the response would have been: “I don’t see that scenario.”

It is part of the Pentagon’s job to imagine unlikely scenarios.

War always upends expectations. Generals plot for surprise. And once wars begin, they evolve in unexpected ways. “Strategic judgments about future environments are often, one might say predictably, wrong,” wrote Richard Danzig, a former secretary of the Navy, in his influential 2011 monograph, Driving in the Dark. Today he’s an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Washington think tank. He was previously a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

At the Ukraine war’s outset, most analysts in the defense community believed that it would last only days or weeks. Russia would roll over its smaller neighbor, oust Zelensky, and install a compliant regime. Instead, the invasion triggered a valiant defense that rallied the Western world. Two years later, the war has evolved into a stalemate, one that has been called “World War I with technology.” Ukraine’s army has mounted an effective defense in part by the heavy use of artillery, especially howitzers. LaPlante described a recent tour of World War I battlefields and the immediate resonance he felt with the war in Ukraine—the men dug into trenches, the continual bombardment, the relentless attrition. There had been an assumption, LaPlante said, that stealth and precision weaponry would somehow preclude this type of warfare, but “it turns out it didn’t.”

War planning occurs in a political and strategic context bigger than the Pentagon, which is another reason the U.S. finds itself where it is. Much of the reduction in America’s arms-manufacturing capacity was deliberate—a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In 1993, the heads of some two dozen of the military’s biggest contractors were invited to a dinner at the Pentagon by then–Defense Secretary Les Aspin. Details of the meeting eventually emerged in press accounts. Such a gathering was unusual, and no agenda was announced, so the executives were understandably curious as they were shown into a plain, white-walled dining room off Aspin’s office.

As a representative from Wisconsin, Aspin had, in 1990, led efforts in Congress to begin shrinking defense spending. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989. The Soviet Union was fracturing. It was a heady time. The U.S. was no longer squared off against another superpower. Aspin had called for “a new kind of defense,” and now, with Bill Clinton in the White House, he was charged with shaping it. Everyone at the dinner knew change was coming. No one was sure exactly what it would look like.

Norm Augustine, then the CEO of Martin Marietta and a onetime undersecretary of the Army, was seated next to Aspin at the dinner table. He asked what was going on.

“Well, in about 15 minutes you’re going to find out,” Aspin replied, “and you probably aren’t going to like it.”

After the meal, the group was led to a briefing room, where William Perry, Aspin’s deputy, stood beside a screen and presented the plan: a dramatic reduction in defense spending. Perry explained that there were too many private contractors, and the Pentagon could no longer afford them all. The fallout would be drastic, he said. Charts showed various categories of purchasing. In some, only one contractor would likely be left with enough business to survive.

Augustine paid particular attention to the forecast for the aerospace industry. It showed that out of more than a dozen existing contractors in his field, perhaps only two or three would remain viable. He was stunned. For many of those in the room, it meant their companies were doomed. They would either go out of business or be sold or absorbed by a competitor. Augustine came to refer to the meeting as the Last Supper.

Perry, who would succeed his boss as defense secretary, was not wrong. Within a decade, the number of prime defense contractors—large companies that typically employ scores of subcontractors on big projects—fell from 51 to five. In terms of personnel, the military shrank by 15 percent. The effect on defense manufacturing was drastic: According to Augustine, the aerospace industry alone lost 40 percent of its employees in the 1990s. Of course, Pentagon spending cuts were not the only factor—American manufacturing in general had been in a long decline as lower wages overseas and the effect of free-trade agreements drained jobs away. But the impact of spending cuts was deep.

For the past three decades, the U.S. war machine’s private sector has been dominated by the Big Five, confirming a 1997 prediction by John Mintz of The Washington Post: “By the end of his second term, it may emerge that President Clinton’s most enduring legacy in national security will be his role in creating a handful of extraordinarily powerful defense contractors.” Fewer players meant less competition, and because the five were so big, they undermined one of America’s greatest strengths—its seemingly inexhaustible bounty of bright entrepreneurs with new ideas. The Big Five spent a lot on research and development and had the capacity to rapidly expand if a product took hold, but the galaxy of small entrepreneurial players was diminished. It became harder for start-ups to compete and thus to remain alive.

Some held on by gaming the system. Bill Greenwalt, a defense analyst with AEI, explained to me that many companies became experts at “just getting a couple million dollars doing a science project” floated by the Pentagon, and then, when that speculative R&D project was done, “raising their hand” for another. They were accustomed to the concepts they developed going no further. If they did, the next step, turning the idea into a prototype, needed a steeper level of funding. If the concept cleared that hurdle, an even bigger one loomed: winning the funds to expand production. These obstacles became known as “the valley of death,” because so many promising ideas and even proven prototypes died trying to make the leaps. The Big Five were better positioned to succeed than were smaller upstarts. And the Pentagon, like all large bureaucracies, is inherently cautious. Bigness meant being able to underwrite prototypes and expand production lines quickly. The upshot was both to curtail innovation and to deflect attention away from basic needs.

One of the most famous examples of this dynamic was an unmanned aircraft invented by the Israeli aerospace engineer Abe Karem originally called Albatross, then Amber, and finally the GNAT-750. He won a Pentagon contract in the 1980s to design something better than the drone prototype offered by Lockheed Martin, known as the Aquila. And he delivered, building a machine that cost far less, required just three operators instead of 30, and could stay aloft much longer than the Aquila could. Everyone was impressed. But his prototype vanished into the valley of death. Although it was a better drone, Aquila looked good enough, and Lockheed Martin was a familiar quantity. But Aquila didn’t work out. Neither did alternatives, including the Condor, from another of the Big Five, Boeing. Only after years of expensive trial and error was Karem’s idea resurrected. It became the Predator, the first hugely successful military drone. By then, Karem’s company had been absorbed into General Atomics—and Karem lost what would have been his biggest payday.

“There are hundreds of Abe Karems out there in America today, and they get frustrated by the department,” Greenwalt said. “They move out to the commercial sector. Every one of those companies, I would argue, has probably got someone there who met the valley of death in DoD and is now doing something crazy in the commercial marketplace because that’s where the money is.”

The flow of defense dollars to the Big Five didn’t just stifle innovation. It also concentrated a growing share of available dollars into weapons systems of the costliest and least ordinary kind. If there is one major lesson to be drawn from the war in Ukraine, apart from the need for an ability to produce drones, munitions, and missiles fast, it’s that small and cheap beats big and expensive—which is the opposite of the assumptions that underlie much of America’s military spending. Drone warfare continues to teach that lesson.

The Pentagon has launched expensive programs, still unfolding, to design and build small drone fleets. Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia have both been using drones that can be bought off the shelf and adapted to military use, all for a tiny fraction of what the U.S. has spent. With its vibrant tech sector, Ukraine has excelled in configuring commercial drones for the rapidly changing conditions of the battlefield. For instance, the Ukrainians have recently made great strides in autonomous terminal guidance—preprogramming drones with target information so that if the weapon encounters electronic jamming, it will remain on course. Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at CNAS, explained that the Pentagon has been working on this technology, too—but with a project that has been years in development and has cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “The Ukrainians are doing it for a few thousand dollars in some guy’s garage,” she said.

The same cost disparity is evident in defending against drone attacks—what LaPlante has called “the problem of our time.” Patriot missiles, which cost $1 million apiece, were not intended for this. The Pentagon is pouring millions into developing countermeasures. But the answers are more likely to come from a tech start-up—from someone like Abe Karem. Over the past half century, the Pentagon has become more of a buyer than an inventor, but it remains a notoriously deliberate customer. Acquisition procedures, legal requirements, and funding issues slow to a crawl on the path from concept to production.

V. A Loss of Will

As shocking as the Last Supper may have been to industry leaders, the larger policy impulse made sense—as much sense as a drawdown did when World War II ended. It was painful, but defense spending has always been a roller coaster. The problem was not the drawdown itself but the structure left in place—heavily corporate in terms of major weapons systems, and yet astonishingly thin in terms of basic manufacturing. If some disaster—an accident, an attack—befell the Holston Army Ammunition Plant, the Army would quickly run out of bombs. All American aircraft carriers and submarines today are powered by small nuclear reactors. A single company makes them: BWX Technologies, in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Less money is only part of the issue. Congress controls the funding, and its dysfunction has had a profoundly negative effect on the military’s manufacturing capacity. The decline of the American war machine reflects both corrosive partisanship and a loss of direction and will.

A bulletin board near the furnace area of Scranton’s production floor (Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post / Getty)

Most of the defense budget—more than 80 percent of it—is essentially allocated before the generals get their hands on it. The budget has, in effect, calcified. Its main expense categories have barely shifted in years. Personnel is the biggest fixed cost, at about 40 percent. The million-person-plus military earns pay and benefits, health first among them. Keeping pace with inflation, those costs steadily grow. More money is spent on health care for military members and their families each year than is spent on building ships. And then there’s competition from private employers. Skilled welders, for instance, who have learned their craft in the Navy, can find ready employment in private shipyards when their tour of service ends—for higher pay and greater benefits. “Staying competitive with the private sector,” Mackenzie Eaglen wrote in a 2022 AEI paper, “means the ‘mandatory’ spending bills get larger every year—whether the overall budget grows or not.” The Pentagon, she reported, “spends almost ten billion more on Medicare than on new tactical vehicles, and more on environmental restoration and running schools than on microelectronics and space launches combined.” The growth in personnel costs is so large that even when the Army has trimmed its ranks, the budget percentage has not gone down.

[From the May 2018 issue: Phil Klay on the eroding morale of America’s troops]

Another huge chunk of the budget goes to operations and maintenance, which also increases as equipment ages. Keeping aircraft, ships, tanks, and troop carriers combat-ready is not optional.

The relatively small slice of the Pentagon budget available for other kinds of spending—at most 15 percent, and possibly half that amount—is still a lot of money, but competition for it is fierce. The manufacture of munitions, arguably the least sexy budget item, falls prey to the infighting. Would the Pentagon brass rather build a new generation of jets and ships and missiles, or instead notch up production of artillery shells that, under scenarios seen as likely, would never be used? Munitions have become known inside the Pentagon as a “bill payer”—something that can always be cut in order to make the budget balance.

Meanwhile, timely, coherent federal budgeting is no more. Congress routinely fails to pass appropriations bills on schedule, resorting to continuing resolutions. This keeps defense dollars coming but limits their use to existing projects. That would not be a problem if it happened only occasionally, but Congress has given the defense department a fully authorized budget on time only once in the past 15 years. This helter-skelter process constrains the Pentagon from adapting quickly to changing circumstances. New projects are put on hold, and there’s no guarantee that money will eventually come. Private contractors need predictable dollar commitments to invest in new product lines, so they simply don’t invest. As one senior Pentagon official described it to me, the phenomenon is “an own goal that we do to ourselves every year.”

When the demand for conventional ammo soared in 2022, established players in private industry—skeptical that the war in Ukraine would last long enough to make investment profitable—were reluctant to gear up. Some smaller companies have been tempted to step in but are also nervous about the risk. John Coffman, who owns a small munitions company called Armada Ammunition, based in Greensboro, Florida, is currently eyeing an opportunity to begin manufacturing howitzer ammo. He has hedge funds offering millions for him to begin making the rounds. He knows how to do it and has even lined up suppliers for the raw materials. The demand is clearly there—for the moment. But what happens if it suddenly isn’t? Wars do end, or at least subside. “Then you have all this machinery and all this product that you just ordered,” he says. And no guarantee that Washington will keep your company whole.

Coffman’s situation is a microcosm of the one faced by any private manufacturer with military contracts. If Congress wanted to get serious about sustaining the military-industrial base, measures could be devised to give companies a cushion, a guarantee of security. Manufacturers nationwide faced the same dynamic during World War II, and the federal government stepped in and smothered the problem with dollars—efficiency or penny-pinching was not as important as getting the job done. The problem today is not the scale of global war. The way Congress works today would not just cripple arms and ammunition supply in a global war; it would cripple it in war on any scale.

VI. Driving in the Dark

John Quirk, a former Army officer who is now a senior staffer with the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been tracking the shortage of howitzer shells in particular. He told me that the military has made some progress: “What they have done, I would say with large success in the Army and the acquisition community, is the work of a guy by the name of Doug Bush.”

Bush appears to be, in the words of one of his friends, “the perfect nerd for the job.” Slender, prim, graying hair gone white at the temples, he is obsessively smart about abstruse things—a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. He is also the official who made that “own goal” remark.

Bush is the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisitions, logistics, and technology. It is a mouthful of a title that is usually dispensed with in favor of the spoken acronym ASA(ALT)—rhymes with basalt—an important but little known position in the upper echelons of the Pentagon hierarchy. Bush is also the Army’s science adviser and senior research and development official. The job is more than just building or buying what he is ordered to supply. It also means obtaining funding from Congress, which is hardly automatic.

Bush knows the Army (he is a West Point graduate and served for five years as an army officer in an infantry unit), and—perhaps more important—he knows Congress (he was a longtime staff member of the House Armed Services Committee). He became ASA(ALT) two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. When war came, he and his team began asking the basic questions: How much ammo would Ukraine need? Of what we had, how much would we need to hold back? Could we make more? How fast? Could we keep up with the demand? The answer to every one of these questions was either “We don’t know” or, simply, “No.”

Bush worked with Congress on “special authorities” for emergency contracts and helped persuade his old colleagues on Capitol Hill to pass, rapid-fire, a series of supplemental funding bills. One of the biggest challenges was just finding enough explosives. “We’re going to use all the TNT capacity in the world we can get access to,” Bush told me when we spoke at length this summer. But that addresses only short-term requirements. For the longer term, there needs to be major new energetics production—primarily of TNT and IMX—here in the United States. “So that’s going to be hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investment that we are going to build out as fast as we can,” he said. In November, the Army awarded a contract to build a TNT plant in Kentucky. The U.S. has promised Ukraine more than 5 million artillery rounds, 500 million small-caliber ammo rounds, and much more. It has also committed billions of dollars to replenishing stockpiles for American forces. For all their accomplishments, what Bush and others have done is merely stabilize the patient in the ER. Systemic dysfunction remains.

Bill LaPlante, looking at the future from a different angle than Bush does, sees even more to be concerned about. If the U.S. finds itself on a back foot when it comes to 19th- and 20th-century technology, how will it confront challenges that are even more sophisticated? In his role as undersecretary of defense, he is tasked with making the kinds of predictions he knows not to trust. How does a huge institution that spends billions and employs millions make sound plans if its assumptions are consistently wrong? How do you prepare to be unprepared?

Today the most obvious threat is “high-volume fire”—large numbers of small, cheap kamikaze drones attacking all at once, swarming and overwhelming defenses. This isn’t some futuristic scenario. It is happening in Ukraine. Imagine if the Iranians or Houthis could send 300 drones and missiles against one or two American ships in the Persian Gulf. The Defense Department is at work on ways to defeat such attacks—by means of AI-assisted targeting for rapid-fire weapons, for instance, or by directing a strong electromagnetic pulse to destroy the drones’ robotic controls. Other potential threats include hypersonic missiles, electronic warfare, and cyberattacks—and these are only the threats that are known. “Just get over the fact that you’re not going to predict everything,” LaPlante told me. Rather, he advised, we need to “plan for adaptability.”

LaPlante cited Danzig’s Driving in the Dark as a blueprint. He said that its prescriptions for coping with uncertainty are guiding the Pentagon’s thinking, at least for now. Metaphorically, Danzig’s approach departs from the traditional fortress concept—a hardened wall of defenses—to embrace a more immunological strategy, more like the way the body defends itself against pathogens. New viruses appear, and the body adapts to counter them. Translating that into national defense means preparing to be surprised and prioritizing weapons systems that can, like antibodies, be altered and mass-produced swiftly. It means leaning on software, particularly AI, that can weigh alternatives and repurpose existing assets faster than people can. To counter the effects of the Last Supper, it means emphasizing shorter-term contracts with a more numerous variety of smaller companies, thereby encouraging both competition and innovation. (Cellphones offer an example of this dynamic; they’re designed for the short term because they can so quickly become outmoded.) It means adopting manufacturing methods that can be rapidly repurposed when the need for some product suddenly ends. All of this, taken together, would radically alter the Pentagon’s status quo and redraw the military-industrial map. Doing so will not be easy. It will require extraordinary cooperation among Congress, the Pentagon, and the private sector.

“I think we could, I really do,” said General Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, and the person charged with making these decisions, when I asked him this spring if the U.S. was truly capable of pursuing a new strategy and way of doing business. “I think it would be painful. People would feel it. But I still am a believer in American ingenuity.”

General Randy George (center, seated) at the Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, 2024 (Eric Thayer / The Washington Post / Getty)

One experiment George mentioned is the Replicator initiative, which is as much an innovation in process as it is in war-fighting. It draws significantly upon what military experts have learned from Ukraine. As Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks explains, it will rapidly produce “multiple thousands” of autonomous systems, including relatively small, inexpensive drones. These will also have a modular structure capable of being adapted in the field to a variety of ends. Using existing and planned Pentagon funds, the project will rely on a number of small producers to achieve the volume needed. The idea is to enable a faster jump over the steepest obstacle in the valley of death, the one from proven prototype to mass production.

Creating a more varied and competitive field of military contractors means investing in many that will fail—a high-risk game. Anyone who spends big on arms production needs predictable budgets and certainty of sales. So the Pentagon will have to shoulder some of that risk. And if the government is underwriting the effort, a lot will ride on who is leading the government.

The current push will take a decade or more to become fully functional, and will cost a lot more than even the generous sums Congress has been shelling out piecemeal over the past few years. The costs and risks of the direction LaPlante defines will meet resistance. The Big Five are a powerful lobbying force and will have allies in Congress and possibly in the new administration, whose plans and ambitions, and basic competence, are question marks. As always, there will be a strong penchant to stick with the familiar.

VII. The Choice

Even if the current experiments do morph into something permanent, they will represent a change in only one part of the procurement system. They will do nothing to address the fact that our national politics, which traditionally have united around issues of national defense, don’t reliably do so any longer. They will not cure congressional dysfunction. They will not change our reliance on foreign supply chains. They will not obviate the need for environmental and safety regulations that add costs and slow down manufacturing. They will not alter the fact that war always confounds expectations, or that people will continue to balk at spending billions based on the proposition “What if?”

Absent a screaming national emergency, the U.S. has never been good at steering steadily in a clear strategic direction. The system for equipping the war machine is “peacetime designed,” Douglas Bush explained. “The basis of it is not built for war.”

One thing the U.S. should definitely do, he believes, is to stop thinking of America as the arsenal of democracy. Perhaps in theory we could go it alone—could press what’s left of our manufacturing capacity to the single end of self-sufficient military production. But going it alone is not really an option. The task of supplying, running, and maintaining a modern war machine is beyond the capacity of any one nation. Starting from scratch and given three years to do it, the U.S. today could not replicate the achievement of World War II—could not build trucks and tanks and ships and airplanes in such volume. When we spoke, Bush suggested that it might be better to start thinking about an “arsenal of democracies”—that is, multinational partnerships among the major democracies, with America playing the major role. It would be maddening and messy and require immense energy devoted just to muddling through.

He didn’t mention the underlying premise: For the idea to work, we need to have democracies. And they need to stick together.

Last winter, the mountains that shape Bogotá’s skyline more than any skyscraper were on fire. Which is strange in a place known for its abundant rainfall, but Colombia has been running low on precipitation since June 2023. In the spring of this year, the mayor began rationing water—the city and its 11 million inhabitants split into nine zones, each of which would have no water once every 10 days. My brother-in-law had told me about the plan, but by the time my family and I moved to Colombia this past summer, I’d forgotten.

One afternoon, not two weeks after unpacking our bags, I tried to refill the half-empty water-purification tank in the kitchen, but when I opened the faucet, nothing happened. I went to the portero, to ask about the absence. He told me it was thanks to the mayor, though we both knew it wasn’t the mayor’s fault.

In Colombia, climate change, coupled with deforestation in the Amazon and El Niño weather patterns that have become more intense, has caused a punishing and prolonged drought. The San Rafael reservoir rests above the city and is replenished by water collected in the country’s páramos––a high-alpine ecosystem known for its nearly constant moisture; as of April, when the rationing began, the reservoir was at less than 20 percent capacity. Natasha Avendaño, the general manager of El Acueducto de Bogotá, the organization responsible for the city’s water infrastructure, recently reported that this August was the driest month in the 55 years since the city started keeping track. Restrictions are unlikely to be lifted anytime soon.

In our community WhatsApp chat, residents remind one another when our turn for rationing draws near. I fill up containers and deposit them throughout the house: a bucket in each of the bathrooms and a huge stockpot in the kitchen. I’m careful not to exceed what I think we will need to get by. El Acueducto sets monthly caps for households, and fines those who exceed their limits.

Getting millions of people to use less water is a complicated dance, but the city tracks our collective effort by publishing the daily consumption rate and the fullness of the reservoirs from which we draw our water. “You’re nothing without water,” Angélica Villarraga, who lives in San Cristóbal and makes a living cleaning homes throughout the city, told me. Avendaño has said she hopes that rationing augments sentiments exactly like that one, and not just on days when the tap runs dry—that it helps residents recognize their dependence on water, and the need to conserve it during lean times.  

El Acueducto was formed around the turn of the last century to guarantee affordable and clean drinking water in the growing metropolis, and now manages more than 30 percent of the forested mountain reserve that abuts the city. In recent years, the organization has opened nearly a dozen hiking trails in Los Cerros Orientales so that residents make the connection between these mountains and the water that fuels their lives. “The reality is there isn’t enough of this very basic resource,” Jhoan Sebastián Mora Pachón, who manages the Kilómetro 11 y 12 Quebradas trail on behalf of El Acueducto, told me. “The more people respect where the water comes from, the more likely they are to make little changes in their lives to conserve it.” Then he added, “When it is our turn for rationing, we cook more simple meals, and we only wash the dishes once, at night. It’s nice, in a way.”

I have spent much of the past 15 years writing about frontline communities affected by climate change, in particular those where higher tides and stronger storms are forcing people to reimagine the way they live. I have learned that letting go of what you think you can’t live without is something a person is more willing to do if they feel that the injustice is shared equally among all. In New York City’s Staten Island, I watched neighbors band together to ask the state to purchase and demolish their flood-prone homes—on the condition that the land itself would go back to nature. Joseph Tirone, a leader of the buyout movement put it this way: “Everybody was pretty much at the same level of wealth, or lack of wealth. If their homes were going to … be knocked down so some developer could build a mansion or a luxury condo, they were not leaving. They’d stay there, they’d rot there, they’d drown there, but they were not leaving.” Eventually the state agreed with residents’ petitions, purchasing and razing hundreds of homes, the property itself becoming part of New York City’s network of parks.

The rolling rationing that moves across Bogotá—and the frustration that comes with the disruption—is shared, too, and it generates, if not solidarity exactly, a feeling of mutual inconvenience. Sandra Milena Vargas, who works as a nanny in my neighborhood, told me, “We wake up early, get one last shower, just like you.” Whether one has hired help or works as a domestic laborer, every household revolves around water in much the same way.

Doing environmental good is often framed in terms of personal sacrifice––less air travel, adopting a meat-free diet, turning off the heat. Water rationing in Bogotá is different in one key way: It’s a decision taken by a central institution to ensure the health and well-being of the entire city. The places that one might turn to in times of crisis––schools and hospitals, for instance––have water no matter what, to help keep the most vulnerable residents safe, but otherwise everyone is compelled to sacrifice together. “It is something we are used to, even anticipate,” Daniel Osorio, whose family has owned the Unión Libre café in the city’s Úsaquen district for more than nine years, told me. “We bring in five-gallon jugs to run the espresso machine. You adapt,” he said.

These sacrifices do take a toll. “Over time you lose confidence in the city to function,” Osorio said. “That’s the real shame.” But what if periodic water rationing weren’t only implemented when the well runs dry? In the future the world is facing, preparation might mean anticipating inevitable shortages, rather than promising they’ll never occur. Imagine, for instance, that governments designated a day without water once every four months—a fire drill, but for drought. Embracing periodic utilities restrictions could be a precautionary measure, a way to prepare for and live on our climate disrupted planet.

I’ve been thinking about this as, over the past few months, I have watched Valencia, Spain, be inundated by nearly a year’s worth of rain in a single day; the central high plains of the United States and much of southern Texas descend into drought; and residents across the Southeast reel after back-to-back hurricanes. No amount of preparation would have kept the French Broad River in North Carolina from rerouting straight through the center of Asheville. But those living in communities that were without power and cell service and potable water weeks afterwards might have had more backup systems in place—more buckets of water peppered throughout more homes, more generators, more solar-powered cellphone-service extenders—and muscle memory to maneuver through them, if a rationing drill had compelled them to practice.  

Doing this kind of adaptive work also teaches one to cope with change. Resilience is a muscle that must be regularly exercised to keep from atrophying. And, perhaps most important, when neighbors ride out small and regular disruptions to daily life together, in many cases they develop information-sharing networks––such as our community WhatsApp chat––so that when a hurricane hits or a heat wave dismantles the grid, they already have in place the kinds of communication hubs and community organizations that make survival through upheaval easier.

We can learn to be flexible in the face of change, and one task of our governing institutions is to teach us how. In July, California imposed permanent water restrictions on towns and cities, an attempt to locally respond to droughts that are expected to only get worse in the coming decades. In places where extreme heat regularly overwhelms the grid, municipalities might implement “fire drill” days without electricity. In the Northeast, where ice storms are on the rise, perhaps cutting the gas from time to time might make more sense. Periodic resource rationing would prepare us for a future that is sure to contain more days without––without water, or electricity, or heat––than today. The only thing that is certain is that the things we depend upon are no longer dependable. What better way to become more resilient to external shocks than to practice?

Iran’s Axis of Resistance, an informal coalition of anti-Western and anti-Israeli militias, was already having a terrible year. But the loss of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad may have dealt the knockout blow.

Syria was both the organizing ground and the proof of concept for the Axis. Assad owed his throne to its armies, which helped him kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in the civil war that began in 2011. Unlike other members of the Axis, Assad wasn’t an Islamist. He also had real differences with Hamas (the only Sunni member of the Axis) and the Yemeni Houthis. But other than Iran itself, Syria was the only United Nations member-state to be considered part of the Axis, and its territory was crucial. Iran passed supplies through Syria to Hezbollah, in neighboring Lebanon, and used it to gather its multinational, mostly Shiite armies of militants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

[Read: The Syrian regime collapsed gradually—and then suddenly]

The Axis has come under pressure before, but never like this. In 2020, an American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Axis’s fabled leader. The Iranian regional project suffered a blow then, but a survivable one. In a rousing speech at her father’s funeral in Tehran, Soleimani’s daughter Zeynab promised that three of her honorary “uncles” would exact revenge for her father’s death: the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and Assad. Within the past four months, all three of these avengers have been dispatched from the scene—Haniyah and Nasrallah killed by Israel, and Assad now a refugee in Moscow.

With Assad gone, Iran faces a reckoning. Why did it spend tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives on a regime that collapsed like a house of cards? Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a defiant speech last Wednesday, insisting that the Axis was alive and well. He chalked up the fall of Assad to an “American-Zionist plot” and said that Tehran would have saved his regime if it could have, a significant admission of his own regime’s weakened capacities. He called on his supporters to “not fall into passivity” and pledged that the “resistance” would yet expel the United States from the region and “uproot Zionism, with the grace of God.” But Khamenei’s bravado isn’t fooling anyone. Israel had already battered the Axis, and Syria’s Turkey-backed Sunni Islamists have completed the job. Khamenei is barely able to respond to Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran itself. His policy has failed.

[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]

The end of the Axis is good news. Iranian-backed militias have brought little but misery to the region. They’ve undermined the sovereignty of several Arab countries and intensified religious hatred and sectarianism. Iran’s rulers once claimed to offer an exportable Islamist model that could rival both capitalism and communism. But then they went and governed their own country as a corrupt and repressive oligarchy, giving the lie to such pretenses. All that remained to unite the Axis members was the quest to destroy Israel. As a result, instead of building a better life for their constituents, the Axis members made their countries into Iranian beachheads in a shadow conflict with the United States and Israel.

Iranian leaders often boasted that they controlled four Arab capitals (Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa, and Baghdad). Last week, the Axis lost Damascus. The others are also slipping from Tehran’s grip. In Beirut, Hezbollah has lost many of its field commanders in its war with Israel, and the Lebanese people are running out of patience with the militia. In Baghdad, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al Sudani’s government enjoys the support of several Iranian-backed militias, but seems not to feel overly constrained by Iranian interests: Iraq did not lift a finger last week to save Assad, and it has maintained close ties with Western allies in the region, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The Houthi-led statelet in Yemen remains profoundly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, and it continues to threaten international shipping in the Red Sea, but it has always been a local movement with looser ties to Tehran than the other members of the Axis. Finally, recent reports suggest that Hamas has agreed to cede the future administration of Gaza to a committee that would include both it and its rival, Fatah—a sign that just over a year after its murderous attack on Israel touched off the most recent conflagration, Hamas, too, is on the back foot.

But the most important capital to be affected by the fall of the Axis is Tehran. Khamenei’s regional policy was supposed to keep the U.S. and Israel at bay. It appears to have done the opposite. In the past 14 months, Israel has battered the Axis and directly attacked Iranian territory for the first (and second) time. Tehran never even answered the Israeli strikes of October 26, because it knew it had few palatable options for doing so. Its bluff called, Iran is now in a corner. And to make matters worse, next month Donald Trump will return to the White House, likely bringing his policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran back with him.

Khamenei’s 35-year rule over Iran has impoverished and isolated his country while making it ever more politically repressive. His hard-line faction is also politically marginalized at the moment, as both the president and the conservative speaker of Parliament have made clear that Iran’s priorities need to be economic development and making a deal with the West. Some believe that the fall of the Axis might persuade Iran to dart toward a nuclear bomb. But decision makers in Tehran know that this would likely incur a ferocious response from the U.S. and Israel, and they may well prefer to take their diplomatic chances on striking a deal with the new American administration.

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

Nobody will miss the Axis of Resistance. But the history of the Middle East has demonstrated that the demise of a bad actor is not sufficient to produce better ones. The Axis will leave a vacuum that other unsavory forces could fill. What the affected countries will need to avoid that outcome is a combination of foreign direct investment and the will to mediate their internal differences. The two are linked: Disputes are much easier to solve when all parties have a reasonable prospect of prosperity.

There is a public appetite for this agenda. In 2019, the peoples of both Iraq and Lebanon rose up in movements with two central demands: to end the sectarian power-sharing system that empowered the Axis militias in these countries, and to build effective public services. The most conspicuous symbols of the two movements were their countries’ national flags. These were anti-Axis uprisings, in which Iraqis and Lebanese sought to prioritize their own countries over the Axis’s plans for revolutionary havoc in the region.

Suppose that, following the Axis’s collapse, the region became one of stable, cohesive nation-states that pursued economic development rather than war. The democratic dreams that fueled the 2011 Arab Spring would still remain distant—but Iran’s revolutionary project for the region would at last come to a definitive end.

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If you got an extra $2,500 after filing your taxes, who would you thank? The president? Congress? Your governor? How about H&R Block?

One of the biggest problems facing democracy is whether voters can discern and reward policy makers for good policy and, in reverse, punish them for bad policy. The research here has been mixed, and the Democratic Party’s performance in the 2024 presidential election has led some to doubt whether the feedback loops necessary for good policy—and a healthy democracy—even exist.

This episode of Good on Paper pushes back against the pessimists. Interpreting signals from voters is complicated, and so much is contingent on which issues are salient when they head to the ballot box. But the political scientist Hunter Rendleman’s research indicates that when states rolled out Earned Income Tax Credit programs—a benefit for working-class Americans—voters rewarded governors who implemented the policy with higher vote shares and approval ratings.

“I think I’m an optimist on sophistication,” Hunter told me. “I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2021, Joe Biden gave the Teamsters union exactly what it was looking for: The American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, included $36 billion to prevent cuts to union pensions. Tens of thousands of workers and retirees in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin received aid.

But when election season came around, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gave a prime-time address at the RNC praising Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, infuriating White House aides who told The Washington Post that it was a “betrayal of the administration’s support” for union workers.

That betrayal rested on a concept known as “deliverism.” Deliverism refers to the idea that if you deliver good and important policy wins, then people will reward you for them at the polls. As The Prospect’s David Dayen wrote in 2021, Barack Obama’s reelection run contained a great example of this: the phrase, “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

But this line of thinking has come under much scrutiny following Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump. As one article from Democracy Journal put it, “If spending trillions of dollars to improve people’s lives isn’t a fair test of ‘deliverism,’ then what is?”

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Hunter Rendleman. She’s a political scientist soon to join the faculty at UC Berkeley and has published a paper at the American Political Science Review called, “Do Government Benefits Affect Officeholders’ Electoral Fortunes?”

Alongside her co-author, Hunter looks at one important federal tax credit for working-class Americans: the earned-income tax credit, or the EITC. Data in 2018 showed the EITC lifted about 5.6 million people out of poverty, most of them kids.

Hunter’s paper asks: Did voters reward governors who expanded this social benefit?

Hunter, welcome to the show.

Hunter Rendleman: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: I’m excited to have you here. You’ve written a really interesting new paper, and it’s about something that I really want to be true, so I’m trying to temper my enthusiasm. But before we get into the details of your paper, I’m hoping you can just step back for us here and explain: What is a policy-feedback loop?

Rendleman: A policy-feedback loop is something where you implement a policy, and when that policy is implemented, it creates a new constituency of individuals that are invested in making sure that policy doesn’t go away. And that constituency of individuals can be motivated for what’s usually thought of for two reasons: either for resource reasons—so basically, you’ve given this group some amount of money, and they become mobilized and motivated around making sure that money doesn’t go away—or it does something to how these people perceive and interpret government.

So for example, in the case of the GI Bill, it allowed these veterans to go to get university education. This changed how they saw themselves vis-à-vis politics, vis- à-vis society. And this led to them changing how they mobilized and then how they participated in government moving forward.

Demsas: And so a lot has to go right for a policy-feedback loop to work, right? People have to understand why a policy happened and who’s responsible. And is it salient to voters come Election Day? And then, do politicians themselves understand that voters are rewarding or punishing them?

So let’s take something like Medicaid expansion. Are voters understanding who’s responsible for that? Is the media giving them that information? Do they know which politicians are actually to blame? Is it federal politicians? Maybe they’re the right people to attribute it to. Maybe it’s state politicians. If it’s state, is it your state legislature? Is it your governor? I mean, a lot of that has to go right. And before we get into your study, again, can you just lay the groundwork for us about the political-science literature in this space?

My read is that there’s a lot of pessimism about the possibility for specific policies to generate salient and durable electoral shifts. There’s this book by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels called Democracy for Realists, and it argues against the idea that policies are due to voter preferences or that voters are even engaged in issue voting, right? They point to those two problems I already mentioned about the difficulty in identifying who’s responsible for changes in your own welfare. But how dominant is this view in the academy?

Rendleman: It really depends who you are in the academy. So if you’re an economist, for example, you often believe in the notion of pocketbook voting, and I think that’s the most classical notion of how people respond to policies. If they’re doing better today than they were a year ago, they’re going to vote for the incumbent that made their pocketbooks, their bank accounts fatter, basically.

Since that happened—and that’s, you know, [Anthony] Downs and how he viewed the world. Since that work was published, there was a lot of pushback on the part of the academy, saying, like, Okay. But wait—we know that people vote on the basis of vibes, for lack of a better word. We know they vote on the basis of identity. And so even if they are not necessarily doing as well as they were yesterday, they still might vote for the incumbent. And then, even further, if the incumbent does do something for them, it depends on who that incumbent is to generate this sort of feedback loop that we’re talking about. And so I’ll say that the academy is extremely mixed with regards to how they view this proper attribution process going.

Demsas: What about you before you started doing your study? What did you think?

Rendleman: When I started the study—the only reason why I wrote the study is because I had this firsthand experience about the policy that I was studying, the EITC.

Demsas: Can you say what that is?

Rendleman: Yeah. The earned-income tax credit—it is a tax credit remitted to lower-income individuals based off of how much they earned in the past tax year. And basically what it is, is this potentially sizable sum of money given to individuals that will defray part of their tax burden, and it’s refundable. At the federal level, it’s refundable. So you offset part of your tax burden, and whatever you get in remainder, you get to take home and as a check.

So this is an incredibly popular policy. It has had bipartisan support since it was first created and implemented. But there is a lot of political-science work that says this actually shouldn’t have an effect, and it doesn’t have an effect. And the reason why people argue this—and specifically, it’s folks like Suzanne Mettler in her book called The Submerged State, but also folks like [R. Douglas] Arnold, who studies something called “policy traceability”—is that no one really knows where the EITC comes from when they get it.

So you get your check on tax day or after tax day, and you’re like, Okay. Cool. I got $500. I did my taxes. It could be for a whole host of different things, like, Taxes are complicated. Maybe I just paid too much, and so I’m getting money back. Or it could be some special policy, or it could be: I hired a fancy accountant, or I went to H&R Block for the first time, and I got this money.

And, in fact, there is a great book called It’s Not Like I’m Poor, which basically says the design of the tax-preparation industry submerges these policies. It makes it really difficult for normal people to know whether or not they’re getting a given tax policy from the government.

But to get back to the topic of my paper—when I was in college, I did volunteer work for the IRS because I was a nerd. And I was helping people out with claiming their EITCs. And people were like, Wow. This is a lot of money. I’m like, Yeah. It’s from the government. And they’re like, Wow. I always knew this guy was really good for us, and they would talk about whatever politician was in office at the time.

Demsas: And who are they talking about? Are they talking about, like, presidential level? Or are they talking about, like, governor? Who are they talking about?

Rendleman: Presidential level. Like, you know, this broad attribution to the president.

Demsas: Thanks, Obama.

Rendleman: Thanks, Obama, basically. But in the positive way, like, Actually, thanks, Obama. And when I got to graduate school, and I read this literature about traceability and policy feedbacks and, specifically, this work on the EITC, I said, That doesn’t make any sense. People sort of know—or, oftentimes, people can know—about this policy, but maybe we’re just not measuring it in the right way.

Demsas: But when you heard people say, Thanks, Obama, do you think that Obama is the reason why the EITC—or he should be credited for the EITC checks people are getting?

Rendleman: No. So government, as you know, is complicated. So it’s an interesting question because there was an EITC expansion under the Obama administration, but was he responsible for it? No. It was the legislators that worked hard to bargain with other legislators in order to get a new policy through.

And the topic of my paper, which are state-level EITCs, it’s the same thing: Is it the governor that is doing this, or is it state legislators, or is it someone else entirely, like nonprofits that went and lobbied to push for certain policies?

I guess going back to your initial question—this idea of attribution is super difficult, and it’s not really clear, from a normative standpoint, if you necessarily need that perfect one-to-one attribution or if it’s okay that we have a diffuse attribution. So in general, Are we rewarding the party that did this for me, or are we rewarding the individual?

There’s a paper by Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and Chris Warshaw, which basically studies this question: When people do better in their wages—I believe that’s the study—is it the individual politician responsible, like what politician is responsible for wages, or is it just this diffuse party effect? And they find that salient politicians really benefit. Like, governors and presidents and House legislators—they really benefit when people do better. But in general, the party in office tends to do better when people are doing better off economically.

Demsas: Well, so in an ideal world, though, the way that we would want to see policy-feedback loops work is: If a policy durably benefits you, then you are going to be able to understand who is responsible for that. That’s, obviously, a difficult question, but you could identify the arm of government that was most responsible, or at least the arms of government that were involved in this, and then you would reward them at the ballot box however you could.

But you’re saying, if you feel like this diffuse version, this one where parties get benefited, is also an optimal way for feedback loops to work.

Rendleman: I guess I have difficulty with this idea of the optimality of the feedback loop, because it’s really sort of voter psychology. Do I want voters to respond to the policy landscape that they are facing? Yes. I think that is the sign of a healthy and thriving democratic system.

We want people to have the information to understand what’s happening to them, and for them to translate that information into decision making at the ballot box. If it’s to a particular individual they can actually trace—I know politician X did Y—that’s great. I think an alternative, perhaps more realistic view is: Can I detect if I did better, and the party that is in office is probably associated with that policy? That’s also good.

Demsas: I’m going to get into your study now. You and your co-author conduct a study looking at states’ adoption of EITC programs from 1992 to 2018. Can you just walk us through what you actually did, what you were trying to measure, and how?

Rendleman: Yeah. We went at it from, as I was saying, this very pocketbook-voting type of perspective, where we investigate whether the introduction of a given state level in earned-income tax credit leads to the incumbent governors—and generally, the incumbent party—being rewarded on Election Day.

So what we do is: It’s called a staggered difference-in-differences design, where you see policy getting introduced in year T, and then we look at the nearest election to year T and see if there is an increase in voting for the incumbents at that time. And so we did this at the county level for vote shares for governor, and then we also did an additional study at the back end of the paper looking at individuals’ approval levels for governor using survey data.

And just to explain the results a little bit: We find quite small effects at the ballot box, which is expected. The EITC doesn’t actually benefit a lot of people on a percentage basis in a given county. We do see in places where more people tend to claim the federal EITC, you get a bit larger increases at the ballot box. So effectively: Places that are poorer, you see bigger swings in favor of the incumbent governor.

But what was also interesting is: When we used the survey data, and we’re able to actually see, Okay, given the demographics that a given person ticked off in the survey—you know, their marital status, their income, how many children they have—we can back out who is a likely eligible person for the EITC. You, in particular, see big boosts in approval amongst those people. So not only do we see this rather small increase on Election Day, but you also see that it has perhaps this more durable psychological effect, or at least attitudinal effect, on the people that the policy is helping.

Demsas: Can we start with why you chose governors? I would imagine the state legislatures are likely to be more responsible for this. Why didn’t you measure what was happening there?

Rendleman: Part of it was data. Vote shares for governors are far easier to come by, and they are still involved in the policy process. They have to sign off for the budget. Like, Okay, this is a good budget. And at the time, it was more difficult for us to detect state legislative election votes. If we were to redo the study, probably we wouldn’t try to investigate that, as well.

You do see on the attitudinal side, we look at different types of politicians. So we look at the governor, we look at the president, we look at senators, and we look at House representatives. And we don’t see the same sort of effect that we do for governors. And so we took that as a good sign that people are properly attributing to at least the state level when they are receiving their EITCs.

Demsas: So when states adopt the EITC, what do we see happening to governors’ vote share?

Rendleman: Yeah. What we see is: In counties where a state EITC has just been implemented, you see a two-percentage-point increase in favor of the incumbent governor, the governor that passed the policy.

Demsas: That’s a pretty big number. Is that surprising to you?

Rendleman: We took that as a pretty small number, given the wide-ranging estimates in the economic-voting and policy-feedback literature.

Demsas: Well, EITC is one of, like, thousands of policies that are implemented. The idea that you would detect something that’s going to a minority of individuals—a very small minority of individuals in the state—and that that would increase the governor’s vote share by two percentage points, I mean, that can be the margin of victory, right?

Rendleman: It could be. Yeah. So when you really parse the effects further, you find that these effects are concentrated in only the first year after the EITC is implemented. And it is way concentrated in places where there are more claimants, so as I was saying before. But also, it’s concentrated amongst Republican governors.

So Republicans tend to get a bigger boost from passing these sorts of policies than Democrats. And I think that’s also a pretty significant part of the story, because if these people who tend to be lower income—and so oftentimes we associate them with voting with the left, or at least voting for Democrats—we’re seeing them potentially switching their votes. Of course, the study itself can’t tell us about whether a given person switched their vote from one thing to another, but we do see, within these counties that would plausibly vote more blue, this increase in support for Republicans and stuff.

Demsas: Can you talk us through the story of what’s going on here? A governor decides to implement a more generous EITC expansion in their state. And then what’s actually happening on the ground? I can imagine there are a bunch of different stories you could tell. There’s a story where the people who are getting the EITC become more likely to vote and more likely to do political participation because they have more money. And we see that happening, in general, with higher-income folks accessing the ballot box more.

Or you could imagine that people are really excited about the EITC. You could also imagine that the EITC is covarying with a bunch of other welfare policies or anti-poverty policies. What’s actually the most plausible story to you about what’s happening here?

Rendleman: These are popular policies when they are passed. And they’re policies that governors would plausibly want to run their elections on, or their campaigns on, rather. And so it’s—I don’t know—October, and you’re trying to get a new sector of the vote, and you say, Okay. What do I tell them that I did?

Well, you tell them that you passed something like the EITC, and they’re like, Okay. Well, that’s wonderful.

So that’s probably going on—that because these policies are popular, and people would probably want to reward you for passing something like this, you talk about it. I think Gavin Newsom—California passed an EITC in our sample—he ran pretty strongly on the fact that he rolled out this EITC. And he also campaigned pretty strongly on increasing the EITC, as well, or making a very generous one. So that’s going on.

You also have the entry of these sorts of nonprofit and lobbying types of organizations that say, Okay, this is sort of a workfarey type of policy that we like to see. It’s something that incentivizes people to work. There’s a whole bunch of economic studies that talk about the downstream economic benefits of implementing EITCs. Maybe they come in, and they say, Yeah. We want you to keep the EITC, and so we’ll help you out. We’ll throw you a bit of extra cash to campaign more in these districts. So that could be going on.

I don’t know, and I doubt it’s a resource story, in the sense of: The amount of money given to an individual because of the EITC is enough to dramatically change the amount of leisure time that they have, which can allow them to participate more in government, or in politics, rather.

So I think that’s a story that’s often told for Social Security: Older folks that are impoverished—they get this potentially transformative amount of money. It allows them to not have to think about maybe getting a part-time job after they retire. Instead, they can have more time to themselves and potentially campaign. I don’t think that’s what’s going on for the EITC. I don’t know.

It’s a great windfall. It’s, like, $200-$300, which is great. There have been economic studies that talk about people spending that money often on more durable goods. So you get your EITC. You buy yourself a new washing machine, potentially, which improves your quality of life significantly. But it’s not something that’s going to durably transform how you approach life.

Demsas: But it’s bigger for people with children, right? So you could have—for childless adults—you could have maybe $500, something like that. But you can get up to $6,000, or even higher than that for families with three or more kids. So that could be pretty big. And one thing I think that was interesting in your study is that you don’t actually see families with children having stronger effects. What do you think is going on there?

Rendleman: Basically, what we’re doing in that analysis is: We’re seeing if there is a difference in the effect size between, generally, people that are eligible to receive the state EITC versus people that are eligible and have children. We don’t see a difference between those two groups. We, overall, see an increase in people’s approval for the governor. We just don’t see a distinct increase on top of that for people with kids.

Demsas: But that’s surprising, right? You would expect, you know, one person’s getting $500, and another person’s getting $6,000. It’s a very, very different outcome.

Rendleman: It’s a very different outcome. It’s also the case that when you also have kids, you’re eligible for more things, on average. And so maybe it’s harder for you to do the attribution, or you already know that you’re receiving more money, on average, and so maybe this extra cash is not going to be so revolutionary to you.

Demsas: But I guess my question is: When you’re going from $0 to $500 or $700, you’re detecting a change in the governor’s vote share in that county where you see more exposure. And so if you see that difference from $0 to $500, but you don’t see that from $500 to $6,000, what would that indicate?

Rendleman: It could be that it is hard for individuals to detect changes, I think. And we also have analyses in the paper that say when states increase or decrease their EITCs, you don’t see a change in either vote shares or approval levels. So when you give someone like a lower-income single person more cash, that’s great because they generally don’t have a lot of things available to them in, you know, the laundry list that is welfare policies. They can’t really claim a whole lot of things, whereas people that might be or are already getting things from government could be less sensitive to these changes.

Sometimes people think of voters as myopic, and so they detect the first thing, and then they don’t detect other things after the fact. There’s a lot of studies to show this. Also within the EITC paper, this also seems to be the case because we only really detect an effect in the first year of implementation.

So yeah. Different populations, if you want to see this attribution going on, like targeting to populations that are going to be able to actually detect it and would change their behavior meaningfully for it—that’s part of how politicians would want to think about targeting these types of things.

Demsas: After the break, why democracy relies on voter sophistication.

[Break]

Demsas: I guess what I take from what you’re saying, and what started me thinking about, too, is just the sort of sense that people are taking a signal from this, right? They’re taking a signal about the political goals or the policy goals, the orientation of the governor and party that is in power when this happens—less so that they’re reacting, specifically, to the material circumstances that are changing for them. And part of what leads me that way—something you mentioned earlier that we didn’t get into, which is that—Republican governors are particularly rewarded for these expansions.

And that is such a signal to me because what it’s saying is that Republicans are less friendly to these sorts of programs. They’re more concerned about welfare expansion leading to problems with people not working a lot. Obviously, that’s why EITC, which is something that—it’s the earned-income tax credit and requires you to work—is more amenable to Republicans. But it is something that’s almost—it changes your perception of the Republican Party for a Republican governor or legislature to okay an EITC expansion or a particularly generous one.

And so is that how you think about it, too? That voters are getting a signal about what the priorities of these elected officials are, and that’s changing their vote share—less so that they’re reacting to the material shifts in their lives?

Rendleman: Yeah, totally. I think a lot of the story that we’re telling here is one of sort of symbolic politics in a way. So if you see an individual politician behaving against their type, or, like, your perceived type of them, then you’re going to be like, Oh, maybe this guy is not so bad, or, This woman is not so bad, so I’ll throw a vote his way, or, I’ll say he’s not as bad as he was when I get the next survey. I think that’s a big part of it and also contributes to this idea of traceability of policies.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s one other part of your paper that is so relevant for this, is that you look not just at people who were eligible for the EITC but also people who were not eligible, and you find effects there. Can you talk through the effects you find from people who were not getting this benefit at all?

Rendleman: Yeah. We do see a bump in approval levels amongst people that are not eligible for the EITC. We went into this finding with sort of two thoughts: Either it’s that people that are not eligible for the policy are seeing the good effects of the policy on the ground, or they’re just into the idea of them being in a state government that is being productive. And so we try and parse these ideas by looking into this—we call them higher- versus low-exposure counties, so places, again, that claim more federal EITCs versus less federal EITCs.

We don’t see the same sort of strong effect for ineligible people when you compare high- versus low-exposure counties. So it’s sort of like this uniform effect amongst ineligible individuals across like the context of the county.

Demsas: So basically, if you’re ineligible and you’re in a county that doesn’t have a lot of people claiming that EITC, or you’re in one that does have a lot of people claiming, your effect is the same. It doesn’t really matter.

Rendleman: Exactly.

Demsas: Okay. So it’s not really about you observing, Oh, people around me seem better off. It’s that you’re just realizing this has happened in your state.

Rendleman: Yes.

Demsas: I think the first thing that’s going to come to a lot of people’s minds is: How do you control for all the things that are going to covary with this, right? Because if you’re a governor that’s willing to do EITC implementation and expansion, it probably means that there are a lot of other things about you that are going to be shifting in that direction. It’s probably not just this random heterodox thing that you did that you can fully isolate.

And on top of that, a lot of other stuff might be going on. Maybe the state’s more willing to do EITC expansion when the economy’s good. Maybe you’re more willing to do it when the state coffers are higher for whatever reason, like your investments paid off, or something happened, or you stopped paying off some municipal bond. You know what I mean?

So there are a bunch of things that could be happening that could covary with this decision to do this. So how confident are you that what you’re measuring is really the effect of EITC implementation?

Rendleman: Yeah. We can’t be completely certain. It’s social science. We just do massive amounts of checks to try and rule out alternative explanations.

Demsas: It’s the funniest part of reading a paper, where you’re like, Okay. Five pages of this are the study, and 30 pages of a study is just like, Are we sure that’s what we’re finding? (Laughs.)

Rendleman: We do try and look at what’s going on in the states where EITCs are implemented. We don’t see any sort of change in, sort of, the budget surplus of the states. So it’s not like an EITC is implemented in a time where, you know, you see a huge budget surplus, and then the state’s like, Oh, okay. So let’s do a bunch of different sorts of spending now.

You also see a sort of a commiserate drawdown on revenues. So the state is not taking in as many revenues anymore. So they’re giving it back. And we also don’t see strong effects in favor of a pure economic story going on. So we don’t see changes in pay in the areas where the EITCs are implemented or in unemployment rates. This is broadly consistent with the sort of mixed findings of EITCs. Some economists find very strong findings. Some of them find quite muted findings.

We also did follow up analyses trying to detect whether people in the survey that we are using detect whether the economy around them is doing much better or much worse. We don’t see very strong effects that suggest that’s going on, at least for ineligible people. In general, actually, we see people that live in high-poverty areas tend to say that the economy is doing pretty poorly, which is consistent with what you might expect.

So we can’t completely rule out the idea that maybe some of these places pass, like, these omnibus welfare policies, where not only did they introduce an EITC, but they introduced something akin to a CTC—

Demsas: Child tax credit.

Rendleman: Yeah. Child tax credit. Thank you. It doesn’t seem like that’s the case when we look at the budget data or in our checks of the places that are passing EITCs. But we can’t really account for everything that is going on in the political moment where these policies were passed.

Demsas: I want to take a step back here because you’ve kind of referenced this a couple of times now, but your research kind of pushes back against other research that has not found an effect of the EITC.

First, can you just give us a sense of what those studies say and why you think yours found something different?

Rendleman: Yeah. The past research on the EITC has been mostly concentrated around the idea that this is a policy that, perhaps purposefully, was deployed in a way that makes it difficult for people to attribute it to government. Suzanne Mettler, in her book The Submerged State, makes the case that many policies that you might expect would have a policy-feedback effect are deployed through the tax code in a way to obfuscate the role of government. You just get your check, as I was saying.

And for policies that might have particularly helped Democrats, let’s say, like an EITC, potentially, it’s sort of a way to level the playing field for politicians. Like, Okay. Well, you want to get this done, but we’re going to remit it in such a way that it’s going to be submerged through the tax code. And because of that, there have been other studies after that, that say, Who does get the benefit from EITCs? And it’s people like tax preparers or community-service organizations that are helping people navigate the complex landscape of the tax code. So it’s not the politicians, but it’s this delegated welfare state, to borrow a term from Andrea [Louise] Campbell. And this happens with a lot of social policy in the United States.

Demsas: So you just mean someone going to their local tax preparer thinks that they’re the ones who helped them, not the state.

Rendleman: Exactly

Demsas: Okay. Gotcha.

Rendleman: Like, I just hit it out of the park by finding this guy from H&R Block.

Demsas: (Laughs.) The Intuit lobby is alive and well.

Rendleman: Exactly. That was sort of the focus of the studies on the EITC. And they spoke to other work that focused on social policies and how they’re remitted and why people don’t respond to those policies. Sometimes people are just more interested in keeping their body and soul together, and they’re not going to necessarily be able to do this attribution process. And the ways that policies are implemented influences this.

The way that our study is different is that we try to exploit periods where—we try and find the best-case period for detecting an effect of an EITC. That’s going to be, like, the first year it was implemented, and it’s going to be in places where, potentially, it’s more generous or the state is doing things to allow for that attribution process to be a bit easier than it might otherwise be.

By focusing on the state EITCs, we’re able to basically examine the same policy across a bunch of different policy landscapes with a bunch of different policy-design strategies, and we’re able to test these different levers that might lead to better or worse attribution to the party that passed the policy. The other studies that study the EITC—they’re just looking at a given snapshot in time, either through interviews or through surveys. And what we do is really exploit this “over time” phenomenon, and say, Can we actually compare it to when we know we wouldn’t detect an effect to when we probably would?

Demsas: And one of the parts of the study that you haven’t talked about yet is what you just mentioned, which is: The way in which the government is almost trying to make the policy-feedback loop happen. So can you talk about the notification laws and what those are and how they work and why those are important?

Rendleman: Yeah. So in some states—and I think the city of Philadelphia—they have what are called EITC-notification laws. So if you are likely eligible to claim the EITC, your employer has to tell you. And so basically you get this note saying, Hey. If you haven’t already, when you file your taxes, you should make sure you claim this benefit. This is, at least to my mind, a tremendous idea. Telling them that you have done something or telling them to do the thing seems like a smart strategy. And in fact, that’s what we see in our study, that places where you have these notification laws, you see slightly higher approval levels for the incumbent governors.

Demsas: So I find it really funny because something very similar to this happened to me this week. I was at the optometrist, and I am always ready to fight when I go to the eye doctor because they are so annoying about giving you your prescription. But this year, the FTC—well, the reason that they’re annoying about it is because they want you to buy glasses from them, rather than going to, you know, 1-800-CONTACTs or going to whatever and Costco and finding something cheaper.

And I have literally been in a situation constantly where I’ll go to the optometrist, and then I will say, I want my prescription printed out, please. And they will try to make it impossible for me to get this prescription. And I’m, like, blood pressure high, ready to go in, fight with my eye doctor. And I get there, and for the first time, they just hand me the printed copy of my prescriptions. And I was like, What’s happening here?

And then I get another document called a Prescription Acknowledgement Form. And it says—I’m reading it right now: “In accordance with Federal Trade Commission regulations, optometrists are required to obtain a signed confirmation from a patient confirming that they received their glasses and/or their contact lens prescription.” And I was like, This is amazing. Not only did I get it; I got a piece of paper explaining to me that the FTC is the reason.

But the funniest part of this whole story is that after this happens, I was like, Oh, why am I getting this? I was just trying to figure out if everyone understood what was happening here. And the woman who was assisting me was like, Oh, yeah. It’s just a local D.C. regulation. It’s like, the piece of paper says that it’s the FTC, and it’s the federal government doing this. The person who handed me this piece of paper, who’s responsible for implementing this policy, is telling me it is a local D.C. regulation, but oh, also, it applies in Virginia.

And this is not to make fun of this woman at all. I don’t think that’s the point. I think that part of what’s happening here is just, like, even with all this notification, this feedback loop is extremely difficult to create. And I don’t know. It both made me optimistic and pessimistic about democracy in the same interaction.

So I don’t know how you feel about the efficacy of these kinds of programs when it’s so, so difficult to actually make clear what is happening and why, even when they do this. I mean, I think another clear example of this is when Donald Trump was signing the stimulus checks, and people were just like, Oh, it’s awful. He’s doing this. But it’s like, I don’t know—shouldn’t we know what government is doing?

Rendleman: Yeah. I think this story sort of sums up how everyone sort of interacts with the welfare state or just public policy, in general. Like, you hear about public policy from your neighbor or from the news or something like that, and you get 10 percent of the story, and you’re just going to take that 10 percent and go with it.

Demsas: It’s actually really funny, too, because I tweeted about it, and someone responded, Oh, in my office, they thought it was because of corporate, and that’s why it was happening.

So we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I want to delve into it a bit more. There’s this idea that I think that most people popularly have, which is that engagement with government programs will increase both approval, if you’re getting something beneficial from the government, but also that it will make you more likely to participate in the political process. I mean, I know you mentioned that, like, this is probably too small of a benefit to change the amount of leisure time you have in the way that Social Security did.

One of the books that I’ve read on the subject that has been really formative to me is this book by Jamila Michener called Fragmented Democracy. And so she looks at Medicaid enrollment and finds that enrollment yields a decline in the likelihood of participating in politics and voting. Her story, I think, has a lot to do with the ways in which the Medicaid implementation can be really degrading for people—the way they’re treated in these offices, the messages they’re receiving about their worthiness as members of the political body.

And is your idea that you think the EITC is just like a better-designed program than Medicaid, or how does your finding kind of interact with Michener’s?

Rendleman: I love the idea that you could think that my study is in conversation with Michener’s.

So it’s a dramatically different policy. A lot of policies that came out of the ’90s will say, We’re very much interested in the idea of dignity, or how we can maintain the dignity of individuals when they claim these policies. And going to a benefits office, where you have to talk to a tired bureaucrat who is upset to be at their job because it’s a difficult job, or you have to travel far away to the office to try and claim the policy—so just making it more difficult for you. All that comes together to make it sort of a lame thing to try and seek out, even if you need it.

The EITC is just a check. It’s easy. So even though, sure, you have to do your taxes, we always have to do our taxes every year, and maybe it’s more or less complicated for some individuals, depending on how complex their taxes are, but it’s nothing like having to go into an office, have to ask answer questions, and have to face the notion that things are not going your way, and you’re having a tough time.

Demsas: I feel like a lot of this work is, in part, answering the question: Do we think that voters are politically sophisticated? There’s a famous 1964 chapter by a political scientist, Philip Converse, called “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” And I have not gone to political-science grad school, but the people I know who have say this is one of the first things everyone gets assigned and has, like, 13,000 citations.

He makes the argument he’s making, and this is a very early attempt to sort of really go out into the field and learn from people through survey data, rather than just kind of sitting in an ivory tower and doing theorizing. And he basically looks at the ideologies of voters. And his argument is that people’s policy views are inconsistent and not ideological. When you ask someone, one day, What do you think about X? It’s not going to be the same question if you ask them at another time. And then it won’t covary with things that should covary together if you were to be a consistent person.

Your argument kind of supports the idea that voters actually are somewhat sophisticated, at least they’re able to see something that is valuable and approve the right people for it. But then there’s also parts of your study which push in the other direction, right? Like, the fact that it’s not super durable indicates that, perhaps, you know, you ask them in year one: Oh, they’re really happy about it. Year two: They don’t even care whether or not it happened. And the size of the benefit not really varying with how much support people are giving to the politicians that they view as responsible also indicates that perhaps they’re not politically sophisticated.

So do you think that voters are politically sophisticated? How has this research changed your views about that, if at all?

Rendleman: No. I think I’m an optimist on sophistication. I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them, because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.

I think the effects that we detect are indeed consistent with this sophistication story. And I think, maybe, I’ll push against this idea that after that first post period—after the implementation of the EITC—that’s where you see the bump. I think I would push against the idea that reversion back to the mean is indicative of voters not being so sophisticated.

It just means that other things happened that interceded in people’s capacities to reward the governor in that same direction. Not all politicians have these hot streaks that will allow for constant bumps to their vote share at the polls or in how people approve of them on approval polls. Scandals get in the way; other policies get in the way, etcetera.

And the finding on the amount of money—it’s not really clear how people would respond to that amount of money, because it’s not like people have that counterfactual, necessarily, or, like, can really detect, I got 15 percent of the federal EITC this year and then 18 percent of the federal EITC the next year. How would we expect that to manifest in approval levels? Like, how much more would we expect people’s attitudes to change? It’s not really clear.

So I like the study because it really points in favor of the idea that voters are reasonably sophisticated. We shouldn’t just expect them not to react to policy. They will react to policy. And it depends on the environments that these individuals are in, in order for us to see an effect. So we should just be far more conscientious about how we deploy policies and where we deploy policies and what sorts of messaging goes along with the policy.

Demsas: One thing that I think really plays into this is sort of the ideological nature of politicians themselves. I mean, I think we have this sense that what we would want is: good-guy politician who does what he believes no matter what, and pushes back against, you know, anything that they find is negative, and is a leader.

But democratic theory, and what we’ve been talking about this whole episode, is that, actually, you kind of want a politician that all they’re going to do is try and make sure that they’re making people happy. They’re going to respond to positive feedback loops. They’re going to search for them. They’re going to try to make sure people know what they’re doing, and they’re going to try to iterate to be more popular because that is how you get better governance, according to basic democratic theory.

And it seems we’re in a highly ideological environment, where politicians are often not willing to do things that are very popular or are willing to do things that are very unpopular.

I think one example of this is the child tax credit, which we mentioned briefly before. I think it’s a great policy. And when it expanded in 2021, it lifted more than 2 million kids out of poverty—when that was expanded by the Biden administration. But it doesn’t get renewed. And there isn’t a massive backlash. And survey data from NPR/Marist showed that just 15 percent of respondents who got payments said that it had helped their families a lot.

And yet, both parties run on it during the presidential election, right? Both the Harris campaign and the Trump-Vance campaign—they run on this, and they talk about the child tax credit. It’s like a point of unity. You can see a lot of Republicans pushing for it and Democrats.

You know, we tend to think about the blame of policy-feedback loops resting with voters for not being sophisticated. But is part of this also just that the ideological nature of politicians makes them often unwilling to engage in those feedback loops appropriately?

Rendleman: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So it’s interesting because you would, indeed, just expect politicians to do the thing that would maximize votes, but politicians don’t always have full information on what would maximize votes, and they also don’t have full information about how people react to policy, necessarily. So it’s funny—you bring up the presidential campaigns, and it seems like presidents will just run on boosting the economy in whatever way possible.

And if you have this sort of universalistic policy, like the child tax credit or everyone-has-kids, everyone-could-benefit type of policy, then that just seems like good political capital. It’s just something to run on. But then the campaign is done, and you actually have to get policy done. It’s hard to bargain with other people towards actually implementing things and, also, implementing things in a satisfactory manner.

One reason why we don’t have a very thick safety net in the United States is, in part, because of the entry of not just outside influence into politics—so let’s say, like, money in politics, like lobbying and things like that—but also because, yeah, these politicians are people, too, and—

Demsas: Politicians are people, too. (Laughs.)

Rendleman: Yeah, exactly. And when they have to work with each other, it’s hard to actually overcome not only their own conceptions of what it means to have good policy but also, you know, what they actually have to do in office. Like, you know, Maybe instead of passing the CTC, I want to do something else.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, that’s a great place for our final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Rendleman: It’s funny because it’s going to be about this idea that politicians are people too. So my other arm of my research agenda is focused on basically the workplace of politics, so focusing on how politicians interact with each other but also how bureaucrats interact with each other.

And when I was doing part of my dissertation work, I wanted to study the idea of, like, Okay, when people of color are with each other in deliberative spaces in government, maybe they work better together. And so I did all this work in my third or fourth year of grad school, and I was fully expecting to see, Yeah, if we add more, let’s say, Black people to a congressional committee, you’ll see that they are more effective at their jobs. And I didn’t see that, and I was really bummed about it. And, you know, I talked to people, and people were like, Ah, maybe it’s just, like, a null effect, so throw it away, and move on with your life.

But I was quite stubborn, so I went to D.C., and I started talking to people. And I asked them, you know, Why am I seeing this effect? I’m seeing no effect, effectively. And it never dawned on me that when people come into Congress, they are not just the silos. They’re not just by themselves, working. They are bargaining with other people. They’re working with other people, and they’re deciding, like, What is the best way to position myself or ourselves as a group?

And ultimately, I found that in the case of African Americans, you don’t see a general empowerment effect; you see this very specific delegated effect. So people that are closer to the policies—groups like the Black Caucus are in support of—those are the people that are speaking more in these settings, whereas people that are farther from those policies speak less.

So this empowerment effect—thought it was good on paper. Maybe it was, but it led to just this far more robust finding that I think squares more with how we think about how elites think about the political process, in general.

Demsas: Side note: I feel like I’m very on the bandwagon of everyone should be publishing their null effects, and it shouldn’t be a negative thing. I guess that’s probably the fault of, like, you know, journals and stuff and not really you, in particular, Hunter.

Rendleman: Well, yeah. Like, my incentives at this stage in my career are such that I have to publish, and sometimes reviewers just like seeing positive effects as opposed to null effects.

Demsas: Blame reviewer two, always.

Rendleman: Yeah, of course.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Hunter, for coming on the show.

Rendleman: Thanks so much for having me. I had a lot of fun.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Photographs by Kennedi Carter

Boley is easy to miss. The flat vista of eastern Oklahoma is briefly interrupted by a handful of homes and some boarded-up buildings, the extent of the tiny town. In its heyday, Boley was a marvel of the Plains, a town built by and for Black people that attracted visitors and media attention from across the country. But now its businesses are defunct, and the steady outflow of young people has left behind an aging population of only about 1,000 people. The main reminder of the town’s glory days is the historical marker I passed on Route 62. The road took me to the wide-open fields where the Boley Rodeo, hailed as the oldest Black rodeo in America, is held every year. I arrived at the grounds early on a May morning, before the sun pierced the clouds. Karen Ekuban, the rodeo’s promoter, had already been there for hours.

The rodeo was in two days, and Ekuban and a small crew of volunteers, including her children, had been busy. She was obsessing over every detail. When new bleachers had been installed a few days earlier, she’d spent so much time directing workers to ensure that the earth underneath them was level, with no holes where people might trip, that she’d dozed off as she drove home that night. Instead of veering into traffic, her vehicle had eased onto the shoulder, jolting her alert. Ekuban told me the story with a giggle, as if nothing had happened. She was “awake now,” she said.

The annual rodeo had been a Boley tradition for more than 120 years, once regularly drawing crowds of thousands, but as of late, it had become something of a glorified family reunion for people with ties to Boley. Ekuban had a plan to try to turn that around. She’d sunk thousands of dollars of her own money and months of her time into throwing what she hoped would be the best rodeo the town had ever seen. Her goal was to raise at least $200,000 to help revitalize Boley, and bring back national attention to the town.

Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic

Without much in the way of a budget, Ekuban created a new sign to welcome the visitors she hoped would come for the rodeo. Ekuban’s new logo for Boley featured a silhouette of a cowboy on a bucking bull. She also brought on Danell Tipton, a world champion bull rider, to serve as the rodeo’s producer.

Members of the community turned out to help. Henrietta Hicks, an 89-year-old judge whom Ekuban affectionately refers to as “Grandmother,” offered her home to Ekuban the night of her near accident. Other old-timers and close friends stopped by to lend a hand. I watched as they worked up a sweat, carrying provisions that they hoped would feed thousands of visitors. All the while, Ekuban’s phone chimed, sending a notification for each ticket bought online. As the sun set, a caravan of trailers carrying horses and bulls arrived.

Ekuban’s aspirations for the rodeo echo the ambitions of her forebears. In 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation signed a treaty with the United States. In that agreement, all Black people who had been enslaved by the Muscogee Nation were emancipated and provided with full Creek citizenship privileges, including the right to landownership. (The Muscogee Nation would later redefine citizenship to exclude the descendants of those enslaved people, a decision that some descendants are challenging in court.) Abigail Barnett and her father, James, a freedman of the Muscogee Nation, were deeded the land that would become Boley, and many other Black Creek citizens settled nearby. After the arrival of the Fort Smith and Western Railway, in 1903, J. B. Boley, a white railroad agent, helped the community incorporate, a process completed in 1905. According to the historical marker in town, Mr. Boley had faith in the Black Man to govern himself and persuaded the railroad to establish a townsite here.

In those days, Oklahoma was promoted by a network of boosters as a promised land for Black people, part of a larger movement to establish Black autonomy and self-governance throughout the West. Some 50 Black towns popped up across Oklahoma from 1865 through 1920. This movement was closely associated with the work of Edward McCabe, who’d risen to prominence when he became the state auditor of Kansas, the first Black person to be elected to a statewide office in the West. McCabe moved to the Oklahoma Territory after two terms in office, hoping to make it a majority-Black state. In an 1891 speech, he laid out his vision. “We will have a new party, having for its purpose negro supremacy in at least one State,” he said, with “negro State and county officers and negro Senators and Representatives in Washington.” Answering the summons of McCabe and others, thousands of Black people chose to forsake the dominion of Jim Crow for Oklahoma.

Karen Ekuban, the promoter of the 2024 Boley Rodeo, hoped that the event would help bring her hometown back to its former glory. (Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic)

The very existence of Boley, and other towns like it, proved what was then—in many white people’s minds—a radical proposition: that Black people could thrive on their own. Booker T. Washington visited the town in 1905 and marveled at its two colleges, its abundance of land. Unlike in other Black communities in America at the time, many of which struggled, the original guarantee of citizenship and property rights in Boley under the 1866 treaty gave citizens a measure of security and wealth to pass on. Even decades after Boley’s founding, the allure of freedom and the ability to own the land under their feet drew Black families—including Ekuban’s Mississippian parents—from across the South.

[From the September 2019 issue: The Mississippi Delta’s history of Black-land theft]

The exact origins of the Boley Rodeo are lost to time, although we do know that it likely arose organically from local customs that predated the town itself. Rodeo, descended from practices established by Spanish and Mexican ranchers, had been molded into its modern form through the participation of Black cowboys, and Boley’s iteration formalized it locally as an event. Even in its early days, the Boley Rodeo regularly drew spectators of all races from Oklahoma and elsewhere, and inspired several other rodeos across the South and the West. One year, Joe Louis, the legendary boxer, made an appearance. The rodeo was always an important source of income for the town.

The 1960s marked the heyday of both Boley and its famous rodeo. According to The Black Dispatch, a newspaper in Oklahoma City, at least 10,000 people attended the event in 1961. The rodeo that year featured acts such as Billy “The Kid” Emerson, a Black rock-and-roll pioneer, and a full orchestra from Houston. In 1963, the same newspaper noted the growth in the “small Negro metropolis,” marked by the five new businesses that had sprung up on Main Street.

But as has been the trend in much of rural America—particularly Black rural America—Boley has suffered from the loss of capital and the gravitational pull of city life. In recent decades, many young people left in search of opportunities elsewhere, and the elders who remained struggled to keep the memory of the old days alive. Boley’s self-reliance had been lauded by white politicians and business executives, but when the town struggled, they lost interest, leaving it to wither.

Over time, the rodeo faded as well. Before Ekuban pitched her plan, it seemed possible that the rodeo might disappear entirely, and that—in a state where history books rarely mention places like Boley—the history might disappear too. Even with Ekuban’s intervention, there are no guarantees.

Ekuban left Boley after high school, some 35 years ago, with no interest in returning. But she eventually discovered that the place had a hold on her. Her mother had taught for decades in the now-defunct school, and her father had served as superintendent. Ekuban remembers how sporting events were held at the local prison, one of the town’s main employers, because there were no facilities elsewhere. When she returned to the area, she bought a house in nearby Spencer, another majority-Black town in Oklahoma. Ekuban started several revitalization projects, because she wanted to cultivate the beauty she saw in her hometown. But after she learned more about Boley’s history from “Grandmother” Hicks, Ekuban’s says her desire to help took on new significance.

She wanted to impress that significance upon the rodeo’s supporters, and to explain just why its success was important. So, the day before the rodeo, even with plenty of setup work left to do, Ekuban gathered a group of friends and family members. They drove to Tulsa to visit the Greenwood Rising History Center, which commemorates Tulsa’s Greenwood District, a neighborhood that had been established by Black people as part of the same wave of migration that built Boley. Greenwood was a thriving community that grew so prosperous, it gained national fame under the moniker “Black Wall Street.” But in 1921, a mob of white assailants attacked and burned the district, killing as many as 300 Black residents and leaving thousands more homeless. The massacre was a tragic reminder of the limits of the optimism of boosters like McCabe, who believed that a Black state could offer “equal chances with the white man, free and independent.” But the exhibition also shows that, even if only briefly, the exertions of Black people themselves brought McCabe’s vision to fruition.

Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic

In front of the exhibits showcasing the golden age of Black Oklahoma, Ekuban told the crowd how early Boleyites had journeyed hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles to unfamiliar territory, and then dug, carved, and heaved their way to independence. They built schools, gristmills, homes, universities, churches, and hospitals. They bore children, and one generation passed down its story to the next. Part of that story was the Boley Rodeo. For more than a century, cowboys had sought to ride atop the bulls and broncos as long as their will and body would allow. They did this for money and acclaim, yes, but also for a less tangible reason: because, no matter how many times they were knocked off their horse, dusted up, and trampled on, trying was always their salvation.

Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic

By the morning of the rodeo, Ekuban had sold more than 1,400 advance tickets, and she hoped thousands more would purchase admission at the gate. She’d already banked more than $20,000 from ticket sales.

A parade of souped-up classic cars, followed by dancing, flag-waving spectators, opened the event. Willie Jones, a country singer who was featured on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album, performed. And then, at 7 p.m., the cowboys entered. The gates to the east of the arena opened and the horses galloped through, kicking up huge clouds of dust.

For the first time in weeks, Ekuban breathed easy. If only for a moment, she could return to the wonder she had experienced as a kid. But then, just 30 minutes into the rodeo, she spoke with her husband, whom she had appointed to liaise with local police and security. Attendance had surged to more than 5,000 people. Without enough seats, some spectators were hanging on the white railing of the rodeo arena. Ekuban had to tell her husband and the police officers to close the gates to the rodeo grounds.

Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic

As the sun set, young cowboys proved their mettle by riding half-wild broncos, the muscles of both man and beast straining to prevail. When the bulls came out, the competitors traded their cowboy hats for padded helmets. Away from the action, Ekuban watched as attendees bought merchandise from stands run by her fellow Boleyites.

Finally, it was time for the centerpiece of the rodeo: the Pony Express, a relay race on horseback, a tradition unique to Oklahoma rodeos. In the finals, the Country Boyz faced off against newer competitors, the Yung Fly Cowboys. Four riders from each team lined up, whispering in their horses’ ears.

The gun fired, and the competitors took off. Riding half-ton horses, they went around the track furiously. The Yung Fly Cowboys finished first, unseating the Country Boyz as champions. In a moment that might have seemed strange at any other rodeo, the stereo system swapped out the country music that had been playing all day for “Get in With Me,” by the Florida rapper BossMan Dlow. The winning crew’s music blared, and winners and losers alike recited every lyric.

The rodeo was over.

Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic

Today, with the success of Cowboy Carter, with the breakthroughs of Black country artists such as Shaboozey, with the growing prominence of Black rodeos including Bill Pickett’s Invitational, and with increased awareness of the Greenwood District through vehicles like the HBO miniseries Watchmen, it’s easier than ever to see the Boley Rodeo’s legacy. In popular culture, the mélange of Westerns and cowboys and country music that is often called “Americana” has been associated with a particular vision of liberty, in which the people most entitled to the possibilities of the West are white men who mastered the land and its inhabitants. But Boley and its rodeo helped create a countertradition—that of the Black West. In this tradition, Black people who had every reason to give up on America instead struck out for places like Boley and dictated the terms of their belonging.

The Black West is a compilation of stories often overlooked or forgotten. As someone from Oklahoma, I’ve long wondered why our histories—of rodeos and of the dreams of leaders like Edward McCabe—don’t appear in many mainstream depictions of Black life. It is our obligation to salvage and reimagine these remnants.

Kennedi Carter for The Atlantic

When it was all over, Ekuban had sold about 3,500 tickets to the revitalized rodeo, and had raised more than $270,000 from ticket sales, donations, sponsorships, and investments. She deemed it enough of a success to start planning the next one before the spectators had even left. It remains unclear whether the rodeo can actually attract enough money to save Boley, but the event undoubtedly helped spread the word about the town’s history and culture, and that was, in itself, a kind of victory. I was surprised when Ekuban, an eternal optimist, seemed to acknowledge how quixotic her mission is. “Boley will never be what it was,” she told me, then added: “But who says it can’t be better?”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “Boley Rides Again.”

Many friends of mine are pretty deep in the slough of despond. I occasionally plead with them to make their predictions of catastrophe less hopeless and categorical, but with less success than I wish. I respect their points of view but have decided to look elsewhere for advice, and so have turned to a different set of friends—those sitting on my bookshelves.

Some of these friends have been with me for more than half a century; and they get wiser and more insightful with age. One of the first I turned to is only slightly older than I am: Motivation and Personality, by the academic psychologist Abraham Maslow. The book has a family history: Maslow summered at a lake in Maine in a cabin near one owned by my grandfather, a self-made shoe-factory owner who came to the United States with only the benefit of a grade-school education.

The story goes that Maslow was complaining about his inability to finish writing his magnum opus while surrounded by the clamor of kids and holiday-makers. After a couple of days of this, Sam Cohen turned to him, told him that writing was a job like any other, and that he had set aside an office for him in his factory, and then he ordered (rather than invited) him to go there and finish the book. Maslow did, and I have the author’s inscription on the title page to prove it.

[Read: A mindset for the Trump era]

Maslow thought that psychology had focused excessively on the pathological; he was interested instead in what made for psychological health—a deeper and truer objective, to my mind, than the contemporary quest for happiness, which tends to be ephemeral and occasionally inappropriate to our circumstances.

Here are two relevant bits:

Since for healthy people, the unknown is not frightening, they do not have to spend any time laying the ghost, whistling past the cemetery or otherwise protecting themselves against imagined dangers. They do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it, or try to make believe it is really known, nor do they organize, dichotomize, or rubricize it prematurely.

And then this:

They can take the frailties and sins, weaknesses, and evils of human nature in the same unquestioning spirit with which one accepts the characteristics of nature. One does not complain about water because it is wet, or about rocks because they are hard, or about trees because they are green. As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical, undemanding, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person tend to look upon human nature in himself and others.

This is, as Maslow says, the stoic style, and one to which a person should aspire in a world where norms are flouted, wild things are done and wilder said, and perils real and imagined loom before us. Maslow’s healthy individual has little inclination to spluttering outrage, which does not mean ignoring unpleasant realities. Just the reverse, in fact.

Having settled into that frame of mind, what about the matter of predicting Trump-administration policies? Another even older friend, George Orwell, speaks to that one.

Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality.

This, I suspect, is going to be a particular problem in dealing with the world of Donald Trump. Neither widely shared hopes (that he will ignore Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., for example, and be more or less normal in most respects) nor fears (that he’s going to do whatever he wants and be even crazier than he lets on) will be useful guides. But, being human, we will make judgments constantly distorted by both emotions. Orwell has a solution:

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.

Useful advice from a man who confessed that most of his own predictions during World War II were wrong, although, as I know from experience, his remedy can be a painful corrective.

On what basis, then, should one attempt to predict Trumpian policy? A downright ancient friend comes to the rescue on this one:

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.

This, from Marcus Aurelius, the last good Roman emperor and a thoughtful Stoic philosopher, is not a bad beginning in looking at an administration that will have a few barbarians in it. He continues:

Whatever man you meet, say to yourself at once: ‘what are the principles this man entertains about human goods and ills?’ For if he has certain principles about pleasure and pain and the sources of these, about honour and dishonour, about death and life, it will not seem surprising or strange to me if he acts in certain ways.  

So much of the contemporary speculation about the administration depends on the distinctive personality of the president-elect and some of his more outré advisers and confidantes. But simply ranting about them does not help one understand what is going on.

One of the troubles with the anti-Trump camp is the tendency simply to demonize. Some demonic characters may roam about the administration, but we would be better off trying to figure out what makes Trump tick. In particular, that phrase about honor and dishonor is worth pondering. For a man in his eighth decade with remarkable political success to his credit, who has just survived two assassination attempts, honor in Marcus Aurelius’s sense is probably something beyond “owning the libs.” More likely, Trump is looking to record enduring accomplishments, including a peace deal in Ukraine. Figuring out what he would like those to be, and in what way, is probably the best method of figuring out how to influence him, to the extent that anyone can.

[Jonathan Chait: The bizarre normalcy of Trump 2.0]

Let us say that we get better at training our judgments and anticipating what the administration will do and why. There may still be plenty of things to brood about—the possibilities of tariff wars, betrayals of allies, mass deportations, attempts to prosecute deep-state denizens, and more. Even if Trump himself may be considerably less destructive than some fear, the MAGA movement will be out there: acolytes looking for opportunities to exit NATO, ban abortion entirely, make getting vaccines through Medicare impossible, sabotage the institutions that guarantee free and fair elections, or simply grift and corrupt their way through ambassadorships and other high government offices.

For that, something more spiritual is indicated, and I find it in the Library of America edition of one of the previous century’s deep thinkers, Reinhold Niebuhr.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Serenity will be something we will need in the years ahead. If you ask me, a well-stocked library will be of more help getting there than tranquilizers, wide-eyed staring at one’s mobile phone, or scrambling to find out if an Irish ancestor qualifies you for a European Union passport.