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Last month, Donald Trump appointed the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his senior AI-policy adviser. Krishnan, an Indian immigrant and U.S. citizen, was seen by some as being friendly to H-1B visas, which are often used in Silicon Valley to allow skilled laborers to work in the tech industry. This sent part of the MAGA faction into a frenzy, spurred by troll in chief Laura Loomer, who declared the appointment a betrayal of the “America First” movement.

The argument over H-1Bs exposes an important fissure in the MAGA alliance that worked together to help elect Trump. How Trump navigates this rift will give us clues about what his real priorities will be as president.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Ali Breland, who writes about the internet, technology, and politics, about this new rift in Trump’s camp and other places it might show up. And we’ll go beyond the politics, with staff writer Rogé Karma, to discuss what a solid body of research shows about the relationship between immigrant labor and the American worker—because even though some prominent Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders, agree with Loomer that there is a negative effect from H-1B visas on American workers, research doesn’t back them up.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There are already cracks starting to show in the MAGA alliance, and those cracks happen to show up in the issue that Trump has declared one of his top priorities, which is drastically reshaping U.S. immigration policy. Trump appointed to a senior position someone seen as being friendly to H-1B visas, the visas that allow people with specialized skills to work in the U.S. People in Silicon Valley love these visas. They depend on them. And maybe more importantly, the H-1B visa lovers include Elon Musk.

But the “America First” wing of Trump supporters—sometimes known as the nativist right—they do not love these visas. “America First,” to them, means, literally, Americans first. No exceptions.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. On today’s show, we’ll talk about this MAGA infighting. In the second half of the show, we’ll get into what’s actually true about the relationship between immigration and the American worker, because it turns out that even a lot of Democrats don’t get that one right. But first, let’s dive into the recent news and what it means. To help me with that is Ali Breland, an Atlantic staff writer who writes about the internet, politics, and technology.

Hey, Ali.

Ali Breland: Hey. Thank you for having me.

Rosin: So, Ali, this fracture in the MAGA alliance seemed to start around Christmas, when Trump announced a senior AI-policy adviser. Who is he, and how did people respond?

Breland: Yeah, his name is Sriram Krishnan. He’s this Silicon Valley figure who has a long history. He works in tech, and he was being appointed to be an adviser on Trump’s AI team, which is being headed up by another big guy in tech: David Sacks, who’s a part of the infamous “PayPal Mafia” that includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etcetera.

Rosin: So these are, like—this is a faction. Like, these guys are becoming more and more powerful, sort of Trump’s tech allies.

Breland: Yeah, there’s some different ideological things happening, but for the most part, they’re largely on the same page. And a lot of people right now are kind of calling them the “new tech right,” or just, like, the “tech right.”

Rosin: So they’re on one side, and then how did the discussion around H-1B visas get going?

Breland: Yeah, so there’s this provocateur troll in Trump World called Laura Loomer. She’s been kind of this weird thing on the right for a long time. She’s chained herself to the headquarters of Twitter in protest of her account being banned at one point. But she sees this appointment, and she decides to make hay of it.

She pulls out a tweet that Krishnan made about country caps for green cards, rather, and high-skilled immigration. And she points to these things and says, This is not what we want. This is not “America First.” These things are not good for our constituency. And so that’s, like, the sort of obvious bit of it.

The other bit, too, is you can kind of see how race is this animating issue in this fight. David Sacks had already been appointed by Trump to be his chief adviser on issues of AI and crypto. David Sacks has talked about H-1B visas. He’s pushed Trump on this. He’s successfully gotten Trump to say that he would support the continued use of H-1B visas.

But Loomer didn’t attack him on that and didn’t turn this into a huge issue. Instead, she went after Sriram Krishnan, who is South Asian. And I think, you know, her targeting him, specifically, on this issue and associating him with that kind of speaks to the sort of nativist sentiment undergirding all of this.

Kind of right after the election, I sort of thought that maybe there was a chance that there was going to be some sort of fractious element at some point in the future, because these are two sides that kind of believe sort of different things.

The tech right is reactionary, like the nativist right that includes people like Laura Loomer, people like Steve Bannon. They sort of all have this streak of being frustrated with the progress that’s taken place in America. They are frustrated with what they see as, like, American weakness. But the distinction is that the tech right also loves business. They love being rich. They love making a lot of money and having their industry be benefitted.

The sort of nativist right cares much more about the American constituency and, specifically, the white American constituency—and benefitting what they see as, like, the natural order of whiteness and the average American, and things that some people in the tech right kind of care about but prioritize less than their own companies and less than their own industry.

Rosin: It’s really complicated because they both have ideas like, There’s an optimum society; there’s a right way that things should be. And then they’re slightly different. So what is each side’s ideal “America made great again” look like?

Breland: Yeah, I think it on the sort of nativist right, the ideal America is this place that prioritizes—with some exceptions, more so now—but fundamentally, it’s this white, sort of very classic, conventional, conservative vision for what the United States is. It’s this, like, return fantasy to a version of the 1950s America that prioritizes white American interests above other people—again, with exceptions. There’s—you know, these people would all say that they’re not racist, that they’re just meritocratic, or things like that.

The tech right is more agnostic to those kinds of things. People like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel kind of, to some degree, see value in that. But they only see value as far as that doesn’t get in the way of their vision for creating this sort of all-star team of Americans that can sort of dominate the global stage in technology and dominate economically.

And so they’re willing to go to look to other countries to bring people in; to try to, like, get the best talent, according to them; to try to solve the toughest engineering problems; and to do things like beat China, which is something that they’re all very obsessed with.

Rosin: So they’re less concerned about where people come from. I mean, what makes it especially complicated and charged that this came up so soon is that it came up in immigration. Trump has made controlling immigration one of his top priorities. How did Trump himself end up weighing in on this?

Breland: After a few days of silence—perhaps because this was happening literally over Christmas and the days after—Trump did say that he does support H-1B visas. And he seemed to kind of take Elon’s side on this.

I wasn’t super surprised, because on an episode of the All-In Podcast—which is a sort of who’s who of the tech right; it includes David Sacks—Trump was pressed on the H-1B visa issue, and he did say, Yeah, I support it; I’m down for this. This was in the summer. And so it was consistent for him to come back up with this. And the other thing it’s sort of consistent with, in a sort of more general, patterny kind of way, is that in the past, when there is sort of tension between his sort of more nationalist, nativist base versus the wealthier interests that are in his coalition—not always, but—he often tends to go with the sort of interests of the wealthy, the people who have given him the most amount of money, people who he probably respects because he has a great deal of respect for people who have built wealth.

And so it wasn’t super surprising to see him break that way, especially because it seems like his larger immigration priority is not regarding H-1Bs, and he seems more flexible on that. His larger immigration priority is people who, as he would say, came here illegally and are not quote-unquote “high-skilled workers.”

And so on the sort of issue of mass deportation, this doesn’t signal that he’s, like, going to break from that at all. He’s talked a lot, very aggressively, about conducting mass deportations and quote-unquote “securing the southern border.” And they talk about the southern border, specifically, because they’re talking about a different kind of immigrant, and they have a different set of priorities when it comes to people coming across the southern border.

Rosin: Interesting. So then, maybe, the thing to explore is the nativist right, not just Laura Loomer. Laura Loomer is, you know, a little more on the fringes. But what about someone like Stephen Miller, who will be Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and who is credited with shaping a lot of the more draconian immigration policies in the last administration. He has solid power in this administration. Have we heard from him or someone closer to power about what they think about H-1B visas?

Breland: Miller hasn’t weighed in directly on this specific moment and this specific issue. He sort of gave a cryptic tweet that signaled that he is still anti-H-1B.

But he’s been very consistent on this in the past, and there’s no reason to believe that he would change, as someone who is, like, motivated primarily by this sort of nativist perspective that is, again, sort of galvanized by racial animus and, in many cases, just outright racism. I don’t think he’ll change his perspective, and he’s going to fight on this, and so there’s going to be weird tension moving forward.

Elon seemed to—I don’t want to say he walked back from this position, but, like, after a few days of fighting, he did seem to try to want to soften the blows and sort of extend an olive branch. People in sort of fairly influential but niche figures in this sort of nationalist, reactionary wing of the party also tried to sort of smooth over the tension and make it seem like there was common cause being found. And so they have an interest among themselves in trying to come together and paint themselves as a united front and sort of reach a consensus on this.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, it’s still early. He hasn’t even taken office yet. But could you imagine a universe where, then, it just moves forward, and we quietly make an exception for elite workers and do mass deportations for everyone else? Like, is that where immigration policy could land?

Breland: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that—from my perspective and the things I pay attention to—that seems exactly the direction it’s going to go in.

The tech right is aware of the mass deportations [but] has not really talked out against them. Elon Musk has tweeted acknowledging them and sees them as an inevitability that he doesn’t seem to have a clear problem with. That could change when we sort of get, like, harrowing images of ICE conducting raids and things like that, but right now, that’s the track that we’re on.

Rosin: So if what you said is true, and if the past history holds, he is going to make an exception for elite immigrant workers. What does that imply about how he might handle other economic issues?

Breland: Yeah, if we extrapolate this out, which we can—both from this example but then, also, from how 2016 through 2020 went—Trump is probably going to side, I guess, with more of the wealthier faction, which includes the tech right, which includes people in his coalition, who are people like the hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent, who also sort of have this prioritization of more, like, economically laissez-faire issues. They have this sort of more traditional, conservative perspective on economics. And that’s something that’s going to run into tension with what the nationalists want. They want this sort of economic nationalist perspective that is a departure from this hyper-free-market sort of way of viewing the world that’s been the dominant conservative perspective for the past several decades.

Rosin: So essentially, this rift that you pointed out in the MAGA world—between, you know, Is he going to take the side of the elites, or is he going to take the side of all the workers? even if that means the nativist right—that’s a rift you can track kind of up and down various issues for the next many years, just to see, Okay, whose side does he take on a lot of these issues?

Breland: Exactly. Yeah. AI and automation is going to be a really big one in this area, too, because the tech right obviously cares a lot about AI and automation. They’re very pro-AI and automation. They see this as, like, an existential issue in the United States versus China, and that the U.S. must—to continue its being, like, the most important country in the world—that must beat China on this.

But a lot of the sort of more nationalist right doesn’t agree with this. They see this as a different kind of issue. Tucker Carlson, who I think kind of squarely falls in this nativist camp and is one of its most influential members, has outright said that he opposes—not necessarily the development of AI and automation but—its implementation and use.

He’s talked directly about never using AI for, like, things like driverless trucks. But Elon at Tesla is directly making self-driving trucks. And so yeah, there’s a lot of weird places where these sort of fractures are going to play out.

Rosin: And Tucker Carlson takes that issue because it’s a betrayal of the American worker.

Breland: Precisely.

Rosin: Interesting. So this is, actually, the central fissure of the Trump administration, basically?

Breland: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like that. I do want to say that this is kind of a unique issue, in that it draws in race, which is a very big thing, and it draws in immigration. And so it might get a uniquely high amount of attention. But there’s still going to be versions of this fight that might not play out as aggressively that are going to happen over the next four years.

Rosin: Well, Ali, thank you for pointing out this line to us. We’ll be watching it for the next four years, and thank you for joining me.

Breland: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Rosin: After the break, we explore what’s behind the politics. Trump and his allies made the argument often in the campaign that immigrants take away jobs from Americans. It’s an argument that, on the surface, has some intuitive logic. But it actually doesn’t work like that. More soon.

[Break]

Rosin: Joining me is Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma, who mainly covers economics. Rogé, welcome to the show.

Rogé Karma: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So an early rift broke out in the Trump administration over H-1B visas, which we’ve been discussing on this show, with the nativist right saying what people say about all kinds of immigration: These immigrants take jobs away from American workers. So what do we know about the relationship between H-1B visa holders and the American worker?

Karma: Well, luckily, the H-1B program allocates workers randomly to companies based on a lottery. And that allows researchers to study what actually happens to the companies that did get workers, as opposed to the companies that didn’t.

And I agree with you. I think there’s a real sort of “man on the street” argument. There’s a sort of view that there’s a fixed pool of jobs, and so any immigrant that we bring in is going to take away a job that would otherwise go to an American. But when researchers have looked at this, the overwhelming majority of the studies have actually found no negative impact on either employment or wages, which I think at first sounds a little bit counterintuitive.

But the reason is a few fold. One: Companies who get H-1B workers actually end up growing and scaling up faster than the companies who don’t. And then because of that, they have to then hire a bunch of more native-born workers around that immigrant. The second reason is innovation.

One of my favorite statistics comes from Jeremy Neufeld, who’s a fellow at the Institute for Progress. And he pointed out that 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. startups belong to immigrants. Now, not all of those are H-1B holders, but there’s a lot of evidence that the companies who are awarded H-1B visas—they produce more patents, more new products, get more VC funding, and all of that actually creates jobs. So on the whole, I actually don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for this broader nativist claim about this program.

Rosin: Let’s make this a little more concrete. So let’s just play out a theoretical company. Here’s a theoretical company, hires H-1B visa holders. How does it work? Like, innovation is a vague word. How does it actually play out?

Karma: I think what’s important to remember here is that getting one of these H-1B visas is actually pretty difficult. And so the idea that a company is going to be able to systematically bring in foreign workers to replace their native ones using this program—it’s just really hard to do because there’s such a low chance they’re even going to get those workers in the first place. And so a lot of times when companies use this program, what they’re doing is they’re looking for a very important skill set.

So let’s use semiconductors as an example. This is an industry, when it comes to the manufacturing of semiconductors, that U.S. companies haven’t really done for a while. A lot of the most advanced chips are made in places like Taiwan, and so a lot of the best talent is abroad. And so if you’re a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, the industry in the U.S. estimates that even if we had the best job-training programs possible, that would only fill about 50 percent of the high-skilled demand for the labor force in this field.

And so you need to bring in folks who have this highly specialized knowledge, probably because they’ve worked in other countries. But then, what that allows you to do, once you have a subset of foreign-born workers who can do this sort of specialized manufacturing—what you then have is people to come in and support around them. And then because a company has that need met, they’re able to then hire a bunch of other workers to fill other needs that they have but that don’t require that same kind of specialized knowledge.

And on the other flip side is that we actually have some studies that look at: What happens to the companies that don’t get H-1B visas? What happens to those companies? Do they hire more native workers? Do they invest in more job training? And it turns out that they don’t. In fact, they end up often just either (A) producing less or growing less quickly, or (B)—and this is a finding of a lot of the recent literature—they end up outsourcing the jobs instead. And so instead of bringing in this new worker and then hiring more native workers around them, they just say, Well, look, we have an office in China, or we have an office in Singapore, or we have an office in Hong Kong or India. Let’s just hire more there because we’re not going to be able to get the talent that we need here.

There are a handful of outlier studies, but I think, right now, the broad consensus in the field is that the H-1B program, even for all its flaws, doesn’t seem to have these negative employment or wage effects.

Rosin: So that’s what the research shows. It’s fairly definitive until now, and yet even some Democrats have repeated the line, The H-1B visas take away American jobs—for example, Bernie Sanders. What do you make of that?

Karma: Well, I think where Bernie’s coming from—and I think where a lot of Democrats are coming from and, quite frankly, some Republicans—is that there are two things that are true here at once. The first thing that’s true is that we don’t find these huge negative effects from the H-1B program. And the second thing that’s also true is that, despite that, the H-1B program has a lot of flaws, a lot of loopholes that companies have learned how to game.

So one of these is that a significant portion of H-1B visas are used by so-called outsourcing firms, which are these companies that basically bring in foreign workers. They train them here, and then, when their H-1B visa expires, they employ them in their home countries for a fraction of the cost. And so they’re functionally using the H-1B visa to train workers here and then employ them at lower labor costs elsewhere.

That’s just bad, on the face of it. The fact that we still don’t see negative effects, overall, is really telling, but we should fix that loophole by, among other things, raising the minimum wage for H-1B visa holders, making the program merit-based instead of random—like, you can more closely regulate how companies use those workers.

So I think part of what Bernie Sanders is getting at, part of what some of these critiques are getting at, is that this program does have a lot of flaws that allow corporations to game it. And it’s actually kind of shocking that, despite all these flaws, it still hasn’t produced these horribly negative results.

But imagine how much better it could be if we fix them. So I really think that this might be a place where you see the sort of messy realities of immigration politics running up against what, really, people all across the political spectrum agree is a pretty common-sense set of reforms. But that doesn’t always mean it makes good politics.

Rosin: Right. Right. Okay. So we’ve been talking exclusively about the H-1B visas because they came up in the news, but the whole of Trump’s promise is not specifically about H-1B visas at all; it’s a promise of mass deportation and immigrant labor, in general. I know that you’ve been looking into the research about the relationship between immigrant labor and the American worker. What did you find?

Karma: Well, I went into this because I kept hearing Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller make these kind of claims that sound kind of intuitive—that when immigrants come in, they take jobs from natives, right? There’s a sort of Econ 101 logic, which says that when the supply of any good goes up, including labor, the price of that good, like wages, goes down.

And so I kept hearing these arguments and thinking, Well, maybe there’s something to this, and so let’s actually look at what is happening. And it turns out that the sort of Trump-Vance view was pretty much the conventional wisdom for most of the 20th century, both among policymakers and economists, until a study came along that sort of shattered the consensus.

And so to tell you about the study, I’m gonna go back a little bit. So in 1980, Fidel Castro, the president of Cuba, opened up emigration from his country. He lifted the ban on emigration. And what that allowed is for 125,000 Cubans to leave from Mariel Harbor to Miami, Florida, an event that ended up becoming known as the Mariel Boatlift. And in just a few short months, Miami’s workforce expands by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands every year because of immigration. And this created the perfect conditions for what economists call a “natural experiment.” It was like this big, massive shock that only happened to Miami.

And so what the economist David Card later realized is that you could compare what happened to workers in Miami to workers in other cities that had not experienced the boatlift, track how wages did in both, and then see what actually happened. And his view was, Look—if there is a negative effect of immigration on wages, Miami in the 1980s is exactly where it should show up. It’s this big, unprecedented shock. That makes what he ended up finding so shocking, because he ends up finding that this huge influx of immigrants has virtually no effect on both employment or wages of native-born workers in Miami, including those without a college degree.

Rosin: And why? I mean, it seems counterintuitive.

Karma: It seems completely counterintuitive. There are a few reasons, but I think the big one—and the big thing that the common-sense view of immigration misses—is that immigrants aren’t just workers. They’re also consumers. You know, they’re people who buy things, like healthcare and housing and groceries. And so at the same time that they’re, you know, competing with Americans for jobs, they’re also buying lots of things that then increase the need for more jobs.

And I think this sounds counterintuitive, but we think about it in other contexts all the time, right? When’s the last time you heard a Republican politician railing against the upcoming group of high-school graduates because they were about to come in and compete with, you know, people currently in the workforce?

You probably haven’t, because we understand that population growth has these two sides to it: that people are consumers who create demand for jobs and workers who take jobs. And so I think that’s the gist of the problem with the conventional view.

Rosin: So that was a singular study. Has that held up over time?

Karma: It has. And so after that study, it got a lot of researchers interested, and this has now been studied in countries all over the world, from Israel to Denmark to Portugal to France, and almost all of the high-quality studies come back with very similar results.

I think the one complication in all of this—the one challenge—has been, Well, what about the least-skilled workers? What about: Okay, maybe on average, immigrants don’t hurt the employment prospects or the wages of native-born workers, but what about the least-skilled workers? What about high-school dropouts, folks without a high-school diploma? And a lot of the more recent literature has shown that even that group doesn’t suffer when immigrants come in.

And so I think the broad consensus in the literature now is that immigration does have costs. It can exacerbate inequality. Tellingly, the wages of other immigrants often get hurt by new immigration. You could see some negative effects in certain sectors, even if it’s balanced out by other sectors, but on the whole, it appears to be really beneficial for basically all classes of native workers.

Rosin: So at this point, there’s a large body of research saying the arrival of immigrants—even sudden arrival of immigrants—doesn’t have a great effect on the American worker, may even have a positive effect. Now, what about the disappearance of immigrant labor? Because Trump’s promise is mass deportations. I’m not sure if you can just flip, you know, the findings of this research. Like, is there a similar natural experiment or study that shows how that might affect workers or the economy?

Karma: There is, actually. And I think the claim from Trump and his advisers is that the ultimate pro-worker policy is mass deportation, right? Because what happens when you get rid of a bunch of immigrant laborers is now those employers have to hire natives at higher wages, because there’s a sort of artificially created labor shortage.

Rosin: Right.

Karma: And again, very intuitive. But when we actually look at what happens in the real world, we see something very different. So the best study on this, I think—although there’s a few—is from the Secure Communities program, which is a Department of Homeland Security program that between 2008 and 2014 deported about 500,000 immigrants. And because the program was rolled out community by community, it created this really nice natural experiment where you could see what happened to the communities that had experienced it and the ones [that] hadn’t.

You could compare them and see what the overall effect [was]. And what researchers found, actually, shocked me—it shocked many of them—was that for every hundred immigrants that were deported, you actually ended up with nine fewer jobs for natives. That’s not just temporary work. That’s, like, nine jobs permanently gone in this community.

And there are many studies that reinforce this finding from all across history, from the Bracero program, studies on the H-2B program—which is like H-1B, but for lower-skilled immigrants—studies going all the way back to the Great Depression that all find similar things.

And the reason is that immigrants are deeply interwoven into their local economies. And so take the restaurant industry. If you’re a restaurant owner, and suddenly you lose a big chunk of your workforce, to the point where you either have to have higher labor costs and at the same time you have less demand, there’s a good chance you have to go out of business altogether. And when you go out of business, that doesn’t just hurt the immigrants who are working for you. That also hurts the native-born workers.

And so there are all these sort of synchronicities, all of these interconnections, that allow immigration to have this positive sum effect. But then as soon as you—if you rip out the immigrants, then native workers often get caught in the crossfire.

Rosin: Yeah. So if the research is so consistent—so strong—and makes a lot of sense, if you think about it a tiny bit more deeply, why do you think this sentiment persists? Is it just a feeling, you know? Because it persists on both the right and the left. It’s not as if the left is fighting back. They don’t necessarily advocate mass deportations, but they are also not fighting back against this idea that immigrants take away American jobs.

Karma: I think part of the fixation on the economics of immigration is a way for many people like us—elites, people in the media—to try to find a more materialist explanation for a set of instincts that I think many of us are uncomfortable with. And I think that is actually kind of a tragedy.

I think if people oppose immigration or feel strongly about immigration because of certain cultural beliefs or concerns about national identity, it’s important to take those concerns seriously. And I think it’s actually a problem, and even a bit patronizing, that we tend to project these sort of more wonky economic concerns onto that.

Rosin: Yeah. I had a conversation with Representative Ritchie Torres of New York right after the election, who talked about how a lot of the immigrants in his neighborhood had a surprising amount of anti-undocumented immigrant sentiment.

And it made me wonder about—I don’t even know how to define this, but sense of chaos, just a feeling of things not being in control. It’s sort of the way people feel about crime. There just seems to be a sense that things have run away, and you can’t get ahead. It’s a vague thing, but it is related to—There’s just so much out of control, and I need someone to stop it.

Karma: I actually think that’s a really important point. One of the greatest shifts in public opinion on immigration has happened in the last few years, where in 2020, according to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans said they wanted immigration decreased.

Four years later, that number was 55 percent. So it had almost doubled. And that is much larger and much faster than even the public-opinion shift on something like gay marriage. So this is a huge, almost unprecedented shift. And as I dug into why, what came up over and over again is this feeling of chaos, this feeling that we are not in control of our own border. And when you actually look at questions about how people feel towards immigrants themselves, they hadn’t changed nearly as much.

People weren’t necessarily anti-immigrant, as much as they felt like the immigration process had gotten out of control and the immigration process was no longer serving the country. And so I think it is really important to distinguish [between] those two things. And I think a lot of the public-opinion shift we’ve seen over the last few years—it isn’t about economics. It’s really about this sense of control and chaos.

Rosin: Yeah. So maybe the place to end is this: Have you talked to anyone or done any thinking about how, in a situation like this, you close the gap? Because we, as journalists—it’s frustrating to us to know that there is an answer. You know, there’s an answer that research has provided. There are truths and facts. And separate from that, there is a perception. So have you thought of or seen anybody talk interestingly about how you bridge a gap like that, where people feel one way that is discordant with what the reality is?

Karma: Unfortunately, like any good journalist, I’m not quite as good at the solutions as I am about identifying the problems. But I will say, I think at the root of a lot of this is the fact that there’s an underlying scarcity. Right?

So I think an example of this is housing. Recently—you know, we haven’t talked about this, in particular—but J. D. Vance and Donald Trump made a big deal in their campaign about how immigrants were responsible for driving up housing costs. That argument has never held weight in American politics before, because it is only over the last decade that housing costs and a housing shortage has become a big problem. When there is material scarcity, people look for a villain; people look for someone to blame. And so I think one answer to, for example, the blaming [of] immigrants for housing costs is to say, Well, if we fix the housing shortage such that people don’t feel that scarcity, maybe we can avoid some of that.

I think the other sort of way I’d look at this is: In some senses, one of the most pro-immigrant things you could do is reduce the amount of chaos, right? So I think there’s actually a sort of middle ground here where you could reduce a lot of the chaos at the border while expanding legal immigration in a way that keeps immigrants coming in but creates a more orderly process that people feel comfortable with. And you can actually get more positive sentiment as a result.

I just think what makes it difficult is the politics are almost perfectly aligned to make that difficult from happening. And it’s been, you know—immigration reform is something that politicians have been talking about for more than 20 years now, and it hasn’t happened.

Rosin: Well, that was really helpful. Rogé, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this.

Karma: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Sara Krolewski fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

My thanks to Ali Breland and Rogé Karma for joining me. If you’d like to hear Rogé go even deeper on the research into immigration’s economic impact, you can hear him on another Atlantic podcast called Good on Paper. It’s hosted by staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, and that episode is linked in the show notes.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

In the world of nutrition, few words are more contentious than healthy. Experts and influencers alike are perpetually warring over whether fats are dangerous for the heart, whether carbs are good or bad for your waistline, and how much protein a person truly needs. But if identifying healthy food is not always straightforward, actually eating it is an even more monumental feat.

As a reporter covering food and nutrition, I know to limit my salt and sugar consumption. But I still struggle to do it. The short-term euphoria from snacking on Double Stuf Oreos is hard to forgo in favor of the long-term benefit of losing a few pounds. Surveys show that Americans want to eat healthier, but the fact that more than 70 percent of U.S. adults are overweight underscores just how many of us fail.

The challenge of improving the country’s diet was put on stark display late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines for which foods can be labeled as healthy. The roughly 300-page rule—the government’s first update to its definition of healthy in three decades—lays out in granular detail what does and doesn’t count as healthy. The action could make it much easier to walk down a grocery-store aisle and pick products that are good for you based on the label alone: A cup of yogurt laced with lots of sugar can no longer be branded as “healthy.” Yet the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines will use the new definition “to make meaningful, long-lasting food purchasing decisions.” In other words, virtually no one.

All of this is a bad omen for Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. As part of his agenda to “make America healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to improve the country’s eating habits by overthrowing a public-health establishment that he sees as ineffective. He has promised mass firings at the FDA, specifically calling out its food regulators. Indeed, for decades, the agency’s efforts to encourage better eating habits have largely focused on giving consumers more information about the foods they are eating. It hasn’t worked. If confirmed, Kennedy may face the same problem as many of his predecessors: It’s maddeningly hard to get Americans to eat healthier.

[Read: Everyone agrees Americans aren’t healthy]

Giving consumers more information about what they’re eating might seem like a no-brainer, but when these policies are tested in the real world, they often do not lead to healthier eating habits. Since 2018, chain restaurants have had to add calorie counts to their menus; however, researchers have consistently found that doing so doesn’t have a dramatic effect on what foods people eat. Even more stringent policies, such as a law in Chile that requires food companies to include warnings on unhealthy products, have had only a modest effect on improving a country’s health.

The estimate that up to 0.4 percent of people will change their habits as a consequence of the new guidelines was calculated based on previous academic research quantifying the impacts of food labeling, an FDA spokesperson told me. Still, in spite of the underwhelming prediction, the FDA doesn’t expect the new rule to be for naught. Even a tiny fraction of Americans adds up over time: The agency predicts that enough people will eat healthier to result in societal benefits worth $686 million over the next 20 years.

These modest effects underscore that health concerns aren’t the only priority consumers are weighing when they decide whether to purchase foods. “When people are making food choices,” Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told me, “price and taste and convenience weigh much heavier than health.” When I asked experts about better ways to get Americans to eat healthier, some of them talked vaguely about targeting agribusiness and the subsidies it receives from the government, and others mentioned the idea of taxing unhealthy foods, such as soda. But nearly everyone I spoke with struggled to articulate anything close to a silver bullet for fixing America’s diet issues.

RFK Jr. seems to be caught in the same struggle. Most of his ideas for “making America healthy again” revolve around small subsets of foods that he believes, often without evidence, are causing America’s obesity problems. He has warned, for example, about the unproven risks of seed oils and has claimed that if certain food dyes were removed from the food supply, “we’d lose weight.” Kennedy has also called for cutting the subsidies doled out to corn farmers, who grow the crops that make the high-fructose corn syrup that’s laden in many unhealthy foods, and has advocated for getting processed foods out of school meals.

There’s a reason previous health secretaries haven’t opted for the kinds of dramatic measures that Kennedy is advocating for. Some of them would be entirely out of his control. As the head of the HHS, he couldn’t cut crop subsidies; Congress decides how much money goes to farmers. He also couldn’t ban ultra-processed foods in school lunches; that would fall to the secretary of agriculture. And although he could, hypothetically, work with the FDA to ban seed oils, it’s unlikely that he would be able to generate enough legitimate scientific evidence about their harms to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge.

The biggest flaw in Kennedy’s plan is the assumption that he can change people’s eating habits by telling them what is and isn’t healthy, and banning a select few controversial ingredients. Changing those habits will require the government to tackle the underlying reasons Americans are so awful at keeping up with healthy eating. Not everyone suffers from an inability to resist Double Stuf Oreos: A survey from the Cleveland Clinic found that 46 percent of Americans see the cost of healthy food as the biggest barrier to improving their diet, and 23 percent said they lack the time to cook healthy meals.

If Kennedy figures out how to actually get people like me to care enough about healthy eating to resist the indulgent foods that give them pleasure, or if he figures out a way to get cash-strapped families on public assistance to turn down cheap, ready-to-eat foods, he will have made significant inroads into actually making America healthy again. But getting there is going to require a lot more than a catchy slogan and some sound bites.

On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.

“Hallelujah!” said a woman arriving for the weekly 7 o’clock “government watch,” during which a group of 20 or so volunteers sits in a circle and prays for God’s dominion over the nation.

“Now the work begins!” a man said.

“We have to fight, fight, fight!” a grandmother said as they began talking about how a crowd at Trump’s election watch party had launched into the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

“They were singing that!” another man said.

Yes, people replied; they had seen a video of the moment. As the mood in the barn became ever more jubilant, the grandmother pulled from her purse a shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn used during Jewish services. She blew, understanding that the sound would break through the atmosphere, penetrate the demonic realm, and scatter the forces of Satan, a supernatural strike for the Kingdom of God. A woman fell to the floor.

“Heaven and Earth are coming into alignment!” a man declared. “The will of heaven is being done on Earth.”

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

Although the secular establishment has struggled to take all of this seriously, Trump has harnessed this apocalyptic energy to win the presidency twice.

If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right. The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state.

Alexandre Luu

And if you are wondering where all of this is heading now that Trump has won the presidency, I was wondering the same thing. That is why I was sitting in the circle at Gateway House of Prayer, where, about 20 minutes into the evening, I got my first clue. People had welcomed me warmly. I had introduced myself as a reporter for The Atlantic. I was taking notes on Earth-heaven alignment when a woman across from me said, “Your writers have called us Nazis.”

She seemed to be referring to an article that had compared Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s. I said what I always say, which is that I was there to understand. I offered my spiritual bona fides—raised Southern Baptist, from Alabama. The woman continued: “It’s an editorial board that is severely to the left and despises the Trump movement.” A man sitting next to me came to my defense. “We welcome you,” he said, but it was clear something was off, and that something was me. The media had become a demonic stronghold. The people of God needed to figure out whether I was a tool of Satan, or possibly whether I had been sent by the Almighty.

“I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.

“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.

“We just take everything to God,” a woman sitting next to me said. “Don’t take it personally.”

The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.

How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points, the most immediate of which is Trump himself. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s. He needed a way to rally evangelicals, so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR, a wilder world where he was cast as God’s “wrecking ball” and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters, people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity. But the DNA of that moment goes back further, to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner.

He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression, and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife. They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s, when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America, filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed, and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy. Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America. Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia. The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States. Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation, emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.

In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist. Wagner, by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, rose to the occasion. In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that aimed to counter these trends. He wrote a book—Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?—which was handed out to all participants, and which argued that concern with social issues “may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.” Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.

After that, Wagner became a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth. He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia, deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world. He was also living in the California of the 1970s, when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating, a kind of counter-counterculture. Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific in what became known as the Jesus People movement. Preachers such as John Wimber, a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers, were casting out demons before huge crowds. In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the Kansas City Prophets believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy, understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.

Wagner met a woman named Cindy Jacobs, who understood herself to be a prophet, and believed that the “principalities” and “powers” mentioned in the Book of Ephesians were actually “territorial spirits” that could be defeated through “spiritual warfare.” She and others formed prayer networks targeting the “10/40 window”—a geographic rectangle between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north that included North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia that were predominantly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu.

C. Peter Wagner (Alexandre Luu)

Wagner also became captivated by a concept called dominionism, a major conceptual shift that had been emerging in conservative theological circles. At the time, the prevailing view was that God’s mandate for Christians was simple evangelism, person by person; the Kingdom would come later, after the return of Jesus Christ, and meanwhile, the business of politics was, as the Bible verse goes, rendered unto Caesar. The new way of thinking was that God was calling his people to establish the Kingdom now. To put it another way, Christians had marching orders—a mandate for aggressive social and institutional transformation. The idea had deep roots in a movement called Christian Reconstructionism, whose serious thinkers—most prominently a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony—were spending their lives working out the details of what a government grounded in biblical laws would look like, a model for a Christian theocracy.

By 1996, Wagner and a group of like-minded colleagues were rolling these ideas into what they were calling the New Apostolic Reformation, a term meant to evoke their conviction that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe, endowing believers with supernatural power and the authority to battle demonic forces and establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. The NAR vision was not technically conservative but radical: Constructing the Kingdom meant destroying the secular state with equal rights for all, and replacing it with a system in which Christianity is supreme. As a practical matter, the movement put the full force of God on the side of free-market capitalism. In that sense, Wagner and his colleagues had found the answer to liberation theology that they’d been seeking for decades.

Wagner, who died in 2016, wrote dozens of additional books with titles such as Dominion! and Churchquake! The movement allowed Christianity to be changed and updated, embracing the idea that God was raising new apostles and prophets who could not only interpret ancient scripture but deliver “fresh words” and dreams from heaven on a rolling, even daily basis. One of Wagner’s most talented acolytes, a preacher named Lance Wallnau, repackaged the concept of dominionism into what he popularized as the “7 Mountain Mandate,” essentially an action plan for how Christians could dominate the seven spheres of life—government, education, media, and the four others posted on the walls like targets at Gateway House of Prayer.

What happened next is the story of these ideas spreading far and wide into an American culture primed to accept them. Churches interested in growing found that the NAR formula worked, delivering followers a sense of purpose and value in the Kingdom. Many started hosting “7M” seminars and offering coaching and webinars, which often drew wealthy businesspeople into the fold. After the 2016 election, a group of the nation’s ultra-wealthy conservative Christians organized as an invitation-only charity called Ziklag, a reference to the biblical city where David found refuge during his war against King Saul. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the group stated in internal documents that its purpose was to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains.” Wallnau is an adviser.

By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society,’ ” according to Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who has been developing new surveys to capture what he and others describe as a “fundamental shift” in American Christianity. Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” Roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” and that the Church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.”

Overall, Djupe told me, the nation continues to become more secular. In 1991, only 6 percent of Americans identified as nonreligious, a figure that is now about 30 percent. But the Christians who remain are becoming more radical.

“They are taking on these extreme beliefs that give them a sense of power—they believe they have the power to change the nature of the Earth,” Djupe said. “The adoption of these sort of beliefs is happening incredibly fast.”

The ideas have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the authors write. “It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

my own frame of reference for what evangelical Christianity looked like was wooden pews, the ladies’ handbell choir, and chicken casseroles for the homebound. The Southern Baptists of my childhood had no immediate reason to behave like insurgents. They had dominated Alabama for decades, mostly blessing the status quo. When I got an assignment a few years ago to write about why evangelicals were still backing Trump, I mistakenly thought that the Baptists were where the action was on the Christian right. I was working for The Washington Post then, and like many journalists, commentators, and researchers who study religion, I was far behind.

Where I ended up one Sunday in 2021 was a church in Fort Worth, Texas, called Mercy Culture. Roughly 1,500 people were streaming through the doors for one of four weekend services, one of which was in Spanish. Ushers offered earplugs. A store carried books about spiritual warfare. Inside the sanctuary, the people filling the seats were white, Black, and brown; they were working-class and professionals and unemployed; they were former drug addicts and porn addicts and social-media addicts; they were young men and women who believed their homosexual tendencies to be the work of Satan. I met a young woman who told me she was going to Montana to “prophesy over the land.” I met a young man contemplating a future as a missionary, who told me, “If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples.” They had the drifty air of hippies, but their counterculture was pure Kingdom.

They faced a huge video screen showing swirling stars, crashing waves, and apocalyptic images, including a mushroom cloud. A digital clock was counting down, and when it hit zero, a band—keyboard, guitars, drums—began blasting music that reminded you of some pop song you couldn’t quite place, from some world you’d left behind when you came through the doors. Lights flashed. Machine-made fog drifted through the crowd. People waved colored flags, calling the Holy Spirit in for a landing. Cameras swooped around, zooming in on a grown man crying and a woman lying prostrate, praying. Eventually, the pastor, a young man in skinny jeans, came onstage and demon-mapped the whole city of Fort Worth. The west side was controlled by the principality of Greed, the north by the demonic spirit of Rebellion; the south belonged to Lust. He spoke of surrendering to God’s laws. And at one point, he endorsed a Church elder running for mayor, describing the campaign as “the beginning of a righteous movement.”

Walking across the bleak, hot parking lot to my rental car afterward, I could understand how people were drawn into their realm. After that, I started seeing the futuristic world of the NAR all over the place. Sprawling megachurches outside Atlanta, Phoenix, and Harrisburg with Broadway-level production values; lower-budget operations in strip malls and the husks of defunct traditional churches. Lots of screens, lots of flags. Conferences with names like Open the Heavens. A training course called Vanquish Academy where people could learn “advanced prophetic weaponry” and “dream intelligence.” Schools such as Kingdom University, in Tennessee, where students can learn their “Kingdom Assignment.” In a way, the movement was a world with its own language. People spoke of convergence and alignment and demon portals and whether certain businesses were Kingdom or not.

In 2023, I met a woman who believed that her Kingdom assignment was to buy an entire mountain for God, and did. It is in northwestern Pennsylvania, and she lives on top of it with her husband. They are always finding what she called “God signs,” such as feathers on the porch. Like many in the movement, she didn’t attend church very often. But every day, she followed online prophets and apostles such as Dutch Sheets, an acolyte of Wagner’s who has hundreds of thousands of followers and is known for interpreting dreams.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

In 2016, Sheets began embracing prophecies that God was using Trump, telling fellow prophets and apostles that his victory would bring “new levels of demonic desperation.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Sheets began releasing daily prophetic updates called Give Him 15, casting Trump’s attempt to steal the election as a great spiritual battle against the forces of darkness. In the days before the insurrection, Sheets described a dream in which he was charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol to stand for the Kingdom. Although he was not in Washington, D.C., on January 6, many of his followers were, some carrying the APPEAL TO HEAVEN flag he’d popularized. Others from Wagner’s old inner circle were there too. Wallnau streamed live from near the U.S. Capitol that day and, that night, from the Trump International Hotel. Cindy Jacobs conducted spiritual warfare just outside the Capitol as rioters were smashing their way inside, telling her followers that the Lord had given her a vision “that they would break through and go all the way to the top.” In his most recent book, The Violent Take It by Force, the scholar Matthew Taylor details the role that major NAR leaders played that day, calling them “the principal theological architects” of the insurrection.

Faith leaders, including major figures in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, pray with Donald Trump at the White House in 2019. (Storms Media Group / Alamy)

At the Pennsylvania statehouse, I met an apostle named Abby Abildness, whom I came to understand as a kind of Kingdom diplomat. It was the spring of 2023, and she had recently returned from Iraqi Kurdistan, where she had met with Kurdish leaders she believed to be descended from King Solomon, and who she said wanted “holy governance to go forth.”

I watched YouTube videos of prophets broadcasting from their basements. I watched a streaming show called FlashPoint, where apostles and prophets deliver news from God; guests have included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because another dimension of the NAR is that the movement is a prominent advocate of Christian Zionism.

I came to understand how the movement amounts to a sprawling political machine. The apostles and prophets, speaking for God, decide which candidates and policies advance the Kingdom. The movement’s prayer networks and newsletters amount to voter lists and voter guides. A growing ecosystem of podcasts and streaming shows such as FlashPoint amounts to a Kingdom media empire. And the overall vision of the movement means that people are not engaged just during election years but, like the people at Gateway House of Prayer, 24/7.

[Read: This just in from heaven]

As November’s election neared, I watched the whole juggernaut crank into action to return Trump to the White House. Wallnau, in partnership with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, promoted an effort called Project 19, targeting voters in 19 swing counties. He also launched something called the Courage Tour, which similarly targeted swing states, and I attended one event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It looked like an old-fashioned tent revival, except that it was also an aggressive pro-Trump mobilization effort. Wallnau dabbed frankincense oil onto foreheads, anointing voters into God’s army. Another speaker said that Kamala Harris would be a “devil in the White House.” Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.

A march called “A Million Women” on the National Mall drew tens of thousands of people and culminated with the smashing of an altar representing demonic strongholds in America. With the Capitol dome as their backdrop, people took turns bashing the altar as music surged and others prayed, and when it was rubble, the prophet Lou Engle declared, “We’re going to point to the north, south, and east, and west, and command America! The veil has been ripped!”

The NAR movement was a major source of the “low-propensity voters” who backed Trump. Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, which tracks antidemocratic movements, has been documenting the rise of the NAR for years, and warning about its theocratic goals. He believes that a certain condescension, and perhaps failure of imagination, has kept outsiders from understanding what he has come to see as the most significant religious movement of the 21st century, and one that poses a profound threat to democracy.

“Certain segments of society have not been willing to understand where these people are coming from,” Clarkson told me. “For me, it’s part of the story of our times. It’s a movement that has continued to rise, gathered political strength, attracted money, built institutions. And the broad center-left doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

Which leaves the question of what happens now.

The movement certainly aligns with many goals of the Christian right: a total abortion ban, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ rights. Traditional family is the fundamental unit of God’s perfect order. In theory, affirmative action, welfare programs, and other social-justice measures would be unnecessary because in the Kingdom, as Abildness, the Pennsylvania apostle, and her husband once explained to me, there is no racism and no identity other than child of God. “Those that oppose us think we are dangerous,” her husband told me, describing a vision of life governed by God’s will. “But this is better for everyone. There wouldn’t be homelessness. We’d be caring for each other.”

Matthew Taylor told me he sees the movement merging seamlessly into “the MAGA blob,” with the prophets and apostles casting whatever Trump does as part of God’s plan, and rebuking any dissent. “It’s the synchronization with Trump that is most alarming,” he said. “The agenda now is Trump. And that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.”

[Read: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

In another sense, the movement has never been about policies or changes to the law; it’s always been about the larger goal of dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear the way for the Kingdom. It is about God’s total victory.

“Buckle up, buttercup!” Wallnau said on his podcast shortly after the election. “Because you’re going to be watching a whole new redefinition of what the reformation looks like as Christians engage every sector of society. Christ is not quarantined any longer. We’re going into all the world.”

On the day after the election, I went to Life Center, the NAR church where Elon Musk had spoken a couple of weeks earlier. The mood was jubilant. A pastor spoke of “years of oppression” and said that “we are at a time on the other side of a victory for our nation that God alone—that God alone—orchestrated for us.”

The music pounded, and people cheered, and after that, a prominent prophet named Joseph Garlington delivered a sermon. He was a guest speaker, and he offered what sounded like the first hint of dissent I’d heard in a long time. He talked about undocumented immigrants and asked people to consider whether it might be possible that God was sending them to the U.S. so they could build the Kingdom.

“What if they are part of the harvest?” he said. “He didn’t send us to them; maybe he’s sending them to us.”

It was a striking moment. Life Center, Mercy Culture, and many other churches in the movement have large numbers of Latinos in their congregations. In 2020, Trump kicked off his outreach to evangelical voters at a Miami megachurch called El Rey Jesús, headed by a prominent Honduran American apostle named Guillermo Maldonado. I wondered how the apostles and prophets would react to the mass deportations Trump had proposed. Garlington continued that Trump was “God’s choice,” but that the election was just one battle in the ultimate struggle. He told people that it’s “time for war,” language I kept hearing in other NAR circles even after the election. He told people to prepare to lose friends and family as the Kingdom of God marched on in the days ahead. He told them to separate from the wicked.

“If you’ve got a child and he says, ‘Come and let us go serve other gods,’ go tell on him. Tell them, ‘I’ve got a kid who is saying we need to serve other gods. Can you help me kill him?’ ” Garlington said he wasn’t being literal about the last part. “But you need to rebuke them,” he said. “You need to say, ‘Honey, if you keep on that path, there’s a place reserved in hell for you.’ ”

This was also a theme the next day at Gateway House of Prayer, where I waited to learn my own fate, as people began praying in tongues and free-forming in English as the Holy Spirit gave them words.

Alexandre Luu

“We’re asking for a full overturning in the media,” a man said. “We’re asking for all the media to turn away from being propagandists to being truth tellers.”

“Their eyes need to be opened,” a woman said. “They don’t know God at all. They think they know all these things because they’re so educated and worldly. But they do not see God … And that’s what we need. The harvest.”

“The reformation,” the grandmother added.

“The reformation,” the woman said.

At one point, a man questioned me: “The whole world knows The Atlantic is a left-wing, Marxist-type publication. Why would you choose to go and work there?” At another point, the group leader defended me: “I feel the Lord has called her to be a truth seeker.” At another point, the grandmother spoke of a prophecy she’d heard recently about punishment for the wicked. “There are millstones being made in Heaven,” she said. “Straight up. There’s millstones.” Another woman spoke of “God’s angry judgment” for the disobedient.

“There’s a lot of people that are going to change their minds,” a man said.

“You’ll be happy with the changes God brings,” a woman reassured me. “You’ll be happy.”

This went on for a while. I wasn’t sure where it was going until the leader of the group decided that I should leave. She could not have been nicer about it. She spoke of God’s absolute love, and absolute truth, and absolute justice, and then I headed for the door.

A few women followed me into the lobby, apologizing that it had come to this. They were sorry for me, as believers in the movement were sorry for all of the people who were lost and confused by this moment in America—the doubters, the atheists, the gay people, Muslims, Buddhists, Democrats, journalists, and all the godless who had not yet submitted to what they knew to be true. The Kingdom was here, and the only question was whether you were in, or out.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Army of God.”

“The countdown clock on the next catastrophic crash has already started,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me.

In the past few weeks, I have heard that sentiment or similar from economists, traders, Hill staffers, and government officials. The incoming Trump administration has promised to pass crypto-friendly regulations, and is likely to loosen strictures on Wall Street institutions as well.

This will bring an unheralded era of American prosperity, it argues, maintaining the country’s position as the head of the global capital markets and the heart of the global investment ecosystem. “My vision is for an America that dominates the future,” Donald Trump told a bitcoin conference in July. “I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”

[Annie Lowrey: The three pillars of the bro-economy]

Financial experts expect something different. First, a boom. A big boom, maybe, with the price of bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies climbing; financial firms raking in profits; and American investors awash in newfound wealth. Second, a bust. A big bust, maybe, with firms collapsing, the government being called in to steady the markets, and plenty of Americans suffering from foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Having written about bitcoin for more than a decade—and having covered the last financial crisis and its long hangover—I have some sense of what might cause that boom and bust. Crypto assets tend to be exceedingly volatile, much more so than real estate, commodities, stocks, and bonds. Egged on by Washington, more Americans will invest in crypto. Prices will go up as cash floods in. Individuals and institutions will get wiped out when prices drop, as they inevitably will.

The experts I spoke with did not counter that narrative. But if that’s all that happens, they told me, the United States and the world should count themselves lucky. The danger is not just that crypto-friendly regulation will expose millions of Americans to scams and volatility. The danger is that it will lead to an increase in leverage across the whole of the financial system. It will foster opacity, making it harder for investors to determine the riskiness of and assign prices to financial products. And it will do so at the same time as the Trump administration cuts regulations and regulators.

Crypto will become more widespread. And the conventional financial markets will come to look more like the crypto markets—wilder, less transparent, and more unpredictable, with trillion-dollar consequences extending years into the future.

“I have this worry that the next three or four years will look pretty good,” Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell and a former International Monetary Fund official, told me. “It’s what comes after, when we have to pick up the pieces from all the speculative frenzies that are going to be generated because of this administration’s actions.”

For years, Washington has “waged a war on crypto and bitcoin like nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told crypto entrepreneurs this summer. “They target your banks. They choke off your financial services … They block ordinary Americans from transferring money to your exchanges. They slander you as criminals.” He added: “That happened to me too, because I said the election was rigged.”

Trump is not wrong that crypto exists in its own parallel financial universe. Many crypto companies cannot or choose not to comply with American financial regulations, making it hard for kitchen-table investors to use their services. (The world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, declines even to name which jurisdiction it is based in; it directs American customers to a smallish U.S. offshoot.) Companies such as Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo tend to offer few, if any, crypto products, and tend to make minimal, if any, investments in crypto and crypto-related businesses. It’s not so much that banks haven’t wanted to get in on the fun. It’s that regulations have prevented them from doing so, and regulators have warned them not to.

This situation has throttled the amount of money flowing into crypto. But the approach has been a wise one: It has prevented firm failures and crazy price swings from destabilizing the traditional financial system. Crypto lost $2 trillion of its $3 trillion in market capitalization in 2022, Kelleher noted. “If you had that big of a financial crash with any other asset, there would have been contagion. But there wasn’t, because you had parallel systems with almost no interconnection.”

Forthcoming regulation will knit the systems together. Granted, nobody knows exactly what laws Congress will pass and Trump will sign. But the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, or FIT21, which passed the House before dying in the Senate last year, is a good guide. The law was the subject of intense lobbying by crypto advocates with billions on the line and cash to spend, including $170 million on the 2024 election. It amounts to an industry wish list.

FIT21 makes the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulator of most crypto assets and firms and requires that the CFTC collect far less information from companies on the structure and trading of crypto products than securities firms give the SEC.

[Annie Lowrey: The Black investors who were burned by Bitcoin]

Beyond loose rules, financial experts anticipate loose enforcement. The CFTC predominantly oversees financial products used as hedges by businesses and traded among traders, not ones hawked to individual investors. It has roughly one-fifth the budget of the SEC, and one-seventh the staff. And in general, Washington is expected to loosen the strictures preventing traditional banks from keeping crypto on their books and preventing crypto companies from accessing the country’s financial infrastructure.

According to Prasad, this regime would be a “dream” for crypto.

Trump and his family are personally invested in crypto, and the president-elect has floated the idea of establishing a “strategic” bitcoin reserve, to preempt Chinese influence. (In reality, this would mean deploying billions of dollars of taxpayer money to soak up speculative assets with no strategic benefit to the United States.) How many Republicans will invest in crypto because Trump does? How many young people will pour money into bitcoin because his son Eric says its price is zooming toward $1 million, or because the secretary of commerce says it is the future?

Nothing being considered by Congress or the White House will reduce the inherent risks. Crypto investors will remain vulnerable to hacking, ransomware, and theft. The research group Chainalysis tallied $24.2 billion in illicit transactions in 2023 alone. And if the U.S. government invests in crypto, the incentive for countries such as Iran and North Korea to interfere in the markets would go up exponentially. Imagine China engaging in a 51 percent attack on the bitcoin blockchain, taking it over and controlling each and every transaction. The situation is a security nightmare.

Americans will be exposed to more prosaic scams and rip-offs too. The SEC has brought enforcement actions against dozens of Ponzi schemers, charlatans, and cheats, encompassing both the $32 billion sham-exchange FTX and ticky-tacky coin firms. Nobody expects the CFTC to have the muscle to do the same. And FIT21 leaves loopholes open for all kinds of scuzzy profiteering. A crypto firm might be able to run an exchange, buy and sell assets on its own behalf, and execute orders for clients—legally, at the same time, despite the conflicts of interest.

Simple volatility is the biggest risk for retail investors. Crypto coins, tokens, and currencies are “purely speculative,” Prasad emphasized. “The only thing anchoring the value is investor sentiment.” At least gold has industrial uses. Or, if you’re betting on the price of tulip bulbs, at least you might end up with a flower.

With crypto, you might end up with nothing, or less. A large share of crypto traders borrow money to make bets. When leveraged traders lose money on their investments, their lenders—generally the exchange on which the traders are trading—require them to put up collateral. To do that, investors might have to cash out their 401(k)s. They might have to dump their bitcoin, even in a down market. If they cannot come up with the cash, the firm holding their account might liquidate or seize their assets.

A report released last month by the Office of Financial Research, a government think tank, makes clear just how dangerous this could be: Some low-income households are “using crypto gains to take out new mortgages.” When crypto prices go down, those families’ homes are going to be at risk.

Many individual investors do not seem to understand these perils. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has had to warn the public that it does not protect crypto assets. The Financial Stability Oversight Council has raised the concern that people do not realize that crypto firms are not subject to the same oversight as banks. But if Trump is invested, how bad could it be?

Regulators and economists are not worried primarily about the damage that this new era will do to individual households, however. They are worried about chaos in the crypto markets disrupting the traditional financial system—leading to a collapse in lending and the need for the government to step in, as it did in 2008.

Where Wall Street once saw fool’s gold, it now sees a gold mine. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater called crypto a “bubble” a decade ago; now he thinks it is “one hell of an invention.” Larry Fink of BlackRock previously referred to bitcoin as an “index of money laundering”; today he sees it as a “legitimate financial instrument”—one his firm has already begun offering to clients, if indirectly.

Early in 2024, the SEC began allowing fund managers to sell certain crypto investments. BlackRock launched a bitcoin exchange-traded fund in November; one public retirement fund has already staked its pensioners’ hard-earned cash. Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs are doing crypto deals too. Billions of traditional-finance money is flowing into the decentralized-finance markets, and billions more will as regulators allow.

[Charlie Warzel: Crypto’s legacy is finally clear]

What could go wrong? Nothing, provided that Wall Street firms are properly accounting for the risk of these risky assets. Everything, if they are not.  

Even the sturdiest-seeming instruments are dangerous. Stablecoins, for example, are crypto assets pegged to the dollar: One stablecoin is worth one dollar, making them useful as a medium of exchange, unlike bitcoin and ether. Stablecoin companies generally maintain their peg by holding one dollar’s worth of super-safe assets, such as cash and Treasury bills, for every stablecoin issued.

Supposedly. In the spring of 2022, the widely used stablecoin TerraUSD collapsed, its price falling to just 23 cents. The company had been using an algorithm to keep TerraUSD’s price moored; all it took was enough people pulling their money out for the stablecoin to break the buck. Tether, the world’s most-traded crypto asset, claims to be fully backed by safe deposits. The U.S. government found that it was not, as of 2021; moreover, the Treasury Department is contemplating sanctioning the company behind tether for its role as a cash funnel for the “North Korean nuclear-weapons program, Mexican drug cartels, Russian arms companies, Middle Eastern terrorist groups and Chinese manufacturers of chemicals used to make fentanyl,” The Wall Street Journal has reported. (“To suggest that Tether is somehow involved in aiding criminal actors or sidestepping sanctions is outrageous,” the company responded.)

Were tether or another big stablecoin to falter, financial chaos could instantly spread beyond the crypto markets. Worried investors would dump the stablecoin, instigating “a self-fulfilling panic run,” in the words of three academics who modeled this eventuality. The stablecoin issuer would dump Treasury bills and other safe assets to provide redemptions; the falling price of safe assets would affect thousands of non-crypto firms. The economists put the risk of a run on tether at 2.5 percent as of late 2021—not so stable!

Other catastrophes are easy to imagine: bank failures, exchange collapses, giant Ponzi schemes faltering. Still, the biggest risk with crypto has little to do with crypto at all.

If Congress passes FIT21 or a similar bill, it would invent a novel asset class called “digital commodities”—in essence, any financial asset managed on a decentralized blockchain. Digital commodities would be exempted from SEC oversight, as would “decentralized finance” firms. In the FIT21 bill, any firm or person can self-certify a financial product as a digital commodity, and the SEC would have only 60 days to object.

This is a loophole big enough to fit an investment bank through.

Already, Wall Street is talking up “tokenization,” meaning putting assets on a programmable digital ledger. The putative justification is capital efficiency: Tokenization could make it easier to move money around. Another justification is regulatory arbitrage: Investments on a blockchain would move out of the SEC’s purview, and likely be subject to fewer disclosure, reporting, accounting, tax, consumer-protection, anti-money-laundering, and capital requirements. Risk would build up in the system; the government would have fewer ways to rein firms in.

Crypto regulation could end up undermining the “broader $100 trillion capital markets,” Gary Gensler, the soon-to-be-former head of the SEC and the crypto industry’s enemy No. 1, has argued. “It could encourage noncompliant entities to try to choose what regulatory regimes they wish to be subjected to.”

[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]

We have seen this movie before, not long ago. In 2000, shortly before leaving office, Bill Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The law put strictures on derivatives traded on an exchange, but left over-the-counter derivatives unregulated. So Wall Street ginned up trillions of dollars of financial products, many backed by the income streams from home loans, and traded them over the counter. It packaged subprime loans with prime loans, obscuring a given financial instrument’s real risk. Then consumers strained under rising interest rates, crummy wage growth, and climbing unemployment. The mortgage-default rate went up. Home prices fell, first in the Sun Belt and then nationwide. Investors panicked. Nobody even knew what was in all of those credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities. Nobody was sure what anything was worth. Uncertainty, opacity, leverage, and mispricing spurred the global financial crisis that caused the Great Recession.

The crypto market today is primed to become the derivatives market of the future. Were Congress and the Trump administration to do nothing—to leave the SEC as crypto’s primary regulator, to require crypto companies to play by the existing rules—the chaos would remain walled off. There’s no sensible justification for digital assets to be treated differently than securities, anyway. By the simple test the government has used for a century, nearly all crypto assets are securities. But Washington is creating loopholes, not laws.

As the crypto boosters like to say, hold on for dear life. “A lot of bankers, they’re dancing in the street,” Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase said at a conference in Peru last year. Maybe they should be. The bankers are never the ones left holding the bag.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”

This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.

Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

[From the October 2024 issue: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”

Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

[Autocracy in America: The end of democracy has already begun]

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”

Children born into poverty are far more likely to remain poor in adulthood in the United States than in other wealthy countries. Why?

The stickiness of poverty in the U.S. challenges the self-image of a country that prides itself on upward mobility. Most scholarship on the issue tends, logically enough, to focus on conditions during childhood, including the role of government income transfers in promoting children’s development. These studies have yielded important insights, but they overlook one major reason why poverty in the U.S. is so much stickier than in peer countries: Americans born into poverty receive far less government support during their adulthood.

In a new study published in Nature Human Behaviour, my co-authors (Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Rafael Pintro-Schmitt, and Peter Fallesen) and I quantify the persistence of poverty from childhood to adulthood in the U.S. We find that child poverty in the U.S. is more than four times as likely to lead to adult poverty than in Denmark and Germany, and more than twice as likely than in the United Kingdom and Australia. These findings hold across multiple measures of poverty.

We also sought to understand why poverty is so much more persistent in the U.S., using more complete data on household incomes than past studies have generally used. Studies focused on the U.S. have found that strong social networks, high-quality neighborhoods, and access to higher education all facilitate social mobility, yet these factors also matter in other wealthy countries where mobility is notably higher. When it comes to upward mobility from childhood poverty, what separates the U.S. from the U.K., Australia, Germany, and Denmark is a robust set of public investments to reduce poverty’s lingering consequences for adults who were born to disadvantaged families. We calculate that if the U.S. were to adopt the tax-and-transfer generosity of its peer countries, the cycle of American poverty could decline by more than one-third.

[Annie Lowrey: The case for spending way more on babies]

Imagine a resident of the U.S. and a resident of Denmark who each grew up spending, say, half of their childhood in poverty. Our study finds that both children will be less likely to pursue higher education or work full-time in adulthood compared with children who didn’t grow up poor. But the Dane is more likely to receive unemployment benefits, means-tested income support, or a child allowance and is therefore far less likely to live in poverty as an adult. This tax-and-transfer insurance effect—or the role of the state in reducing adult disadvantages that stem from childhood poverty—matters more than other oft-studied characteristics, such as parental education or marital status, in shaping the U.S. disadvantage compared with peer nations.

We were surprised by some factors that did not explain the U.S.’s outlier status—in particular, the role of racial discrimination. We and others have documented how historic and ongoing discrimination affects racial differences in poverty rates. But racial discrimination does not appear to explain why poor children in the U.S. are so much likelier to also be poor adults. Black Americans are much more likely than white Americans to experience childhood poverty, but the white children who do grow up poor are just as likely to be poor in adulthood.

We were also struck by the fact that, when it comes to escaping childhood poverty, the differences between the U.S. and its peer countries are much larger than the differences between places within the U.S. As the economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors have shown, growing up in a high-mobility city such as San Jose, California, confers significant long-term benefits compared with growing up in a low-mobility city such as Charlotte, North Carolina. Our study reveals, however, that even in the most economically mobile places in the U.S., poverty is stickier from childhood to adulthood than it is in the U.K., Australia, Denmark, or Germany.

[Rogé Karma: A baffling academic feud over income inequality]

It might seem tautological to say that poor American children would be less likely to be poor as adults if the government gave them more money. But Americans still tend to treat the distribution of government benefits as a symptom of economic deprivation rather than a potential solution to it. Many academic studies of intergenerational disadvantage have used welfare benefits as a direct proxy of poverty. Our study, in contrast, emphasizes that receipt of well-designed government transfers can directly reduce the persistence of poverty. As recent proof of this claim, Americans do not even need to look abroad. In 2021, the expanded child tax credit brought the U.S. poverty rate to its lowest level ever recorded and had the American welfare state temporarily reducing poverty at the rate of Norway’s. After the benefit expansions expired in 2022, poverty and food hardship predictably increased. Evidence from the other high-income countries in our study suggests that the U.S.’s return to a more restrictive and targeted welfare state is unlikely to promote upward mobility from poverty.

Some people might argue that self-sufficiency—giving people the means to overcome poverty without government income assistance—should be the aim of government policy. That is a defensible perspective and policy aim, yet it is inconsistent with the fact that all high-income countries include government taxes and transfers when measuring poverty. Moreover, it implies that it is better for American children who were born into poverty—through no fault of their own—to stay poor in adulthood than to escape poverty thanks to government transfers.

Breaking the cycle of poverty is not merely about increasing families’ child-care support or promoting higher education to wayward teenagers; it also requires direct state effort to improve the ability of disadvantaged adults to meet their basic needs. The United States’ reluctance to do so largely explains why its poor children are more likely to become poor adults.

Illustrations by Max Guther

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The Bar Is Closed

A short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was empty. But looking closer, I realized that business was booming. The bar was covered with to-go food: nine large brown bags.

As we ate our meal, I watched half a dozen people enter the restaurant without sitting down to eat. Each one pushed open the door, walked to the counter, picked up a bag from the bar, and left. In the delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, not a word was exchanged. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.

Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars. “It’s just a few seats, but it was a pretty happening place,” Rae Mosher, the restaurant’s general manager, told me. “I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it,” she went on. “I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. But there’s nowhere else for the food to go.” She put up a sign: BAR SEATING CLOSED.

The sign on the bar is a sign of the times for the restaurant business. In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.” Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)

Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

[Derek Thompson: Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out]

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.

Max Guther

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping. A 2021 study of the widely used UCLA Loneliness Scale concluded that “the frequently used term ‘loneliness epidemic’ seems exaggerated.” Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is little evidence that loneliness is rising more broadly today. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday” declined by roughly one-third from 2021 to 2023, even as alone time, by Atalay’s calculation, rose slightly.

Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life—its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse. Our habits are creating what Atalay has called a “century of solitude.” This is the anti-social century.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

The End of the Social Century

The first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social. From 1900 to 1960, church membership surged, as did labor-union participation. Marriage rates reached a record high after World War II, and the birth rate enjoyed a famous “boom.” Associations of all sorts thrived, including book clubs and volunteer groups. The New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world; communities and developers across the country built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and all kinds of gathering places.

But in the 1970s, the U.S. entered an era of withdrawal, as the political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. Some institutions of togetherness, such as marriage, eroded slowly. Others fell away swiftly. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half. The decline was astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every demographic group that Putnam tracked.

What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.

Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time—300 hours a year!—to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.

Television transformed Americans’ interior decorating, our relationships, and our communities. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards. Like a murder in Clue, the death of social connections in America had any number of suspects. But in the end, I believe the likeliest culprit is obvious. It was Mr. Farnsworth, in the living room, with the tube.

Phonebound

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.

Max Guther

The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.

[Read: Jonathan Haidt on the terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: The latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” These data are alarming, but shouldn’t be surprising. Young rats and monkeys deprived of play come away socially and emotionally impaired. It would be odd if we, the self-named “social animal,” were different.

Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.

If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional costs of physical-world togetherness—and prone to keeping even close friends at a physical distance—that suggests that phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.

[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]

In the 1960s, Irwin Altman, a psychologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, co-developed a friendship formula characterized by increasing intimacy. In the early stages of friendship, people engage in small talk by sharing trivial details. As they develop trust, their conversations deepen to include more private information until disclosure becomes habitual and easy. Altman later added an important wrinkle: Friends require boundaries as much as they require closeness. Time alone to recharge is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.

Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

[From the July/August 2008 issue: Nicholas Carr on whether Google is making us stupid]

If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.

Homebound

Last year, the Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey was working on a book about how places shape American lives and economic fortunes. He had a feeling that the rise of remote work might have accelerated a longer-term trend: a shift in the amount of time that people spend inside their home. He ran the numbers and discovered “an astounding change” in our daily habits, much more extreme than he would have guessed. In 2022—notably, after the pandemic had abated—adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.

This finding formed the basis of a 2024 paper, “Homebound,” in which Sharkey calculated that, compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.”

One might ask: Why wouldn’t Americans with means want to spend more time at home? In the past few decades, the typical American home has become bigger, more comfortable, and more entertaining. From 1973 to 2023, the size of the average new single-family house increased by 50 percent, and the share of new single-family houses that have air-conditioning doubled, to 98 percent. Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th-century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness.

A homebound life doesn’t have to be a solitary life. In the 1970s, the typical household entertained more than once a month. But from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45 percent, according to data that Robert Putnam gathered. In the 20 years after Bowling Alone was published, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32 percent.

As our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?,’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer, said last year that “for the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” From studying floor plans, he noticed that bedrooms, walk-in closets, and other private spaces are growing. “I think we’re building for aloneness,” Fijan told me.

“Secular Monks”

In 2020, the philosopher and writer Andrew Taggart observed in an essay published in the religious journal First Things that a new flavor of masculinity seemed to be emerging: strong, obsessed with personal optimization, and proudly alone. Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

When I read Taggart’s essay last year, I felt a shock of recognition. In the previous months, I’d been captivated by a particular genre of social media: the viral “morning routine” video. If the protagonist is a man, he is typically handsome and rich. We see him wake up. We see him meditate. We see him write in his journal. We see him exercise, take supplements, take a cold plunge. What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. These videos are advertisements for a luxurious form of modern monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and, at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that is ideally avoided—like porn, perhaps, or Pop-Tarts.

[Read: The agony of texting with men]

Drawing major conclusions about modern masculinity from a handful of TikToks would be unwise. But the solitary man is not just a social-media phenomenon. Men spend more time alone than women, and young men are increasing their alone time faster than any other group, according to the American Time Use Survey.

Max Guther

Where is this alone time coming from? Liana C. Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, shared with me her analysis of how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. Sayer divided leisure into two broad categories: “engaged leisure,” which includes socializing, going to concerts, and playing sports; and “sedentary leisure,” which includes watching TV and playing video games. Compared with engaged leisure, which is more likely to be done with other people, sedentary leisure is more commonly done alone.

The most dramatic tendency that Sayer uncovered is that single men without kids—who have the most leisure time—are overwhelmingly likely to spend these hours by themselves. And the time they spend in solo sedentary leisure has increased, since 2003, more than that of any other group Sayer tracked. This is unfortunate because, as Sayer wrote, “well-being is higher among adults who spend larger shares of leisure with others.” Sedentary leisure, by contrast, was “associated with negative physical and mental health.”

Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. He calls it “neededness”—the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere,” he said. This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count on us to fill a pew or bring the dip.

But building these bridges to community takes energy, and today’s young men do not seem to be constructing these relationships in the same way that they used to. In place of neededness, despair is creeping in. Men who are un- or underemployed are especially vulnerable. Feeling unneeded “is actually, in some cases, literally fatal,” Reeves said. “If you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives, they are worthless and useless.” Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of men have died of drug overdoses, mostly from opioids and synthetics such as fentanyl. “If the level of drug-poisoning deaths had remained flat since 2001, we’d have had 400,000 fewer men die,” Reeves said. These drugs, he emphasized, are defined by their solitary nature: Opioids are not party drugs, but rather the opposite.

This Is Your Politics on Solitude

All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional. Marc J. Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive: Today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger.

Parents are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of communication. “My wife and I have texted 10 times since we said goodbye today,” Dunkelman told me when I reached him at noon on a weekday. “When my 10-year-old daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a phone notification about it.”

At the same time, messaging apps, TikTok streams, and subreddits keep us plugged into the thoughts and opinions of the global crowd that shares our interests. “When I watch a Cincinnati Bengals football game, I’m on a group text with beat reporters to whom I can ask questions, and they’ll respond,” Dunkelman said. “I can follow the live thoughts of football analysts on X.com, so that I’m practically watching the game over their shoulder. I live in Rhode Island, and those are connections that could have never existed 30 years ago.”

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.

The middle ring is key to social cohesion, Dunkelman said. Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views. “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past. “An important implication of the death of the middle ring is that if you have no appreciation for why the other side has their narrative, you’ll want your own side to fight them without compromise.”

The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy. For the past five decades, the American National Election Studies surveys have asked Democrats and Republicans to rate the opposing party on a “Feeling Thermometer” that ranges from zero (very cold/unfavorable) to 100 (very warm/favorable). In 2000, just 8 percent of partisans gave the other party a zero. By 2020, that figure had shot up to 40 percent. In a 2021 poll by Generation Lab/Axios, nearly a third of college students who identify as Republican said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of Democratic students said the same of members of the GOP.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had many causes, including inflation and frustration with Joe Biden’s leadership. But one source of Trump’s success may be that he is an avatar of the all-tribe, no-village style of performative confrontation. He stokes out-group animosity, and speaks to voters who are furiously intolerant of political difference. To cite just a few examples from the campaign, Trump called Democrats “enemies of the democracy” and the news media “enemies of the people,” and promised to “root out” the “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Max Guther

Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal. In the fall, one popular Democratic lawn sign read Harris Walz: Obviously. That sentiment, rejected by a majority of voters, indicates a failure to engage with the world as it really is. Dunkelman emailed me after the election to lament Democratic cluelessness. “How did those of us who live in elite circles not see how Trump was gaining popularity even among our literal neighbors?” he wrote. Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right. Even in the highly progressive borough of Brooklyn, New York, three in 10 voters chose Trump. If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.

Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, began asking Americans to evaluate false rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with people on the left sharing conspiracies about the right and vice versa. But some participants seemed drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. Perhaps more important, Petersen said, they tended to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues coined a term to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos.

[Read: Derek Thompson on the Americans who need chaos]

Although chaotically inclined individuals score highly in a popular measure for loneliness, they don’t seem to seek the obvious remedy. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said. For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.

The Introversion Delusion

Let us be fair to solitude, for a moment. As the father of a young child, I know well that a quiet night alone can be a balm. I have spent evenings alone at a bar, watching a baseball game, that felt ecstatically close to heaven. People cope with stress and grief and mundane disappointment in complex ways, and sometimes isolation is the best way to restore inner equilibrium.

But the dosage matters. A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing. A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely. And people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy. In his 2023 paper on the rise of 21st-century solitude, Atalay, at the Philadelphia Fed, calculated that by one measure, sociability means considerably more for happiness than money does: A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.

Max Guther

Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone, in their home, away from other people. Perhaps, one might think, they are making the right choice; after all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want, or what will make them happy. The saying that “predictions are hard, especially about the future” applies with special weight to predictions about our own life. Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety. And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.

[From the May 2012 issue: Is Facebook making us lonely?]

Several years ago, Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, asked commuter-train passengers to make a prediction: How would they feel if asked to spend the ride talking with a stranger? Most participants predicted that quiet solitude would make for a better commute than having a long chat with someone they didn’t know. Then Epley’s team created an experiment in which some people were asked to keep to themselves, while others were instructed to talk with a stranger (“The longer the conversation, the better,” participants were told). Afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel? Despite the broad assumption that the best commute is a silent one, the people instructed to talk with strangers actually reported feeling significantly more positive than those who’d kept to themselves. “A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Researchers have repeatedly validated Epley’s discovery. In 2020, the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky, at UC Riverside, asked people to behave like an extrovert for one week and like an introvert for another. Subjects received several reminders to act “assertive” and “spontaneous” or “quiet” and “reserved” depending on the week’s theme. Participants said they felt more positive emotions at the end of the extroversion week and more negative emotions at the end of the introversion week. Our modern economy, with its home-delivery conveniences, manipulates people into behaving like agoraphobes. But it turns out that we can be manipulated in the opposite direction. And we might be happier for it.

Our “mistaken” preference for solitude could emerge from a misplaced anxiety that other people aren’t that interested in talking with us, or that they would find our company bothersome. “But in reality,” Epley told me, “social interaction is not very uncertain, because of the principle of reciprocity. If you say hello to someone, they’ll typically say hello back to you. If you give somebody a compliment, they’ll typically say thank you.” Many people, it seems, are not social enough for their own good. They too often seek comfort in solitude, when they would actually find joy in connection.

Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities.

The AI Century

The anti-social century has been bad enough: more anxiety and depression; more “need for chaos” in our politics. But I’m sorry to say that our collective detachment could still get worse. Or, to be more precise, weirder.

In May of last year, three employees of OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence company, sat onstage to introduce ChatGPT’s new real-time conversational-speech feature. A research scientist named Mark Chen held up a phone and, smiling, started speaking to it.

“Hey, ChatGPT, I’m Mark. How are you?” Mark said.

“Hello, Mark!” a cheery female voice responded.

“Hey, so I’m onstage right now,” Mark said. “I’m doing a live demo, and frankly I’m feeling a little bit nervous. Can you help me calm my nerves a little bit?”

“Oh, you’re doing a live demo right now?” the voice replied, projecting astonishment with eerie verisimilitude. “That’s awesome! Just take a deep breath and remember: You’re the expert here.”

Mark asked for feedback on his breathing, before panting loudly, like someone who’d just finished a marathon.

“Whoa, slow!” the voice responded. “Mark, you’re not a vacuum cleaner!” Out of frame, the audience laughed. Mark tried breathing audibly again, this time more slowly and deliberately.

“That’s it,” the AI responded. “How do you feel?”

“I feel a lot better,” Mark said. “Thank you so much.”

AI’s ability to speak naturally might seem like an incremental update, as subtle as a camera-lens refinement on a new iPhone. But according to Nick Epley, fluent speech represents a radical advancement in the technology’s ability to encroach on human relationships.

“Once an AI can speak to you, it’ll feel extremely real,” he said, because people process spoken word more intimately and emotionally than they process text. For a study published in 2020, Epley and Amit Kumar, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, randomly assigned participants to contact an old friend via phone or email. Most people said they preferred to send a written message. But those instructed to talk on the phone reported feeling “a significantly stronger bond” with their friend, and a stronger sense that they’d “really connected,” than those who used email.

Speech is rich with what are known as “paralinguistic cues,” such as emphasis and intonation, which can build sympathy and trust in the minds of listeners. In another study, Epley and the behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder found that employers and potential recruiters were more likely to rate candidates as “more competent, thoughtful, and intelligent” when they heard a why-I’m-right-for-this-job pitch rather than read it.

Even now, before AI has mastered fluent speech, millions of people are already forming intimate relationships with machines, according to Jason Fagone, a journalist who is writing a book about the emergence of AI companions. Character.ai, the most popular platform for AI companions, has tens of millions of monthly users, who spend an average of 93 minutes a day chatting with their AI friend. “No one is getting duped into thinking they’re actually talking to humans,” Fagone told me. “People are freely choosing to enter relationships with artificial partners, and they’re getting deeply attached anyway, because of the emotional capabilities of these systems.” One subject in his book is a young man who, after his fiancée’s death, engineers an AI chatbot to resemble his deceased partner. Another is a bisexual mother who supplements her marriage to a man with an AI that identifies as a woman.

If you find the notion of emotional intercourse with an immaterial entity creepy, consider the many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen. Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he said.

Epley sees the exponential growth of AI companions as a real possibility. “You can set them up to never criticize you, never cheat on you, never have a bad day and insult you, and to always be interested in you.” Unlike the most patient spouses, they could tell us that we’re always right. Unlike the world’s best friend, they could instantly respond to our needs without the all-too-human distraction of having to lead their own life.

“The horrifying part, of course, is that learning how to interact with real human beings who can disagree with you and disappoint you” is essential to living in the world, Epley said. I think he’s right. But Epley was born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s. People born in the 2010s, or the 2020s, might not agree with us about the irreplaceability of “real human” friends. These generations may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation—that can be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon-based life forms. Long before technologists build a superintelligent machine that can do the work of so many Einsteins, they may build an emotionally sophisticated one that can do the work of so many friends.

The Next 15 Minutes

The anti-social century is as much a result of what’s happened to the exterior world of concrete and steel as it is about advances inside our phones. The decline of government investments in what Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure”—public spaces that shape our relationship to the world—may have begun in the latter part of the 20th century, but it has continued in the 21st. That has arguably affected nearly everyone, but less advantaged Americans most of all.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to poor neighborhoods in big cities, and the community leaders tell me the real crisis for poor teenagers is that there’s just not much for them to do anymore, and nowhere to go,” Klinenberg told me. “I’d like to see the government build social infrastructure for teenagers with the creativity and generosity with which video-game companies build the toys that keep them inside. I’m thinking of athletic fields, and public swimming pools, and libraries with beautiful social areas for young people to hang out together.”

Improved public social infrastructure would not solve all the problems of the anti-social century. But degraded public spaces—and degraded public life—are in some ways the other side of all our investments in video games and phones and bigger, better private space. Just as we needed time to see the invisible emissions of the Industrial Revolution, we are only now coming to grips with the negative externalities of a phonebound and homebound world. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation. We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.

Max Guther

But we can choose differently. In his 2015 novel, Seveneves, Neal Stephenson coined the term Amistics to describe the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept. The word is a reference to the Amish, who generally shun many modern innovations, including cars and television. Although they are sometimes considered strictly anti-modern, many Amish communities have refrigerators and washing machines, and some use solar power. Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values. In his 1998 dissertation on one Amish community, Tay Keong Tan, then a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, quoted a community member as saying that they didn’t want to adopt TV or radio, because those products “would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people.”

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?

A seemingly straightforward prescription is that teenagers should choose to spend less time on their phone, and their parents should choose to invite more friends over for dinner. But in a way, these are collective-action problems. A teenager is more likely to get out of the house if his classmates have already made a habit of hanging out. That teen’s parents are more likely to host if their neighbors have also made a habit of weekly gatherings. There is a word for such deeply etched communal habits: rituals. And one reason, perhaps, that the decline of socializing has synchronized with the decline of religion is that nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.

“I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.

When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it.”

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Anti-Social Century.”

A few months ago, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with a woman whose husband raises cattle in Missouri. She, however, had recently raised and butchered an ostrich for meat. It’s more sustainable, she told me. Sure, I nodded along, beef is singularly terrible for the planet. And ostrich is a red meat, she added. “I don’t taste any difference between it and beef.” Really? Now I was intrigued, if skeptical—which is, long story short, how my family ended up eating ostrich at this year’s Christmas dinner.

I eat meat, including beef, and I enjoy indulging in a holiday prime rib, but I also feel somewhat conflicted about it. Beef is far worse for the environment than virtually any other protein; pound for pound, it is responsible for more than twice the greenhouse-gas emissions of pork, nearly four times those of chicken, and more than 13 times those of beans. This discrepancy is largely biological: Cows require a lot of land, and they are ruminants, whose digestive systems rely on microbes that produce huge quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. A single cow can belch out 220 pounds of methane a year.

The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has inspired a cottage industry of takes imploring Americans to consider other proteins in its stead: chicken, fish, pork, beans. These alternatives all have their own drawbacks. When it comes to animal welfare, for example, hundreds of chickens or fish would have to be slaughtered to feed as many people as one cow. Meanwhile, pigs are especially intelligent, and conventional means of farming them are especially cruel. And beans, I’m sorry, simply are not as delicious.

So, ostrich? At first glance, ostrich didn’t seem the most climate-friendly option (beans), the most ethical (beans again), or the tastiest (pork, in my personal opinion). But could ostrich be good enough in all of these categories, an acceptable if surprising solution to Americans’ love of too much red meat? At the very least, I wondered if ostrich might be deserving of more attention than we give to it right now, which is approximately zero.

You probably won’t be shocked to hear that the literature on ostrich meat’s climate impact is rather thin. Still, in South Africa, “the world leader in the production of ostriches,” government economists in 2020 released a report suggesting that greenhouse-gas emissions from ostrich meat were just slightly higher than chicken’s—so, much, much less than beef’s. And in Switzerland, biologists who put ostriches in respiratory chambers confirmed their methane emissions to be on par with those of nonruminant mammals such as pigs—so, again, much, much less than cows’.

But Marcus Clauss, an author of the latter study, who specializes in the digestive physiology of animals at the University of Zurich, cautioned me against focusing exclusively on methane. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, but it is just one of several. Carbon dioxide is the other big contributor to global warming, and a complete assessment of ostrich meat’s greenhouse-gas footprint needs to include the carbon dioxide released by every input, including the fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives that went into growing ostrich feed.

This is where the comparisons get more complicated. Cattle—even corn-fed ones—tend to spend much of their life on pasture eating grass, which leads to a lot of methane burps, but growing that grass is not carbon intensive. In contrast, chicken feed is made up of corn and soybeans, whose fertilizer, pesticides, and soil additives all rack up carbon-dioxide emissions. Ostrich feed appears similar, containing alfalfa, wheat, and soybeans. The climate impact of an animal’s feed are important contributions in its total greenhouse-gas emissions, says Ermias Kebreab, an animal scientist at  UC Davis who has extensively studied livestock emissions. He hasn’t calculated ostrich emissions specifically—few researchers have—but the more I looked into the emissions associated with ostrich feed, the murkier the story became.

Two other ostrich studies, from northwest Spain and from a province in western Iran, indeed found feed to be a major factor in the meat’s climate impact. But these reports also contradicted others: In Spain, for instance, the global-warming potential from ostrich meat was found to be higher than that of beef or pork—but beef was also essentially no worse than pork.

“Really, none of the [studies] on ostrich look credible to me. They all give odd numbers,” says Joseph Poore, the director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability, which runs the HESTIA platform aimed at standardizing environmental-impact data from food. “Maybe this is something we will do with HESTIA soon,” Poore continued in his email, “but we are not there yet …” (His ellipses suggested to me that ostrich might not be a top priority.)

The truth is, greenhouse-gas emissions from food are sensitive to the exact mode of production, which vary country to country, region to region, and even farm to farm. And any analysis is only as good as the quality of the data that go into it. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed studies of American farms raising the ostrich meat I could actually buy. Ultimately, my journey down the rabbit hole of ostrich emissions convinced me that parsing the relative virtues of different types of meat might be beside the point. “Just eat whatever meat you want but cut back to 20 percent,” suggests Brian Kateman, a co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, which advocates eating, well, less meat. (Other activists, of course, are more absolutist.) Still, “eat less meat” is an adage easier to say than to implement. The challenge, Clauss said, is, “any measure that you would instigate to make meat rarer will make it more of a status symbol than it already is.”

I thought about his words over Christmas dinner, the kind of celebration that many Americans feel is incomplete without a fancy roast. By then, I had, out of curiosity, ordered an ostrich filet (billed as tasting like a lean steak) and an ostrich wing (like a beef rib), which I persuaded my in-laws to put on the table. At more than $25 a pound for the filet, the bird cost as much as a prime cut of beef.

Ostrich has none of the strong or gamey flavors that people can find off-putting, but it is quite lean. I pan-seared the filet with a generous pat of butter, garlic, and thyme. The rosy interior and caramelized crust did perfectly resemble steak. But perhaps because I did not taste the ostrich blind—apologies to the scientific method—I found the flavor still redolent of poultry, if richer and meatier. Not bad, but not exactly beefy. “I wouldn’t think it’s beef,” concluded my brother-in-law, who had been persuaded to smoke the ostrich wing alongside his usual Christmas prime rib. The wing reminded me most of a Renaissance Fair turkey leg; a leftover sandwich I fixed up the next day, though, would have passed as a perfectly acceptable brisket sandwich.

I wouldn’t mind having ostrich again, but the price puts it out of reach for weeknight meals, when I can easily be eating beans anyways. At Christmas, I expect my in-laws will stick with the prime rib, streaked through as it is with warm fat and nostalgia.

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Americans are spending more and more time alone. Some are lonely. But many people—young men in particular—are actively choosing to spend much of their time in isolation, in front of screens. That proclivity is having a profound effect on individual well-being and on American’s “civic and psychic identity,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes in our new cover story. I spoke with Derek about what he calls our anti-social century.

Lora Kelley: The pandemic was obviously very disruptive to people’s social lives. How much is it to blame for this trend toward aloneness?

Derek Thompson: I never would have written this story if the data showed that Americans were hanging out and socializing more and more with every passing year and decade—until the pandemic happened, and we went inside of our homes, and now we’re just slowly getting back out. That’s not a story about America. That’s a story about a health emergency causing people to retreat from the physical world.

The anti-social century is the opposite of that story. Every single demographic of Americans now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis. Overall, Americans spend about 20 percent less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the century. For teenagers and for young Black men, it’s closer to 40 percent less time. This trend seems, by some accounts, to have accelerated during the pandemic. But as one economist pointed out to me, we were more alone in 2023 than we were in 2021.

Lora: We’ve talked a bit about shifts in isolation for young people. Where do older Americans fit into this? Are we seeing similar dynamics play out for that cohort?

Derek: Aloneness is rising across the board—for every age group and for every ethnicity and for every type of education—but it’s rising slower for old people and faster for young people.

Older people have always spent more time alone than young people. They don’t go to school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; they’re not legally forced to be around people the same way that many young people are. They aren’t in college, and they are often unemployed, so they aren’t in offices.

The solitude inequality that used to exist between different age groups—where old people were very alone, and young people were very social—is shrinking. You could say young people are acting more like old people.

Lora: What would you say to someone who thinks: Well, what’s wrong with spending time alone? If people are doing what they want to do, and pursuing their idea of a good life, why not spend more time in the house?

Derek: I don’t want this article to be a criticism of introversion, and I certainly don’t want this article to be a criticism of quiet. I myself am somewhat introverted and love a bit of quiet time. But what’s happening in America today is not a healthy trend of people simply spending more time being happy by themselves. Many researchers who looked at the rise of alone time have come to the conclusion that Americans self-report less satisfaction when they spend lots of time alone or in their house.

I think a certain amount of alone time is not only acceptable; it’s absolutely essential. But as with any therapeutic, the dosage matters, and people who spend a little bit of time taking moments by themselves, meditating, or decompressing are very different from people who are spending more hours, year after year, isolated.

Lora: To what extent is the rise of isolated lifestyles an individual issue—one that’s concerning because it’s making people sadder—versus a civic issue that’s causing a shift in American politics?

Derek: This pullback from public life started with technology, with cars and television, and ultimately smartphones, allowing Americans to privatize their leisure. But I absolutely think it’s becoming a political story.

I think we don’t understand one another for a reason that’s mathematical, almost tautological: Americans understand Americans less because we see Americans less. More and more, the way we confront people we don’t know is on social media, and we present an entirely different face online—one that tends to be more extreme and more negative and more hateful of the “out” group. I don’t think there should be any confusion about why an anti-social century has coincided with a polarized century.

Lora: You write in your article that “nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.” How do you think about the way that so many Americans use technology—things like phone reminders and calendar tools and self-improvement apps—to inscribe rituals into their personal routines?

Derek: We haven’t just privatized leisure. We’ve privatized ritual. Modern rituals are more likely to bind us to ourselves than to other people: Meditate at this time alone. Remember to work out alone, or around other people with noise-canceling headphones.

It’s profoundly ironic that a lot of people are optimizing themselves toward solitude. The anti-social century is about accretion. It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.

Related:

February cover story: The anti-social century Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out

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How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days Stop the (North Carolina) steal. Mark Zuckerberg wants to be Elon Musk.

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Federal prosecutors said they plan on releasing the part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report that details Donald Trump’s election-interference case if the court order blocking them is lifted. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Trump against taking over Greenland, Denmark’s autonomous territory. Trump asked the Supreme Court to halt the sentencing hearing in his New York criminal hush-money case, which is scheduled to take place on Friday.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: BFA / Alamy; Roadside Attractions / Everett Collection; Pablo Larraín / Netflix.

The Film That Rips the Hollywood Comeback Narrative Apart

By Shirley Li

[Demi Moore’s] fame, when contrasted with some of her forgettable films—The Butcher’s Wife, The Scarlet Letter—turned her into an easy punch line. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sneered at the start of his review of the latter: “What is the point of Demi Moore?”

Look at Moore now.

Read the full article.

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Try something new. The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has driven a search for an alternative protein that’s ethical and tasty, Sarah Zhang reports. Is the answer ostrich meat?

Read. Recent entries into the literature of parenting offer two different ways of understanding fatherhood, Lily Meyer writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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