You’d be forgiven for thinking that America’s continental shelf couldn’t get any bigger. It is, after all, mostly rock, the submerged landmass linking shore and abyss. But in late 2023, after a long and expensive mapping project, the State Department announced that the continental shelf had grown by 1 million square kilometers—more than two Californias.

The United States had ample motive to decide that the continental shelf extends farther than it had previously realized. A larger shelf means legal access to more of the ocean floor’s riches: animals, hydrocarbons, and, perhaps most important, minerals to power electric-vehicle batteries. America has no immediate plans to excavate its new seabed, which includes chunks of the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and Atlantic, as well as several small pockets of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. But, according to the State Department, the combined area could be worth trillions of dollars.

The announcement shows just how shrewdly the U.S. has gamed the international system. Since 1982, a United Nations agreement called the Law of the Sea has served as the cornerstone of the global maritime order. In its expansion project, the U.S. abided by the treaty’s rules dictating how nations can extend their shelves—but, notably, it never ratified the agreement, which means that unlike the 169 nations that did, it doesn’t have to pay royalties on the resources it extracts. Apparently America can have its cake and eat it, too: a brand-new shelf, acquired in seemingly good order, that it can mine for free. This gold rush in the making can be seen as the culmination of a long national bet that even though America helped create the global maritime order, it’s better off not joining.

America’s undersea enlargement would not have been possible without Larry Mayer. An oceanographer at the University of New Hampshire, Mayer began the U.S. government’s largest-ever offshore-mapping effort in 2003. Over the next 20 years, he led a team of scientists that dragged sensors across America’s neighboring oceans, scanning more than 1 million square miles of seabed. “When you do that at nine miles an hour, it takes time,” Mayer told me. The project logged more than three years afloat, “a lot of it in the Arctic, which takes even more time because we’ve got to break ice.”

[From the January/February 2020 issue: History’s largest mining operation is about to begin]

Forty voyages and more than $100 million later, Mayer returned with four terabytes of data, which State Department officials plugged into formulas laid out by the treaty. “Not all countries have the ability to hire Larry Mayer and the scientific wherewithal to go out for 20 years and spend tens of millions” to grow their shelf, says James Kraska, a law professor at the U.S. Naval War College who also teaches a course at Harvard Law School on international maritime code. “Ghana hasn’t done this.”

America first claimed jurisdiction over its continental shelf in 1945, a few weeks after Japan’s surrender in World War II. For several years, the U.S. government had been concerned about Japanese ships catching salmon off Alaska, as well as other nations drilling for oil off American shores. With the war over, President Harry Truman proclaimed that an underwater area of some 750,000 square miles—about 4.5 Californias—now belonged to America.

No internationally agreed-upon definition of continental shelves existed until 1958, when 86 countries gathered at the first UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The group decided, somewhat unhelpfully, that a shelf could extend as far and as deep as a nation could drill. By the following decade, technology had advanced so quickly that a country could claim virtually an entire ocean. Sure enough, one member of Congress from Florida proposed that the U.S. occupy what amounted to two-thirds of the North Atlantic.

President Lyndon B. Johnson warned against such expansionism. In a 1966 speech, he denounced the “new form of colonial competition” that threatened to emerge among maritime nations. “We must ensure that the deep seas and the ocean bottoms are, and remain, the legacy of all human beings,” he said. The following year, Arvid Pardo, an ambassador from Malta, called on the UN to deem the ocean floor “the common heritage of mankind.” In 1970, the U.S. voted alongside 107 other nations to do precisely that.

The UN reconvened in 1973 to legislate a shared vision of the seas. Over the next nine years, more than 150 nations and as many as 5,000 people gathered for off-and-on negotiating sessions in New York City and Geneva. They discussed a wide range of topics—freedom of navigation, fishing, scientific research, pollution, the seabed—and ultimately produced the Law of the Sea.

The U.S. had helped pave the way. Three years before the convention, the Nixon administration had presented a draft treaty that proposed a forerunner to the International Seabed Authority: an agency established by the Law of the Sea that would collect royalties from underwater resources and distribute them to the developing world. But the nation’s posture changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. American delegates began showing up to negotiating sessions wearing ties that bore the image of Adam Smith, the father of free markets. It was an early sign of the administration’s reluctance to regulate the maritime economy.

In 1982, the U.S. voted against adopting the Law of the Sea—one of only four countries to do so—and said it would refuse to ratify the finalized treaty. Reagan’s reason: the regulations on mining, which he thought would hamper America’s ability to exploit undersea mineral resources. He seemed particularly worried about the royalty scheme that would govern the international seafloor, a vast virgin deep that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any one state and makes up about half of the world’s ocean floor.

That June, Reagan reportedly told his National Security Council, “We’re policed and patrolled on land and there is so much regulation that I kind of thought that when you go out on the high seas you can do what you want.” The president was concerned about “free oceans closing where we were getting along fine before,” minutes from the meeting show. He dispatched onetime Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to persuade other nations to reject the treaty, but the mission failed.

Just 16 years earlier, the U.S. under Johnson had set out to prevent nations from making unilateral claims to the high seas. Then America made its own. Months after the Law of the Sea was finalized, Reagan said the U.S. would abide by its rules on “traditional uses of the oceans,” such as navigation, but not by the “unnecessary political and economic restraints” that the treaty imposed on mining. Instead, Reagan claimed jurisdiction over all the natural and mineral resources within 200 nautical miles of the nation’s shores (230 regular miles), an allowance that the Law of the Sea granted only signatories. That is, he cited “international law” for permission, even though he had refused to ratify that law. Reagan showed that the U.S. could take what it wanted from the treaty without submitting to the UN. Judging by the newly extended shelf, it still can.

The State Department’s Extended Continental Shelf Project works out of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building in Boulder, Colorado, some 800 miles from the nearest ocean. Its office is down the hall from the Space Weather Prediction Center. When I visited last year, maps of the Arctic adorned the walls, and a whiteboard showed an elementary red drawing of the U.S. and Canada protruding into the Atlantic. Inside sat Brian Van Pay, the director of the project, and Kevin Baumert, its lawyer.

Van Pay and Baumert are picky about words. When I asked whether America had just gotten bigger, Van Pay replied: “It depends on how you define it. If you’re talking about sovereignty”—he emphasized the last syllable—then no. “But if you’re talking about sovereign rights”—maybe. “But it’s not territory.”

[From the April 1969 issue: The deep-sea bed]

According to the Law of the Sea, a continental shelf stretches 200 nautical miles from a nation’s shores. Any country can mine this area without worrying about royalties. But the treaty lays out two formulas for tacking on “extended” shelf; calculating this is what kept Van Pay and Baumert busy. If you mine there, you need to pay royalties to the International Seabed Authority—unless you’re America and haven’t ratified the treaty.

The first formula requires finding the “foot of the continental slope,” where the seabed starts to flatten out. For the next 60 nautical miles beyond that point, you’ve got continental shelf. The second formula involves the sediment on the ocean floor. (This goes by the technical name “ooze.” It’s plankton skeletons, mainly.) Shelves extend as long as the sediment covering them is thick enough that oil and gas could plausibly be stashed underneath. A team of scientists, led by the geologist Debbie Hutchinson, scanned the ocean floor with seismic sensors to find this boundary. Two regulatory limits circumscribed Van Pay and Baumert’s calculations: No shelf can spread more than 350 nautical miles from shore, or more than 100 nautical miles beyond 2,500 meters of depth. The formulas yielded 1,279 coordinate points delineating the new shelf.

The rules are objective, but the results depend on other nations’ recognition. Parts of America’s new shelf overlap with those of the Bahamas, Canada, and Japan, prompting ongoing negotiations. And in March, Russia’s foreign ministry said that it wouldn’t recognize America’s shelf, because the U.S. hadn’t sent its data to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the agency created by the Law of the Sea to review such submissions.

Russia’s claim relates to a broader concern that the U.S. has essentially ignored unfriendly provisions in the treaty—such as oversight requirements—while exploiting advantageous ones, such as formulas for shelf expansion. Van Pay and Baumert disagree with that characterization. Baumert told me that America’s expansion is not unprecedented; more than three dozen countries have extended their shelves without ratifying the Law of the Sea. (Only four of those still haven’t ratified, though: Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and the United States.)

Furthermore, Van Pay and Baumert told me that they hadn’t sent in their new coordinate points because the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf had never considered submissions from a nation that wasn’t a party to the Law of the Sea. I asked the commission, If America submitted its shelf boundaries, would you review them? “This question has never been raised,” Aldino Campos, the chair of the commission, told me. He said it wouldn’t discuss whether to consider such a submission unless it actually receives one. But ultimately the commission only makes recommendations; actually asserting the new limits of a continental shelf falls to the United States.

Even though America hasn’t ratified the treaty, Kraska, the law professor, told me it has an obligation to comply with it. He argued that it has taken on the force of “customary international law”—that is, a set of norms and practices that are so widely followed that they become binding to all nations, whether or not they’re signatories. All told, he said, the U.S. has made a “credible, good-faith effort” to extend its continental shelf in accordance with the Law of the Sea.

Most mainstream U.S. government officials want America to ratify the treaty. Five presidents and at least five secretaries of state have urged Congress to join, arguing that it would help bolster the international rule of law. Becoming a party to the Law of the Sea would also allow the U.S. to further legitimize its expanded shelf.

Ever since Reagan, though, Republican lawmakers have staved off ratification, which requires two-thirds of the Senate. Along with conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, they worry that the royalty schemes would impose an undue financial burden and that joining the treaty could result in a “dangerous loss of American sovereignty.”

Their calculus may soon change. As early as this year, the International Seabed Authority could finalize regulations that would open up mining on the international seafloor. Because America hasn’t ratified the Law of the Sea, it won’t have the right to participate. (Some conservatives argue, however, that the U.S. can simply do as it pleases on the international seafloor.) Pressure is mounting on lawmakers: In March, more than 300 former political and military leaders called on the Senate to ratify, reflecting concerns that America might not be able to keep up with China if it relies solely on its own shelf.

America may not mine its new seabed for decades anyhow. The role of the State Department, Van Pay and Baumert insist, is to set the fence posts, not referee what happens within them. In the meantime, America’s shelf could keep growing. “We always want to leave open that possibility,” Van Pay told me. More data could be collected, he said. “There are more invisible lines to draw.”

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”

Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

Obviously? Immediately upon assuming office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the approximately 1,500 people prosecuted for participating in the January 6 attacks, including convicted violent offenders. He might not have literally deployed any mobs yet, but he has freed members of paramilitary groups that are loyal to him, and who may see their pardons and commutations as license to act on his behalf again.

[Read: January 6ers got out of prison—and came to my neighborhood]

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, led military-style maneuvers on January 6 and had an armed strike force nearby. This week, while strolling the Capitol in a kind of victory tour, Rhodes told CNN, “I don’t regret calling out the election as what it was.” The Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who had to direct the attacks from a distance (a judge had barred him from the city for vandalizing a Black church), expressed vindication and a desire for revenge. “We went through hell—and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it,” he exulted on The Alex Jones Show. “The people who did this [to us], they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars.” And the “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said in a livestream, “I would storm the Capitol again for Donald Trump. I would start a militia for Donald Trump.”

The J6 pardons have chagrined many Republicans. But it is not going to make many of them rethink their support for Trump. If you want to understand why, look again at the sentence that Lowry wrote just before laughing off the hysterical fear of Trumpist paramilitaries. Trump “says crude and unworthy things.” He “behaved abysmally.”

Even when Republicans in good MAGA standing can bring themselves to scold Trump, their criticism is limited to discrete acts. Trump can say or do something bad, but he cannot be something bad. To acknowledge that his bad acts follow from his character and beliefs, and therefore offer a guide to his future actions, would throw into question the morality and wisdom of supporting him.

Before the fact, vanishingly few prominent Republican politicians or conservative intellectuals actively endorsed the notion of freeing the J6 criminals en masse. The party line before the inauguration held that Trump was in his rights to grant clemency to some of the nonviolent offenders, but not to the ones who’d beat up cops or planned the operation. The week before he was sworn in as vice president, J. D. Vance said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Even Representative Jim Jordan, one of the most flamboyant Trump devotees in Congress, wouldn’t endorse a full suite of pardons.

After Trump went ahead, his allies mostly stopped short of defending the pardons. Instead, they turned to a familiar menu of evasive maneuvers. Some expressed an implausible degree of unfamiliarity with Trump’s actions. (“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,” Senator Susan Collins said.) Others fell back on whataboutism. (“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” Senator Chuck Grassley sneered in response to a reporter’s question about January 6. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”) Most expressed a desire to ignore the issue altogether. (“We’re not looking backwards; we’re looking forwards,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.) Awkwardly, almost immediately after bleating about their desire to move forward, House Republicans announced a new committee to “investigate” January 6, which presumably will advance Trump’s alt-history of the event as an FBI setup, a Democratic security failure, a day of love, or, somehow, all three.

[Listen: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon]

The most revealing statement on the pardons came from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “The president’s made his decision,” he said. “I don’t second-guess those.” Here, Johnson was stating overtly what most of his colleagues had only revealed tacitly: that he does not believe that his job permits him to criticize, let alone oppose, Trump’s actions.

This admission has profound implications. It shows that Trump faces no effective constraints from within his party. Given the Republican trifecta, this means he faces no effective opposition from within the elected branches of the federal government. Even if his allies personally believe that a line exists that the president cannot or will not cross, what matters is that if he does cross it, nothing will happen to him. This realization ought to shake their confidence that the next imagined red line will hold. Instead, they have declined to revise any of their deeper beliefs about Trump.

The refusal to draw any broader conclusions from the January 6 pardons is evident not just on Capitol Hill but also in the handful of reproachful articles published in conservative media. The pardons are “a poor start for an administration that has pledged to end the partisanship of law enforcement and restore public order,” National Review editorialized. “This is a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally,” the editors of The Free Press observed. The implication of these dutiful reprimands is that Trump has failed to live up to his values, rather than having fulfilled them.

In the midst of the Soviet show trials in 1936, Workers Age, an American communist newspaper, gently rebuked Stalin for his heavy-handedness. Sure, the defendants were guilty of sabotage at the behest of Trotsky, but execution was an excessive punishment. “Furthermore,” the editorial declared, “we do not hesitate to say that the bureaucratic regime of Stalin in the CPSU makes it extremely difficult for healthy, constructive critical opposition forces developing in the Party ranks”—as if inhibiting criticism of Stalin was some kind of unintended consequence of executing his rivals.

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

The conservatives distressed over Trump’s mass pardons have a similar lack of curiosity about his motives. Why Trump would take such unfortunate actions, they do not ask. Could it be because he believes fundamentally that opposition to him is per se criminal, action on his behalf is per se legal, and any outcome in which he loses is illegitimate?

One might hope that Trump’s congressional allies, temporarily disappointed by his regrettable lapse in judgment regarding the January 6 pardons, might rethink their approach to the ongoing confirmation fights, which revolve around fears that the president will abuse his power. Given Trump’s reported desire to use the military to shoot peaceful protesters, maybe find a defense secretary who hasn’t written a series of hair-on-fire books depicting American liberals as tantamount to hostile enemy combatants. And given Trump’s obsession with criminalizing his critics, they might pick an FBI director who does not have an enemies list and who hasn’t produced a recording of a Trump anthem performed by violent insurrectionists.

Alas, the “moment,” as The Free Press revealingly put it, for expressing disappointment with the president has already passed. They are back to the workaday routine of supporting Trump’s efforts to keep his administration free of any official who might be stricken with conscience. There may be more moments of concern in the future. Indeed, the party’s acquiescence to Trump’s appetite for revenge and corruption all but guarantees it. But those moments, too, shall pass.

When Vladimir Putin daydreams, he imagines himself saluting a phalanx as it goose-steps across central Kyiv. In Donald Trump’s version of the fantasy, he is triumphantly floating through the Panama Canal on a battleship. Both men see themselves recovering lost empires, asserting their place in history by reversing it.

During his first term, Trump set about dismantling the architecture of postwar internationalism by trash-talking and bullying the institutional implements of global cooperation, the likes of NATO and the World Health Organization. This assault on the old order was waged in the name of populism, an attack on elites in foreign capitals who siphoned off taxpayers’ dollars. But what Trump hoped to achieve with these rhetorical fusillades was sometimes unclear, other than pleasing his political base, which adored them.

As Trump enters his second term, those attacks now seem more purposeful. In retrospect, he may have been laying tracks for a more ambitious plan, weakening those institutions so that he could eventually exploit their weakness.

Over the past weeks, he’s declared himself the tribune of a new era of American imperialism, which abandons any pretext of promoting liberal values to the world. In Trump’s newly hatched vision of empire, America stands poised to expand—not just into Panama but into Greenland and outer space—simply because its raw power entitles it to expand. To use the phrase he invoked in his inaugural address, a callback to the 19th-century vision of American imperialism, it is his “manifest destiny.”

This new policy represents a twist in his evolution that makes some of his most ardent supporters look like suckers. MAGA intellectuals and mouthpieces—Tucker Carlson is the paragon—portrayed Trump as a devoted isolationist, a fierce critic of militarism, a leader who would never indulge in foreign adventures. (Writing in Compact, the journalist Christian Parenti exclaimed that Trump “has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”) It turns out that Trump isn’t really a member of the peace party after all.

[Helen Lewis: Carlson and Vance—two smart guys who play dumb for power]

At a glance, Panama is an odd centerpiece for this vision. Before Trump started wailing about it, there wasn’t any apparent issue with American access to the canal. But Trump has focused on it because of its historic resonance. Reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.

In its nostalgic quest to return to a prelapsarian era of the America past, the right used to incessantly harp on the canal. It was, by any ideological measure, a defining symbol of national prowess. In The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough’s epic history of its construction, the author called it “the first grandiose and assertive show of American power at the dawn of the new century … the resolution of a dream as old as the voyages of Columbus.”

But, as McCullough also documents, that triumph came at an immense human cost. By dredging a notch in the earth, many laborers were digging their own grave; they perished in landslides, of rampant heatstroke and malaria and yellow fever. The death toll stoked enduring hatred of the yanqui.  

Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back. Johnson appreciated this lesson only after dispatching troops to quell anti-American riots in 1964. Presidents knew that if the canal remained an American possession, they would have to repeat Johnson’s intervention; the anger over America’s presence would never subside.

Henry Kissinger poured himself into negotiating an agreement relinquishing the waterway. But only Jimmy Carter had the political courage to push a pair of treaties through the U.S. Senate. In classic Carter fashion, his painstaking efforts brought little domestic political benefit. Indeed, by mobilizing moderate Republicans to support the treaties, he helped doom their careers.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

That’s because the insurgent New Right, the faction of the Republican Party that evolved into the modern conservative establishment, appreciated the political upside of demagoguing the issue. As Richard Viguerie, an architect of the right’s emerging infrastructure, put it, “We’re going to ride this hard. It’s a sexy issue. It’s a populist issue.” Running for president in 1976, Ronald Reagan bellowed, “We built it; we paid for it; and we’re going to keep it.” This was a lament for what George Will called America’s “vanished mastery.”

These attacks were highly effective. The New Right bludgeoned the 68 senators who voted to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which helped unseat 20 of them in 1978 and 1980. Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, crowed, “The Panama Canal treaties put us on the map.”

For Ronald Reagan, however, the treaties were merely a campaign talking point. As president, he never sought to reverse Carter’s course. He backed away from the raw nostalgia for empire that he had espoused in the campaign and joined a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, which tended to distance itself from America’s imperial history.

During the Cold War and the era that followed, American presidents justified intervention in foreign conflicts as a means toward the end of defending liberal values, the promotion of democracy, the squelching of communism, and the prevention of genocide. Sometimes this was hypocrisy. Sometimes it was dangerously misguided. But it was also a genuine evolution in values. America no longer used its military might to acquire territories or to blatantly protect its corporations or to acquire precious resources. Interventions were justified in the moral vocabulary of international law.

Donald Trump is abandoning this tradition by describing a Hobbesian world in which the most powerful are given free reign to dominate. If the U.S. wants Greenland’s resources, it has a divine right to them. If it wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico, to suggest the subservience of a neighbor, it can. This type of imperial spirit rarely restricts itself to the rhetorical. Martial threats manifest themselves in martial action. After demolishing the global order, Trump intends to plant his flag on the rubble.

In the hours after Donald Trump returned to power, Jacob Chansley, already in a celebrating mood, became exuberant. Chansley, who is also known as the QAnon Shaman, a nickname he earned for the horned costume he wore during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, did what any red-blooded MAGA American might have done in his situation. “I GOT A PARDON BABY!” Chansley posted on X last night. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”

In the lead-up to Inauguration Day, Trump had spent a lot of time talking about getting revenge on his political enemies. But in one of his first moves as president, Trump decided to treat his supporters to some forgiveness. Last night, he pardoned all of the nearly 1,600 people who had been convicted for their involvement in the Capitol riots. He commuted the sentences of 14 insurrectionists who remained in prison, allowing them to go free. Paired with his order for the attorney general to dismiss “all pending indictments,” Trump has effectively let everyone convicted for their actions in the January 6 attack off the hook.

In Trump’s telling, the people he pardoned were viciously and unfairly punished for what happened at the Capitol. Yesterday, he called the rioters “hostages.” Some of those pardoned included goofy characters, such as Chansley, who seemingly did not arrive at the Capitol intending to overthrow the government but got swept up in the moment. Chansley wasn’t exactly going out of his way to avoid the chaos of the day, however: He left a note on then–Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.” Among those pardoned was Adam Christian Johnson, otherwise known as “lectern guy”: On January 6, he carried then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s podium around the Capitol, smiling and waving in a now-viral photo. “I’m ashamed to have been a part of it,” he said to a judge in February 2022, before he was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to 75 days in jail. “Got a pardon … now … about my lectern,” Johnson wrote on X before later asking Trump to free the men imprisoned for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Among the rioters granted clemency by President Trump there are also longtime militia leaders who planned carefully for the riot. They have been implicated in actively conspiring to violently overtake the Capitol and attack police officers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, and Kelly Meggs, who led its Florida chapter, were among the 14 people whose sentences were commuted. Meggs allegedly participated with his wife in weapons training to prepare for the attack. Before the president intervened, both were slated to spend more than a decade in prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy. According to the Department of Justice, Rhodes and Meggs had organized “teams that were prepared and willing to use force and to transport firearms and ammunition into Washington, D.C.,” and tried “to oppose, by force, the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

Of the 14 people whose remaining prison sentences were commuted by Trump, nine were affiliated with the Oath Keepers and five with the Proud Boys, another violent far-right group. At least one other militia leader was outright pardoned: Enrique Tarrio, a former head of the Proud Boys, is now free long before the end of his 22-year sentence. Though he wasn’t in Washington during the insurrection, Tarrio egged on Proud Boys who entered the Capitol, posting on social media that he was “proud of my boys and my country” and telling his supporters, “Don’t fucking leave” moments after rioters entered the Capitol. In private messages, he took credit for the attack: “Make no mistake,” he wrote, “we did this.” Some of the Proud Boys, including top members Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, went inside the Capitol, where they “overwhelmed officers,” according to the Department of Justice. Biggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Rehl to 15.

Of course, it wasn’t just militia members who seemingly arrived at the Capitol with violence in mind. Also among those pardoned was Eric Munchel, who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after entering the Capitol clad in a tactical vest and carrying zip ties, with which he intended to “take senators hostage,” according to the judge who heard his case. The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity—as long as they’re loyal to Trump. Should an extremist on the right break the law, he can reasonably hope for Trump to pluck them out of the justice system. This is one of the key ingredients to the perpetuation of political violence across society—a belief among those who might carry it out that they can do so, and that they’ll get away with it.

In that sense, the pardons mark what’s to come. The insurrection was the culmination of increased militia activity during the first Trump administration. But after the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys continued to operate while many of their leaders and members were in prison, but in a less publicly visible way than before. Even without militia groups operating at their peak levels, political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.

*Lead-image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Peterson / Redux; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Evan Vucci / AP; Getty.

Updated at 11:11 a.m. ET on January 13, 2025

In 1900, a former schoolteacher named Carrie Nation walked into a bar in Kiowa, Kansas, proclaimed, “Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate,” and proceeded to hurl bricks and stones at bottles of liquor. The men, interested less in spiritual salvation and more in physical safety, fled to a corner. Nation destroyed three saloons that day, using a billiard ball when she ran out of bricks and rocks, which she called “smashers.” She eventually—and famously—switched to a hatchet, using it across years of attacks on what she considered to be the cause of society’s moral failings. She referred to this period of her life as one of “hatchetation.”

By comparison, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, an internist of mild disposition perhaps best known for raising alarm about the “loneliness epidemic,” has taken a gentler approach to the obstinate challenge of alcohol. His recent call to add cancer warnings to alcoholic products was made without violence or yelling. But the recommendation, if followed, would be the most significant action taken against alcohol since at least the 1980s, when new laws set the national drinking age at 21 and mandated warning labels concerning, among other things, alcohol’s pregnancy-related risks. Murthy’s proposal is part of ever-grimmer messaging from public-health officials about even moderate drinking, and comes during a notable shift in cultural attitudes toward alcohol, especially among “sober-curious” young people. In 2020, my colleague Olga Khazan asked why no one seemed interested in creating a modern temperance movement. Now that movement has arrived with a distinctly 21st-century twist. Carrie Nation was trying to transform the soul of her country. Today’s temperance is focused on the transformation of self.

The movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries—which eventually brought about Prohibition—went hand in hand with broad religious revivalism and the campaign for women’s rights. It considered alcohol to be unhealthy for women, families, and the general state of humanity. The depth of the problem posed by alcohol in pre-Prohibition America is hard to fathom: In 1830, Americans drank three times the amount of spirits that we do today, the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80-proof booze a year. As distilled liquor became widely available, men were wasting most of their wages on alcohol and staying out all night at saloons, and what we now call domestic abuse was rampant, the food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson told me. Members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union saw themselves as a progressive group helping the disadvantaged. “They were protecting the home, protecting the family, and protecting the nation by getting rid of alcohol,” Dan Malleck, a health and sciences professor at Brock University, told me. In the latter half of the 19th century, young people signaled their moral virtue by taking temperance pledges.

Today’s sober-curious, by contrast, post on Instagram about how Dry January has reduced their inflammation, sharpened their jawline, and improved their sleep score. The sanctity of the home, or the overall moral health of society—not to mention the 37 Americans who die in drunk-driving crashes every day—appears to be less of a concern. (To be fair, this focus on health is partially a response to research on moderate alcohol consumption’s detrimental effects on heart health, cancer risk, and lifespan.) In a 2020 Gallup poll, 86 percent of respondents said that drinking alcohol was morally acceptable, an increase from 78 percent in 2018. By contrast, more than half of young adults surveyed in 2023 expressed concerns about the health risks of moderate drinking.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: America has a drinking problem]

Colleen Myles, a professor at Texas State University who studies how alcoholic drinks change cultures, told me that such responses don’t mean that the national conversation about alcohol has abandoned morality—simply that Americans’ ethical center of gravity has drifted. She considers modern teetotaling to be steered by a great moral project of our age: self-optimization. In her book Sober Curious, Ruby Warrington wrote that lower alcohol intake “is the next logical step in the wellness revolution.” Myles said that choosing not to drink in an alcohol-soaked culture is seen as an act of authenticity or self-care; social change, but enacted through the individual. In 2019, a nonalcoholic-spirit producer, who calls her product a “euphoric” instead of a mocktail, almost echoed Carrie Nation when she told The New York Times, “Alcohol is a women’s lib issue, an LGBTTQQIAAP issue, a race issue.” But her vision of temperance was much less socially minded: Sober-curiosity, she said, was about a person’s “freedom to choose.” One can hardly imagine Congress or a radical activist like Nation attempting to restrict that freedom by outlawing the sale of espresso martinis. The proposed warning label, however, with its nod to individual health (and absence of radical social action), is more fitting for our age of wellness. It won’t cure society of all its ills, but it at least has a shot of persuading some people to tone down their drinking.

The original temperance movement’s end result—Prohibition—was more ambitious, and took place at the societal level. Prohibition didn’t make the personal act of drinking illegal, but rather the sale, purchase, and transport of alcohol. After Congress proposed the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917, it allowed seven years for the measure to pass; thanks to widespread enthusiasm, the states ratified it in only 13 months. The amendment and the Volstead Act, the law that enforced it, passed in 1919, and Prohibition officially kicked off in 1920.

In this century, “I don’t think we’re going to have Prohibition again,” Myles said, not least because the sober-curious are not advocating for policy change at this scale. Instead, neo-temperates are shifting social and, yes, moral norms about alcohol by emphasizing its effects on health. They also, crucially, are creating markets for nonalcoholic drinks and spaces. The original temperance movement similarly popularized a number of new beverages, such as sodas and fruit juices. But unlike the modern version, it directly attacked the alcoholic-beverage industry. In 1916, the United States was home to 1,300 breweries that made full-strength beer; 10 years later, they were all gone.

[From the April 1921 issue: Relative values in Prohibition]

Alcohol consumption, and the deaths associated with it, decreased significantly during Prohibition. But many people continued to buy alcohol illegally or make it themselves. Part of the reason the temperance movement didn’t usher in utopia, Malleck said, is that it failed to recognize how drunkenness could be fueled by still other societal problems, such as low wages or 12-hour workdays in factories where you were liable to lose a limb or have to urinate in a corner. These issues persisted even when alcohol was outlawed. In 1933, during the Great Depression, legislators decided the country needed the economic boost from alcohol sales and repealed Prohibition. President Herbert Hoover called Prohibition a noble experiment, but many historians consider it a failure. Today, about 60 percent of Americans drink, and that figure has held steady for more than four decades.

And yet, over the past several years, signs have appeared that fewer young people are drinking. If bricks and hatchets couldn’t convince Americans to transform their relationship to alcohol, perhaps the promise of finding your best self through phony negronis and nonalcoholic IPAs will.

This article originally misstated Colleen Myles’s title and the name of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

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