At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

Sick of it. Stop and think about that phrase. Trump inserted it into a stream of falsehoods, produced over several days, many of which he must have known to be untrue. He has been lying about the origins of the war, about Zelensky’s popular support, about the levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, about the extent of European funding, about the status of previous negotiations. But sick of it—that, at least, has the ring of truth. Trump is genuinely bored of the war. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it started. He doesn’t know how to stop it. He wants to change the channel and watch something else.

Also, he has no cards: That probably reflects Trump’s true belief as well. For Donald Trump, the only real cards are big money and hard power. Players, in his world, are people whom no court can block, no journalist can question, no legislator can oppose. People whose money can buy anything, whose power cannot be checked or balanced.  

But Trump is wrong. Zelensky might not have money, and he might not be a brutal dictator like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Yet he does have other kinds of power. He leads a society that organizes itself, with local leaders who have legitimacy and a tech sector dedicated to victory—a society that has come, around the world, to symbolize bravery. He has a message that moves people to act instead of just scaring them into silence.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, stop and remember what happened on the night it began. I’d had plane tickets to Kyiv that week, but my flights were canceled, and on February 24, 2022, I stayed up and watched the war’s start on television, listening to the sounds of explosions coming from the screen. That night, everyone expected Russia to overrun its much smaller neighbor. But that capitulation never came. Six weeks later, I made it to Kyiv and heard and saw what had happened instead: the hit squads that had tried to kill Zelensky; the murders of civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb; the Ukrainian journalists who had driven around the country trying to tell the story; the civilians who had joined the army; the waitresses who had started cooking for the troops.

Three years later, against all obstacles and all predictions, the civilians, journalists, soldiers, and waitresses are still working together. Ukraine’s million-man army, the largest in Europe, is still fighting. Ukraine’s civil society is still volunteering, still raising money for the troops. Ukraine’s defense industry has transformed itself. In 2022, I saw tiny workshops that made drones out of what looked like cardboard and glue. In 2024, Ukrainian factories produced 1.5 million drones, and this year they will make many more. Teams of people in underground control centers now use bespoke software to hit thousands of targets every month. Their work explains why Russia has taken territory only slowly, despite being on the offensive for most of the past year. At the current rate of advance, the Institute for the Study of War estimates, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine.

Russia doesn’t have the resources to fight indefinitely against that kind of organization and determination. Putin’s military production is cannibalizing his country’s civilian economy. Inflation has skyrocketed. The only way Putin wins now—the only way he finally succeeds in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty—is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war.

He wins by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine, because Zelensky has no cards, and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either. That’s why Putin’s money bought American influencers in Tennessee and probably many other places, too, and it’s why his propaganda supported the pro-Russian far right in Germany’s elections yesterday, along with other pro-Russian parties across the continent. Putin can’t win on the ground, but he can win in his enemies’ heads—if we let him.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Europeans and Americans, Democrats and Republicans, can resist the temptations of boredom and distraction. We can refuse to give in to the cynicism, nihilism, and lies of Russian propaganda, even when they are repeated by the president of the United States. And we can refuse to believe that Ukraine has no cards, that we have no cards, and that the democratic world has no sources of power other than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Three years into this war, the stakes are the same as they were on the night it began. Putin, who yesterday launched one of the largest attacks of the entire war, still seeks to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty, civil society, democracy, and freedom. He still wants to show the world that the era of American power is over, that America will not defend allies in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. He still wants to nullify the rules and laws that kept Europe peaceful for eight decades, to create instability and fear, not only in the countries that border Russia but across the continent and even around the world.   

The war will only end, truly end, when Putin gives up these goals. Don’t accept any peace deal that allows him to keep them.

LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

A vocal group of conservative intellectuals really, really wants Americans to have more babies. The movement is small, but it doesn’t lack for high-profile adherents. Vice President J. D. Vance, a father of three, recently proclaimed, “Very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.” Elon Musk, a father of at least 12, posted in 2022, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” A recent Department of Transportation memo even instructed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” It was signed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine.

If messages like these somehow do not get you in the mood to procreate, well, that’s precisely the problem.

It’s a problem, specifically, for the pronatalists: a group whose members are overwhelmingly conservative, usually religious, and almost always the parents of three or more children. They espouse the view that America’s declining birth rate is an alarming trend we ought to try to reverse. Seventeen years ago, the national birth rate was at the minimum level for a society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Since then, it has fallen well below that, with no signs of bottoming out. In response, a loose cohort of intellectuals, writers, thinkers, and policy makers are doing their best to make friends in high places, get a policy agenda together, and make Americans make families again.

This won’t be easy. The pronatalists combine conservative social nudges (get married, start a family) with liberal policy objectives (give parents more money, upzone the suburbs), which makes for tricky politics. At a time of increased abortion restrictions, many liberals find them creepy—busybodies at best and eugenicists at worst. And many conservatives think they’re Trojan horses for socialism, cloaking their desire to spend taxpayer money in family-values rhetoric. Like parenting itself, giving birth to a broadly popular pronatal movement will take a lot of hard work.

Until recently, the idea that humanity might be growing too slowly would have seemed absurd. During the second half of the 20th century, experts—many swayed by the book The Population Bomb—were far more worried about the opposite problem. They feared that overpopulation would lead to widespread famine and potentially even societal collapse.

Something strange happened next: None of those predictions came true. The population continued to grow, but famine was not widespread, and collapse did not come. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, fertility rates steeply declined, most dramatically in rich countries. Rather than exploding, the global population-growth curve began to level off. At first, few noticed. After all, the birth-rate decline came on gradually. A decade ago, the U.S. total fertility rate was only slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Now, however, that number is 1.6 and falling fast, even as polls show Americans believe that the ideal number of children is two to three. This poses a dire economic problem. Social Security, Medicare, and other old-age programs can’t survive at their current generosity if the number of tax-paying workers continues to decline. Even economic growth itself becomes challenging once a low enough fertility rate is reached; fewer workers means a smaller economy. In East Asia, where the worldwide birth-rate drop has been most pronounced, every country faces serious economic challenges resulting from low fertility; all are now furiously trying to encourage birth. In South Korea, where the total fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.68, every 200 fertile-age adults can expect to give life to 68 children; those children will produce 23 grandchildren, who will result in only eight great-grandchildren. That’s a 96 percent population decline over the course of three generations, and that’s if fertility stops decreasing and finally holds steady.

The negative effects of low fertility at home can be mitigated to some degree with immigration, but birth rates are plummeting all over the world—Mexico’s is 1.8—and the amount of immigration sufficient to outweigh the local birth dearth would be a political nonstarter, a kind of Great Replacement theory come to life. To avoid becoming South Korea someday, America needs more babies.

Making that happen is the task the pronatalists have taken on. The effort is new, but beginning to get organized. As of 2023, there’s an annual Natal Conference, and last week, there was a panel at the U.S. Capitol featuring Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a member of the Republican leadership. Every conservative think tank seems to suddenly have an “expert” on birth rates. (Liberal and centrist pronatalists exist, too, but they’re less numerous and less vocal.)

The intellectual force behind the movement lies mainly in a cluster of culturally conservative writers. These include Bethany Mandel, a writer and homeschooling mother of six; Tim Carney, a father of six who wrote Family Unfriendly, a recent book about society’s hostility toward big families; Patrick T. Brown, a father of four and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank; and Daniel Hess, a writer more commonly known by his X username, MoreBirths. The informal ringleader is Lyman Stone, a 33-year-old father of three who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

[Lyman Stone: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?]

They generally advocate for a three-pronged approach to lifting the birth rate. First are cultural nudges, which mostly entail spreading the word that kids are more blessing than burden. Second are supply-side housing-reform policies, intended to make it easier for would-be parents to afford a place to raise a family. (“Want fecundity in the sheets? Give us walkability in the streets,” Carney writes in Family Unfriendly.) Finally, there are economic incentives, which resemble the types of family-friendly welfare-state policies familiar to Northern Europeans: child allowances, baby bonuses, long parental leaves.

Stone argues that implementing such policies in the U.S. would have a significant effect. He estimates that pronatal economic policies in France, including maternity leave, child allowances, pregnancy protections at work, and higher Social Security payments for parents, have boosted the French population by 5 to 10 million people. Policy matters, he argues, not just culture.

You might expect such a progressive-sounding agenda to have attracted an enthusiastic liberal following. Not so much. In fact, left-of-center Americans are more likely to be anti-natalists. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many people who identify as liberal, and four times as many people who identify as very liberal, think too many children are being born than think not enough are.

To the extent that they’re even familiar with the pronatalist argument, liberals seem to find it creepy and off-putting. The main cause of the global birth-rate decline was women’s growing autonomy and access to contraception. Liberals understandably fear that trying to reverse the decline might involve undoing the progress that triggered it. (This is more or less the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Atwood novel in which right-wing theocrats revolt over low fertility, and institute sex slavery and totalitarian patriarchal rule.)

Some liberals also pay attention to the context in which pronatalist messages are transmitted and who is embracing them. Vance’s “I want more babies” quote, for example, came at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Liberals might even know that the birth rate is still far above replacement in much of sub-Saharan Africa and wonder whether pronatalists are worried specifically about a lack of white babies. “For many progressives and liberals, this conversation is tainted by a sense of it being reactionary, conservative, even sort of fascist,” Rachel Wiseman, an “anti-anti-natalist” leftist writer told me.

Then, as one former senior policy aide to a Republican lawmaker told me, “there’s the Elon of it all.” (He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash for criticizing fellow Republicans.) Musk, the most well-known pronatalist in the world, is also perhaps the most disliked person in liberal America after Donald Trump. Musk is known to have had 12 children with three partners. (Last week, a conservative influencer claimed to be the mother of his 13th child, born five months ago, though Musk has neither confirmed nor denied that he is the father of her child.) He had twins via IVF with an executive at one of his companies while a surrogate was pregnant with the child he was having with his longtime partner Grimes, who was reportedly furious when she found out. Having a dozen kids is good for the birth rate, but making big families look messy and dysfunctional is probably not.

The conservative pronatalist intellectuals, who seem to crave the ideological embrace of liberals, are self-conscious about their creepiness problem. Moore, who last month introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the child tax credit, told me, “Any effort to make this a right or left issue is nonsense and counterproductive.” He and his allies go to great lengths to clarify that they aren’t into eugenics or patriarchy and that they want more babies of all skin colors. “The people who give pronatalism a bad name care for it for reasons that I think are rather unseemly,” Brown told me. “And so it becomes icky because, well, those bad people are very concerned about it.”

Women of childbearing age skew liberal, so liberals’ distaste for pronatalism is a long-term problem. But, at a moment when Republicans have a trifecta in Washington, pronatalists face a more immediate issue on their own flank: Most Republicans still want to slash government spending, not increase it.

[Read: The coming Democratic baby bust]

“There’s a lot of headwinds to a pronatal conservative policy because Republicans have long distrusted urbanist talk, or talk of government supporting people in need,” Carney told me. Many traditional Republicans look at the pronatalist policy agenda (give money to parents, loosen suburban zoning rules) and wonder what happened to the party of fiscal restraint, anti-welfare politics, and the strictly zoned Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Stone told me that many old-guard Republicans are worried about incentivizing single motherhood. “On some level, we have to be able to say, ‘Look: Supporting people having families is worth it,’” even if that means money flows to unwed parents, he said.

Anti-welfare Republicans aren’t the only intra-coalitional enemy. Pronatalists also face resistance from the so-called Barstool Right, the class of epicurean, anti-woke young men, usually thin in ideology but thick in leftward-pointing resentment. “This is fucking idiotic,” Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder, wrote on X above a video of Vance clumsily arguing for lower tax rates on parents. “If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.” (Neither Vance nor Portnoy signaled any awareness of the fact that, thanks to the child tax credit, the tax code already favors parents.)

Still, the pronatalists think they are winning, if slowly. Stone told me he understands there to be “a few” Vance staffers tasked with getting Congress to raise the child tax credit in this year’s reconciliation bill. Whether or not that happens, the pronatalists feel they are operating on a longer time horizon.

“Short term: maybe; long term: yes,” Brown told me when I asked if he was optimistic. But they had better not move too slowly. If convincing people takes too long, there might not be enough people left to convince.

By reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has grown two of the largest hardware-innovation companies in the world, Tesla and SpaceX. As for Trump, he once told Golf Digest: “I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”

But now, united in Washington, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk has made its mark not by building, but by the opposite: demolition.

With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of power: Serving as the iron fist of the White House, he’s rooting out what he sees as the plague of wokeism in government, halting grants, freezing payments, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as he can get away with. On Monday, DOGE claimed to have already saved the government more than $50 billion. Meanwhile, federal judges have ruled that Trump and Musk have violated the law, typically by exceeding the powers of the executive branch and attempting to defund agencies that were initially funded by Congress.

In theory, DOGE exists to promote efficiency. And the need for efficiency is real. The federal government is deeply in debt. Its interest payments now exceed what it spends on defense. Even if the United States had no issue with its debt, it would still be a mitzvah to find ways to make government work better—to take the same tax dollar further, to do one more unit of good. But judging by DOGE’s early returns, the only objective conclusion one can reach about the agency seems to be that it’s out of control. What we’re witnessing in government right now—across the Departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Education, and beyond—is not only a bonfire of cruelty but a reign of ineptitude.

[Read: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]

Let’s start with the Department of Energy, which recently faced the brunt of massive DOGE layoffs. Among those who lost their job were dozens of staff members at the National Nuclear Security Administration—scientists, engineers, and safety officials responsible for safeguarding and assembling nuclear warheads. Roughly 100 people were reportedly laid off from the Pantex Plant, in Texas, the most important nuclear-assembly-and-disassembly plant in the country, before they were called back to the office. As Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said: “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for.”

Next, there’s Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered buyouts to tens of thousands of employees before realizing that, once again, they’d made a mistake. Far from the typical impression some might have of government workers just moving paper around all day, the VA provides health and psychiatric care to millions of U.S. veterans. That means if you offer buyouts to the VA, what you’ll get is a lot of underpaid doctors, nurses, and psychologists taking up offers to leave offices that are already understaffed—which is exactly what happened. Days after the buyout offer, thousands of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other essential staff got a notice that they were exempt from the offer.

At the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems to want to destroy, DOGE terminated $1 billion in contracts. But rather than end ideological programs that Musk says he wants to eliminate, these cuts decimated the Institute for Education Sciences, which funds many of the longest-running and most famous studies in education research, including several longitudinal studies on student achievement and school effectiveness. It’s hard to think of a better nonpartisan role for government than data collection. But Musk and his team have gutted some of the best education-data tools we have. Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told The Washington Post: “There’s a lot of bloat in IES. There’s a lot of problems to be solved. These are problems you solve with a scalpel and maybe a hatchet, but not a bulldozer.”

[Read: The government waste DOGE should be cutting]

DOGE’s cuts will go much further. At the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, including those involved in testing food and medical devices. At the CDC, more cuts have reached the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which pays disease detectives around the world and stops epidemics in other countries before they spread. At the National Institutes of Health, the administration is set to slash personnel and funding in a variety of ways. If you’re a fan of Musk and Trump, your hope is that these cuts will be all fat and no bone. But remember: This is the same administration that, in an attempt to refocus the Department of Energy on nuclear security, initially gutted the division with the words nuclear security in it.

So far, few DOGE actions have received more attention than the agency’s attack on USAID, which is responsible for foreign aid and global-health spending. Musk seems to be on a gleeful and personal mission to destroy USAID, placing most of its employees on leave, closing its headquarters, and moving what’s left of it to the State Department. According to one report, the administration says that it plans to reduce USAID staffers from 10,000 to about 600. As Musk recently posted on X, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

There is irony here. And there is tragedy. The irony is that, when he was a U.S. senator, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he called foreign aid “critical to our national security.” In 2019, he said: “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.” Today, however, Rubio is in the morally compromising position of overseeing, as secretary of state, the dismantling of the very aid agency he once praised.

[Read: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

The tragedy will be felt at the individual level, with immense human costs. Unless the administration course-corrects and immediately replenishes our global-health grants, there’s just no getting around the fact that a lot of people around the world are going to suffer and die in order to save the typical American taxpayer a negligible sum. The U.S. pays for insecticide sprays in Uganda, for pregnancy services in Zambia, for health-care clinics in the poorest parts of the world. Most notably, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented more than 5 million babies from being born with HIV. It’s not yet clear whether PEPFAR will be spared or left to wither away. This wrecking-ball approach to reform has astonished even the most famous critics of U.S. aid programs. William Easterly, an economist who has written that much of American aid props up dictators and goes to waste, told The New Yorker that Trump’s USAID-demolition plan is “horrific,” “illegal,” and “undemocratic.”

Musk has hinted, amid rising criticism, that DOGE will simply reverse any measures that go too far. This sounds good in theory. Move fast; cut stuff; add back whatever you miss. But in practice, you can’t just slash 10,000 programs at once and then reinstall them on a one-by-one basis depending on whether the volume of criticism passes some imaginary threshold. Whatever you think of the failures of progressive governance, “mess around and find out” is not a suitable replacement. Unfortunately, it does appear to be the current methodology of the executive branch.

Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically.

A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.

That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility rates. And they found that after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically than after the 2016 election. According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.

Dahl’s paper suggested a novel idea: Perhaps shifts in political power can influence fertility rates as much as, say, the economy does. This one paper only goes so far: Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility rates. (They suggest in the paper, though, that the intense economic impact of the Great Recession might have drowned out any partisan effect.) And the study looked only at those three elections; little other research has looked so directly at the impact of American presidential elections on partisan birth rates. But plenty of  studies have found that political stability, political freedom, and political transitions all affect fertility. To researchers like Dahl, this growing body of work suggests that the next four years might follow similar trends.

In the U.S., partisan differences in fertility patterns have existed since the mid-1990s. Today, in counties that lean Republican, people tend to have bigger families and lower rates of childlessness; in places that skew Democratic, families tend to be smaller. And according to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research group, places that tilt more Republican have become associated with even higher fertility rates over the past 12 years. “I don't think there’s any reason to think that’s about to stop,” Lyman Stone, a demographer with the institute, told me.

That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent. “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,” Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told me. They also consider more subjective factors, such as their own well-being, their feelings about the state of society, and their confidence (or lack thereof) in political leadership. Trump’s supporters may feel more optimistic than ever about the future, but his detractors feel otherwise. After a few short weeks in office, the president has already announced withdrawals from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization, and paused funding for a slew of government services. Those include child-care-assistance programs, although the administration has promised to support policies to encourage family growth. “If you’re a Democrat and you really care about child care and family leave and climate change,” Dahl said, you might conclude that “this is maybe not the right time to bring a kid into the world.”

Some would-be parents aren’t just worried about the world they might bring a child into—they’re worried about themselves, too. In 2016, Roe v. Wade still protected Americans’ right to an abortion. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe, states across the country have enacted abortion bans. In some cases, those bans have meant that pregnant women have had to wait for care, or be airlifted to other states; as a direct result, at least five pregnant American women have died. These risks can weigh heavily. After the election, Planned Parenthood locations across the country saw a surge in appointments for birth control and vasectomies.

Brittany, a labor-and-delivery nurse in North Carolina, told me that she and her husband had decided to try for one more kid—she wanted a girl, after three boys—but after Trump was reelected, she changed her mind. (Brittany requested that I not use her last name, in order to protect her medical privacy.) During her first pregnancy, when she nearly lost her uterus to a severe postpartum hemorrhage, doctors stopped the bleeding with the help of a device that can also be used in abortions. Emergency abortion is legal in North Carolina, but Brittany fears that could change or that doctors might become more wary about using those same tools to save her reproductive organs—or even her life—under an administration that has signaled support for anti-abortion groups. Brittany is 37 now, and not optimistic about her chances of getting pregnant in four years, when Trump is out of office. Her husband, who voted for Trump, “thinks that I’m kind of blowing things out of proportion when I say we’re definitely not having another baby because of this administration,” she said. For her, though, it seemed like the only rational choice.

If Democrats’ drops in fertility over the coming years do again outstrip Republican gains, that trend will worsen a broader issue the U.S. is facing: a countrywide baby bust. The fertility rate has been falling for almost a decade, save for a brief pandemic baby boom. Around the world, falling birth rates have set off anxieties about how societies might handle, for instance, the challenge of an aging population with few younger people to care for them. In the U.S., fears about population collapse also have helped unite conservatives with the techno-libertarians who have recently flocked to Trump’s inner orbit. Elon Musk, who has 12 children, has repeatedly claimed that population collapse is a bigger threat than climate change. At the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., last month, Vice President J. D. Vance told the crowd, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”

So far, no country has hit on the magic public policy that will reverse population decline. Taiwan introduced more paid family leave, along with cash benefits and tax credits for parents of young kids. Russia, Italy, and Greece have all tried paying people to have kids. Japan has tried an ever-changing list of incentives for some 30 years, among them subsidized child care, shorter work hours, and cash. None of it has worked. Vance favors expanding the child tax credit; the Trump administration has also sent early signals of family-first policies, including a memo instructing the Department of Transportation to preferentially direct grants and services toward communities with high marriage and birth rates.

As Musk and Vance fight against population decline, they could entice enough Americans to have kids that they can counteract a Democratic deficit, or even reverse falling birth rates. But that won’t be easy. “There may be a Trump bump in conservative places and a Trump bust in liberal places,” Stone told me. “I would bet on the dip being bigger.”

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has positioned himself as an unabashed bull on America’s need to dominate AI. Yet the president has also tied this newfound and futuristic priority to a more traditional mission of his: to go big with fossil fuels. A true AI revolution will need “double the energy” that America produces today, Trump said in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, days after declaring a national energy emergency. And he noted a few ways to supply that power: “We have more coal than anybody. We also have more oil and gas than anybody.”

When the executives of AI companies talk about their ambitions, they tend to shy away from the environmental albatross of fossil fuels, pointing instead to renewable and nuclear energy as the power sources of the future for their data centers. But many of those executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, have also expressed concern that America could run out of the energy needed to sustain AI’s rapid development. An electricity shortage for AI chips, Elon Musk predicted last March, would arrive this year.

Both Trump and the oil and gas industry—which donated tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign—seem to have recognized an opportunity in the panic. The American Petroleum Institute has repeatedly stressed that natural gas will be crucial in powering the AI revolution. Now the doors are open. The oil giants Chevron and Exxon have both declared plans to build natural-gas-powered facilities connected directly to data centers. Major utilities are planning large fossil-fuel build-outs in part to meet the forecasted electricity demands of data centers. Meta is planning to build a massive data center in Louisiana for which Entergy, a major utility, will construct three new gas-powered turbines. Both the $500 billion Stargate AI-infrastructure venture and Musk’s AI supercomputer reportedly already or will rely on some fossil fuels.

If one takes the dire warnings of an energy apocalypse at face value, there’s a fair logic to drawing from the nation’s existing sources, at least in the near term, to build a more sustainable, AI-powered future. The problem, though, is that the U.S. is not actually in an energy crunch. “It is not a crisis,” Jonathan Koomey, an expert on energy and digital technology who has extensively studied data centers, recently told me. “There is no explosive electricity demand at the national level.” The evidence is ambiguous about a pending, AI-driven energy shortage, offering plenty of reason to believe that America would be fine without a major expansion in oil, coal, or natural-gas production—the latter of which the U.S. is already the world’s biggest exporter of. Rather than necessitating a fossil-fuel build-out, AI seems more to be a convenient excuse for Trump to pursue one. (The White House and its Office for Science and Technology Policy did not respond to requests for comment.)

Certainly, data centers will drive up U.S. energy consumption over the next few years. An analysis conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and published by the Department of Energy in December found that data centers’ energy demand doubled from 2017 to 2023, ultimately accounting for 4.4 percent of nationwide electricity consumption—a number that could rise to somewhere between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. Some parts of the country will be affected more than others. Northern Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, and the state is facing “the largest growth in power demand since the years following World War II,” Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest utility, told me. Georgia Power, similarly, is forecasting significant demand growth, likely driven by data-center development. In the meantime, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are all rapidly building out power-hungry data centers.

But as Koomey, who co-authored the LBNL forecast, argued, that forecasted growth does not seem likely to push the nation’s electricity demands past some precipice. Overall U.S. electricity consumption grew by 2 percent in 2024, according to federal data, and the Energy Information Administration predicted similar growth for the following two years. A good chunk of that growth has nothing to do with AI, but is the result of national efforts to electrify transportation, heating, and various industrial operations—factors that, in their own right, will continue to substantially increase the country’s electricity consumption. Even then, the U.S. produced more energy than it consumed every year from 2019 to 2023, as well as for all but one month for which there is data in 2024. An EIA outlook published last month expects natural-gas-fired electricity use to decline through 2026. John Larsen, who leads research into U.S. energy systems and climate policy at the Rhodium Group, analyzed the EIA’s power-plant data and found that 90 percent of all planned electric-capacity additions through 2028 will be from renewables or storage—and that the remaining additions, from natural gas, will be built at two-thirds the rate they have been over the past decade.

None of this discounts the fact that the AI industry is rapidly expanding. The near-term electricity-demand growth is likely real and “a little surprising,” Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara and another co-author of the LBNL forecast, told me. More people are using AI products, tech companies are building more data centers to serve their customers, and more powerful bots may also need more power. Last year, Rene Haas, the CEO of Arm Holdings, which designs semiconductors, attracted much attention for his prediction that data centers around the world may use more electricity than the entire country of India by 2030. Some regional utilities have projected much higher demand growth into the late 2030s than nationwide estimates suggest. And chatbots or not, building enough electricity generation and power lines for transportation, heating, and industry in the coming years will be a challenge.

Still, tremendous uncertainty exists around just how power-hungry the AI industry will be in the long term. State utilities, for instance, are likely exaggerating demand, according to a recent analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That might be because utilities are overestimating the number of proposed data centers that will actually be built in their territories, according to a new Bipartisan Policy Center report that Koomey co-authored. And AI still could not turn out to be as world-changing and money-making as its makers want everyone to believe. Even if it does, the energy costs are not straightforward. Last month, the success of DeepSeek—an AI model from a Chinese start-up that matched top American models for lower costs—suggested that AI can be developed with lower resource demands, although DeepSeek’s cost and energy efficiency are still being debated. “It’s really not a good idea” to look beyond the next two to three years, Masanet said. “The uncertainties are just so large that, frankly, it’s kind of a futile exercise.”

If AI and data centers drive sustained, explosive electricity demand, natural gas and coal need not be the energy sources of choice. For now, utilities are likely planning to use some fossil fuels to meet short-term demand, because these facilities are more familiar and much quicker to integrate into the grid than renewable sources, Larsen told me. Plus, natural-gas turbines can operate around the clock and be ramped up to meet surges in demand, unlike solar and wind. But clean energy will also meet much of that short-term demand, if for no reasons other than cost and inertia: Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are becoming cost-competitive with natural gas and getting cheaper, while a growing number of industries are turning to renewable energy sources. The tech firms leading the AI race are major purchasers of and investors in clean energy, and many of these companies have also made substantial investments in nuclear power.

Using natural gas, coal, or oil to power the way to an AI future will not be the inevitable result of the physics, chemistry, or economics of electricity generation so much as a decision driven by politics and profit. AI proponents and energy companies “have an incentive to argue there’s going to be explosive demand,” Koomey told me. Tech firms benefit from the perception that they are building something so awe-inspiring and expensive that they need every possible source of energy they can get. Any federal blessing for data-center construction, as Trump granted Stargate, is a boon to production. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies want to sell more energy; utilities earn higher profits the more they spend on infrastructure; and the Republican Party, Trump included, has a pretense to satisfy demand to ramp up fossil-fuel production.

Of course, AI needn’t precipitate a national energy shortage to add to a different crisis. Microsoft and Google, despite promising to significantly reduce and offset their carbon footprints, both emit more greenhouse gases across their operations than they did a few years ago. Google’s emissions grew 48 percent from 2019 to 2023, the most recent year for which there is public data, and Microsoft’s are up 29 percent since 2020, an increase driven substantially by data centers. These companies want more power, and the fossil-fuel industry wants to supply it. While AI’s energy needs remain uncertain, the environmental damages of fossil-fuel extraction do not.

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Whenever my mom comes to visit, she scolds me for not having orange juice in my fridge. “What about your health?” she asks, to which I reply: “What about my bank account?”

As in many families, orange juice was always on the breakfast table when I was growing up. It was affordable, delicious, and full of vitamin C. (The high levels of sugar were considered less of a problem at the time.) But orange juice isn’t so cheap anymore. Tropicana, for instance, has shrunk its bottles and raised prices in recent years. And since 2019, the price of concentrate has increased by about 80 percent. Chances are slim that it’ll go down anytime soon.

Some of this is because of inflation. And if President Donald Trump ever goes through with the tariffs he has threatened against Mexico and Canada, orange juice—which once came to Americans from Florida, but now is generally made from a mix of international oranges—could become even more expensive. Yet orange juice also is facing a grander existential problem than the economy. The world’s biggest orange producers aren’t growing as much fruit as they used to. As orange availability slides, the era of orange-juice ubiquity is rapidly coming to an end.

The primary cause is a disease known as citrus greening. When tiny, hard-to-control insects called Asian citrus psyllids feed on orange trees, they inject bacteria that floods the tree’s veins. Fruits become rancid, misshapen, and discolored, and within a few years, the tree dies. Around the world, millions of acres of orange trees have succumbed, and in the past 20 years, production in Florida’s storied orange groves, which once supplied the majority of America’s juice, has declined 92 percent. What little fruit is left on the trees gets blown to the ground by hurricanes, which are becoming more destructive in the state.

Growers have a few tools to mitigate the disease, such as antibiotic injections and plant-growth sprays to boost fruit production, but they are costly and labor-intensive to use. Many have given up and sold their generations-old groves to real-estate developers; in January, one of Tropicana’s suppliers, Alico, announced that it will no longer invest capital in its citrus operations once the current crop is harvested, because its business is no longer “economically viable.”

Citrus greening has no cure: Labs around the country are racing to develop disease-resistant trees, but research is slow because trees take up to eight years to bear fruit, Tripti Vashisth, a citrus expert at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, told me. At the rate trees are dying, a solution is likely to come too late.

The dwindling fruit supply is making orange juice harder, but not impossible, to produce. Other orange-growing countries are contributing more of the juice sold in U.S. stores. Out of curiosity, I read the ingredients on a carton of Florida’s Natural at the grocery store: “juice from Florida, Mexico, & Brazil.” These countries haven’t yet been hit as hard by citrus greening as Florida; about 40 percent of their crops have been affected so far. Still, their supply is uncertain too. American orange-juice manufacturers will be on edge until April, when the impact of citrus greening on this year’s crop in Brazil will first become apparent, Andrés Padilla, a citrus-supply expert at Rabobank, a bank serving the agricultural industry, told me. If the situation worsens, companies may have to source oranges from countries even farther abroad, such as Spain, Italy, Turkey, and India, where the disease is less pronounced.

For the juice industry, international oranges are more of a lifeline than a long-term fix. The only places where citrus greening isn’t affecting orange groves yet are Europe and Australia, Vashisth said. Imported fruit can be costly, and its flavor varies because of differences in variety, growing conditions, and taste preferences. (European oranges skew tart because locals like their juice sour, while American varieties cater to the nation’s sweet tooth.) To maintain the flavor profile that U.S. customers expect, manufacturers have to blend different batches of juice, much like they would batches of wine or whiskey.

For the industry, those blends mark a big shift from a time when orange-juice products were proudly made—and consumed—in America. “Everybody went for the 100 percent Florida. It was a premium juice, without any doubt,” Carol Plisga, a beverage-industry consultant, told me. After the citrus-greening crisis started in the early 2000s, the 100% Florida label began to disappear from cartons.

More poignant, orange juice itself is beginning to lose significance. “It’s definitely already a much smaller category than it was 20 years ago,” Padilla said. Other beverages, such as teas, coffees, seltzers, energy drinks, and bottled waters—some of which sugar-conscious consumers might view as healthier alternatives—have helped nudge it out. And some juice makers are extending their orange supply with juice from other fruits, such as tangerines and mandarins, which aren’t affected by citrus greening, and even apple and lemon. Plus, as family sizes shrink and growing numbers of people live alone, people are simply buying less orange juice, Padilla said.

I ended up buying the carton of Florida’s Natural at the grocery store. It cost about $5—reasonable, I thought, as long as my family doesn’t drain it too quickly. We savored every drop. Orange juice as a category “will not disappear” entirely, because people will pay up for foods they see as healthy, Plisga told me. But maintaining the custom of a daily glass will either be that much more costly, or it will break.

In many ways, the decline of orange juice represents the future of many staple foods. Continuous abundance, a prerequisite for staples, is no longer guaranteed. More and more, the notion of the classic American breakfast—bacon, eggs, toast, milk, coffee, and a glass of orange juice—is beginning to seem like a snapshot of a bygone era. Not only is the supply of orange juice becoming shaky, but so is that of eggs, milk, and coffee (not to mention other goods, such as chocolate and olive oil). None of this means that we’ll have to go without these foods anytime soon. But for everyday Americans, it will likely mean having less.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.

Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.

In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.

Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.

The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.

And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.

If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.

So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)

The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.

To judge by the shelves of America’s vice merchants, the nation is in the grips of a whipped-cream frenzy. Walk into any vape store or sex shop, and you’ll find canisters of nitrous oxide showcased in window displays—ostensibly to catch the eye of bakers and baristas, who use the gas to aerate creams and foams. At the bodega near my apartment, boxes of up to 100 mini-canisters are piled up to eye level, next to Baby Yoda bongs.

In fact, culinary professionals generally don’t shop for equipment at stores with names like Puff N Stuff or Condom Sense. The true clientele inhales the gas to get high. A dangerous and technically illegal drug, nitrous oxide is widely available as long as everyone pretends it’s destined for use as a food product. Indeed, a whole industry appears to have built its business model around exploiting this loophole. Large distributors brand and flavor nitrous in ways that attract young inhalers, stock it with retailers catering to other vices, and sell it in quantities that are implausible for culinary use but ideal for huffing. The gas can even be ordered from Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. Without meaningful regulation, getting high on nitrous will remain as convenient as picking up a bag of chips.

Nitrous oxide has been recreationally inhaled since the 1800s. It induces a euphoric head rush and tingling in the user’s fingers and toes, often followed by giddy laughter. Almost as soon as it starts, it’s over. The effects of a single hit typically last for less than a minute.

The modern version of the drug, known colloquially as a “whippet” or “whip-it,” has recently climbed the youth-popularity ranks. (These products are distinct from the Reddi-Wip cans found at the supermarket, which contain cream and nitrous oxide together. The canisters proliferating now contain the gas alone.) Although pandemic-era lockdown protocols hampered illicit drugs’ supply chains, nitrous oxide remained broadly available by comparison. In 2018, about 12.5 million Americans over age 12 reported having ever used it, a number that rose to nearly 14 million in 2022. Social media is full of clips of young people ripping hits before falling on their faces (so much so that TikTok eventually banned nitrous-related search terms). Fans of the drug have created gas-tank accessories in the video game Roblox; one rapper’s song “Whippet” features him and his entourage ripping hits of nitrous from tanks tucked in their waistbands between verses. A recent Columbia graduate told me that, back in college, one friend’s birthday party featured a salad bowl “full to the brim” with used nitrous canisters. (He spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss illegal drug use.)

[Malcolm Ferguson: Marijuana is too strong now]

As you might imagine, depriving your brain of oxygen in favor of laughing gas is not wise. Heavy nitrous users can suffer severe health consequences, including, occasionally, death. Varun Vohra, an emergency-medicine professor at Wayne State University, in Detroit, told me that heavy users experience symptoms including irregular walking, bodily weakness, and severe limb pain. (Nitrous-oxide-related emergency-room visits in Michigan more than doubled from 2022 to 2023.) Inhaling the gas deactivates vitamin B12, which harms nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. Among chronic users, this can eventually induce paralysis. Users also report depression, anxiety, mood swings, and even hallucination. A senior at Tulane University, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that he’d quit the drug after one night when he took a deep inhale and blacked out. He awoke on the floor a few seconds later, unable to remember what had happened; his friends told him he’d had a seizure.

Perhaps the greatest danger arises from what people do while huffing the drug. Ed Scott, a city-council member in Rialto, California, told me that his son, Myles, died in a car accident after his friend inhaled the gas while driving and passed out at the wheel. This inspired Scott to investigate the drug’s use in California. He told me that he found many other fatal car accidents in which nitrous-oxide products were discovered at crash sites but police—who thought they were helium cannisters—did not register the crashes as DUIs.

Given the health and safety risks, the sale and use of nitrous oxide for recreational purposes is technically illegal. The key word here is technically. Businesses can generally get away with selling nitrous oxide over the counter as long as they say it’s for culinary use—and pretend not to know what customers are really doing with it. (Some states prohibit sales to anyone under 21 or 18.) If, that is, they even bother pretending. The Tulane senior told me that the clerks at his local smoke shop greeted him with shouts of “whip-it boy!” when he visited to restock.

A major industry has grown out of the regulatory vacuum. In 2020, Marissa Politte’s family sued United Brands, the Silicon Valley–based company that distributes the brand Whip-It!, after she was killed by an unconscious nitrous-huffing driver. Documents revealed by the lawsuit suggest that the players involved know they’re benefiting from a legal loophole. A former warehouse employee estimated that three-quarters of United Brands’ customers were smoke shops, not bakeries or cafés. The client list named retailers including Mary Jane’z Novelties, Herban Legend Smoke Shop, Smoke 420, and Precious Slut 1. In a seven-year span, documents show, the company sold about 52,000 “chargers,” or miniature nitrous capsules, to Kaldi’s Coffee—and more than 1 million to the It’s A Dream smoke shop.

Internal emails between United Brands and retailers, uncovered by the lawsuit, suggest a certain cynicism around legal compliance. One United Brands employee emailed a retailer requesting that the Whip-It! chargers “are used properly and legally.” The retailer responded: “yah man we know the deal we put a disclaimer… you know we all got to cover our asses, better safe than sorry.” (United Brands did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Meanwhile, many other companies market nitrous in ways that seem conspicuously ill-tailored to professional pastry chefs. A variety of gas tanks are sold with names that evoke marijuana strains, not whipped cream—Monster Gas (slogan: “Become easy, Become happy!”), Hippie Whippy, Baking Bad, Cosmic Gas—and in flavors such as mango smoothie and tropical punch. Colorful labels feature fruits, unicorns, women in bathing suits, or sports cars. (Hervé Malivert, the director of culinary affairs at the Institute of Culinary Education, told me that many food professionals are loyal to iSi chargers, which they order from the company’s website—not at a gas station. Malivert said he has never heard of a chef using flavored gas or gas tanks.)

One of the most prominent nitrous companies is Galaxy Gas, which was founded in 2021 by three brothers who ran Cloud 9, an Atlanta-based smoke-shop chain. A Cloud 9 executive told New York magazine that Galaxy Gas at one time made up nearly 30 percent of all nitrous sales nationwide. Asked by CBS to explain why anyone would need to buy a tank with enough nitrous oxide to make thousands of servings of whipped cream, a Galaxy Gas spokesperson claimed that the product was for customers seeking an “erotic culinary lubricant.” (The company’s rising profile in the world of whip-its has brought legal scrutiny. According to New York, its trademark was recently sold for $1 to a newly registered corporate owner, and it has paused direct sales. Galaxy Gas did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Mike Riggs: Congress accidentally legalized weed six years ago]

In response to the spread of nitrous-oxide use, states and the federal government have begun taking steps toward more effective regulation. The most notable example is Louisiana, where the drug used to be outlawed only if sold for the purpose of being inhaled. Legislation enacted last May made its sale presumptively illegal, with carveouts for genuine industrial and culinary use. Jeanette Brick, the president of iSi North America, told me that her company does not oppose the Louisiana law. “These laws are intended to prevent misuse, and they have not negatively impacted our ability to serve the culinary community in the state,” she said in an email. She also noted that “iSi does not sell large tanks of nitrous oxide, as they have no culinary application and are increasingly associated with misuse. We strongly advocate for additional restrictions on these large tanks to help curb their growing misuse among teenagers.”   

Outside Louisiana, however, legislative efforts have yet to deliver significant change. In 2017, for example, then–California State Senator Jim Nielsen proposed a bill to ban nitrous-oxide sales in stores selling tobacco or tobacco-related products. Industry lobbyists opposed the bill, and it eventually failed to pass.

In the absence of effective regulation, litigation has emerged as the best tool to achieve accountability. In 2023, a Missouri jury found United Brands liable for conspiring to sell nitrous oxide as a drug. The company was ordered to pay $720 million to Marissa Politte’s family for her wrongful death. The novel jury verdict and the large court-mandated payout might set a lasting precedent. “You have companies whose full-time scheme it is to pour this stuff onto our streets,” Johnny Simon, the Politte family’s attorney, told me. “That’s who we need to go after.”

Still, case-by-case litigation can push only so hard against countervailing market forces. Nor should it have to, when the blueprint for lifesaving regulation exists. Had something like Nielsen’s California bill been federal law in 2020, Politte might still be alive. The driver who killed her bought his nitrous oxide from a smoke shop.