By anointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Napoleon-style, Donald Trump revealed a longing to seize one of America’s most romantic and abiding myths: Camelot. Nothing would be better than to appropriate the elegant and sparkling aura of cultural influence that came to characterize John F. Kennedy’s administration—hopeful, attractive, even sexy. And if the liberal elites refuse to see Trump this way, his actions seem to be saying, then he’ll just have to create his own version, MAGAlot.

Trump’s interests seem to flicker depending on the day—yesterday owning Gaza, today invading Canada—but when it comes to culture, he is all in. This is not a job to outsource to Elon Musk. He is most engaged when issuing executive orders calling for “beautiful” and “classical” architecture in federal buildings or reviving his idea for a National Garden of American Heroes (where the stony likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Antonin Scalia, and Shirley Temple will congregate for all eternity), and especially when promising to turn his showman’s instincts toward transforming the Kennedy Center—to “make art great again,” as the newly appointed interim president of the center put it.

To the extent that Trump’s cultural designs offer a coherent vision, it shares his larger ambition to restore the country to a “golden age” (and a gilded one). In usurping control of Washington’s premier cultural institution, the annual bestower of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors (the closest America has to knighthood), he appears set on rebuilding Camelot in his own image.

But if Trump is trying to follow, or supplant, JFK, he is missing an important aspect of how the earlier president understood culture: not as a blunt instrument to be wielded for ideological or personal gain, but as a natural resource to tap for the long-term benefit of America’s image. Just as Trump is discovering that imperialism is a bigger lift in the 21st century than it was in the 19th, he is bound to learn that the unruly organism of American culture exists to be propagated, not tamed.

Even Camelot was only Camelot in the rearview mirror: King Arthur’s legendary medieval court was first invoked by Jackie Kennedy in the days after her husband’s assassination, as a way to begin shaping his legacy. In an interview with Life magazine, she paraphrased from the then-popular Alan Jay Lerner musical: “Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.”

[Read: The Trump world order]

There was some substance behind the grieving widow’s spin. The Kennedys had brought the executive branch not only glamour but also a renewed emphasis on the arts. Robert Frost became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration when he recited “The Gift Outright” on the day JFK took the oath of office. Musicians, writers, and artists were frequently, and very publicly, invited to the White House, and the historic legacy of the house itself, its art and architecture, was the subject of Jackie Kennedy’s meticulous attention. The president sent out Duke Ellington as a “jazz ambassador” on international tours. In 1963, Kennedy proposed creating a federal advisory council on the arts, an idea that would find its expression in the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. He was emphatic about the value of cultural patronage, saying in a speech after the death of Frost that he envisioned an America “which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

Camelot had its borders, of course, and the aesthetic vision of the Kennedys, for all their youth, was still a patrician one that excluded the more jagged and challenging forms of expression emerging in the 1960s (as for his personal taste, Jackie once joked that her husband’s favorite piece of music was “Hail to the Chief”). When James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and a group of other Black artists met with Attorney General (and brother of the president) Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 to express their exasperation with the slow pace of desegregation, the conversation was famously tense, leaving RFK annoyed and Baldwin confirmed in his feeling that the quasi-royal family was out of touch.

But Kennedy’s Camelot at least tried to elevate idealism, intellectualism, and the modern elegance of a pillbox hat. What might MAGAlot bring us? The jokes about Hulk Hogan becoming a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors were tired even before they were made. When, a week into the new regime, the comedian W. Kamau Bell wondered from the stage of the Kennedy Center, “How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he elicited audible groans. Trump hasn’t provided too many clues about his vision for programming beyond that it should stop being “wokey,” as he put it in a call to the new board. “I think we’re going to make it hot,” he told the group, now packed with loyalists. “And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.” The new chairman had not only declined to attend the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term; he recently admitted that he hadn’t been to a single performance there.  

What he doesn’t want is much clearer to discern: drag shows. “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP,” he posted on February 7. He seemed to be referring to a couple of drag-based events at the center that represent a minuscule fraction of programming (the institution puts on roughly 2,000 events a year). As for what he would add to the schedule, the suggestions coming from Trump world sound like one-offs that would serve the sole purpose of giving Washington’s liberal establishment the finger. Steven Bannon wants to see the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men who had been jailed for attacking the Capitol on January 6, perform on opening night.

Trump does have his own neo-Baroque aesthetic: The Village People, Luciano Pavarotti, the grand chandelier he envisions hanging from the ceiling of the Oval Office. But these personal flourishes—like his desire to pave the Rose Garden to more closely resemble his patio at Mar-a-Lago—seem to have little chance of trickling down into the culture at large. Trump’s effect on the culture cannot be easily sussed out from a programming guide or a glance at the gold figurine recently screwed into a molding at the White House. He has been more effective at glorifying and encouraging a style of meanness, which appears in unlikely places but is easy to hear if you’re listening for it. Even Kendrick Lamar flaunted this style by making a diss track the focus and theme of his Super Bowl halftime show.

Read: Trump takes over the Kennedy Center

The most recent president to attempt the Camelot thing was Barack Obama, who elevated American art forms like jazz and hip-hop in ways meant to show that inclusiveness and excellence were not mutually exclusive. Stevie Wonder and Lin-Manuel Miranda would drop by the White House. Philip Roth was given a National Humanities Medal. And Barack and Michelle would happily bop to Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors. But how much did this presidential boosterism influence the culture and the artists who make it? Obama’s regular book picks and Spotify playlists have come to seem, in his post-presidency, slightly self-indulgent and cringey. The overall effect is of professional curation designed to be respectfully broad (a little country, a little indie rock), while not veering toward blandness. The Obamas have always understood the potency of culture, which helps explain their move, in recent years, toward making it themselves; but despite the occasional Netflix documentary production credit, it’s harder to say that they have set an enduring agenda.

MAGAlot seems even less likely to shift the culture of the arts in any concrete way. This might be, in part, because Trump’s ambition misses what made Camelot matter: The Kennedy administration’s true legacy was the advancement of American soft power in service of real global policy goals. Just as Kennedy created USAID and the Peace Corps in part to showcase American abundance and goodwill, he deployed cultural influence to demonstrate, during the most intense period of the Cold War, that the U.S.-led vision of the world was just cooler than the rest. At one point, in 1962, he even sent Robert Frost to the Soviet Union, where he met with other poets, gave readings, and had a tête-à-tête with Nikita Khrushchev. Cultivating attractive, dynamic American arts, whether spaghetti Westerns or Broadway musicals, accrued long-term strategic benefits to the United States—and it still does. But reaping those benefits requires supporting people who make culture without dictating what that culture should look like.

Trump would find this hard. His zero-sum view of the world affords little patience for the churn and friction and provocation that actually makes for good art. He wants to be the minister of culture mostly because it’s the quickest way to upset his detractors, to pave over the rose gardens of generations past—and because, I imagine, the thought of a North Korean–style glorification of his rule pleases him. But after the drag shows are banned and the J6 chorus has had a chance to sing its “Justice for All” at the Kennedy Center, he may well discover what other aspiring authoritarian leaders have in the past—that culture is not easily bent. And when it is, it usually snaps back with force.

Last Saturday, I was in Montreal for the Canada-U.S. hockey game in the 4 Nations Cup. I knew I needed to be there. A few nights later, I was at home in front of our TV for the final game, which Canada won 3–2 in overtime. I watched every moment, from before the game began to after it ended. I almost never do that. Those games, I knew, were going to say something—about Canadian players, about Canadian fans, about Canada. Maybe something about the United States too. I didn’t know what.

Sports can tell big stories. I was one of two goalies for Canada in the Canada–Soviet Union series in 1972, the first international best-against-best hockey series. Until that moment, professional players from the NHL were not eligible to compete in the amateurs-only Olympic Games or World Championships. Canada was where hockey originated, where all of the best players in the world were born and developed. To the total annoyance of Canadians, year after year the Soviet Union, not Canada, became known as “World Champions.”

The 1972 showdown was eight games: four in Canada, four in Moscow. Everyone—the Canadian players and fans, even the Soviet players and fans and the experts from both countries—knew that Canada would win decisively, likely all eight games and by big scores.

In Game 1 in Montreal, the Soviets won, 7–3. Imagine the reaction all across Canada. Then multiply that by 10.

Instantly, the stakes changed. Something deeper than hockey pride was on the line. We were the best in the world when it came to hockey; the rest of the world didn’t think about Canada that way when it came to many other things. Now we had lost. What did that say about us? About Canada? About Canadians? The next seven games would decide. These were the stakes.

We left Canada trailing two games to one, with one game tied. We lost the first game in Moscow. The series was all but over. Then we won the next two games, leaving it to one final game. In 1972, not many North Americans traveled to Europe; almost none went to Moscow. Three thousand Canadians were in that arena. They were there because, somehow, they knew they had to be there. For the last game, on a Thursday, played entirely during work and school hours all across the country, 16 million out of Canada’s population of 22 million people watched. Behind two goals to start the third period, we tied the game, then won it, and the series, with 34 seconds remaining. I felt immense excitement. I felt even more immense relief. In that series, Canadians discovered a depth of feeling for their country that they hadn’t known was there.

In 1980, I was the other person in the Olympics booth in Lake Placid, New York, when the U.S. beat the Soviets and won the gold medal. (When Al Michaels said, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!,” I said, “Unbelievable.”) At the beginning of the Olympics, for the U.S., there were no stakes. The team was made up almost entirely of college kids. The Soviets, at the time, were the best team in the world. Even after the U.S. team won some early games, their players seemed on a roll to enjoy, not to be taken seriously. Then they beat the Soviets and two days later defeated Finland to win the gold.

This was not a good time for the U.S. in the world. Among other problems and conflicts, Iran was holding 52 Americans hostage in Tehran. Weeks passed. The U.S. seemed powerless to get them back. Unbeknownst to all but a few, six of the hostages—all American diplomats—had escaped and were being hidden in the Canadian Embassy. The Canadians sheltered the diplomats for months, and eventually helped them escape. The news that the diplomats had made it safely out of Iran came just before the Lake Placid games began. Everywhere I went around the village, Americans came up to me and said, “Thank you, Canada,” as if they were otherwise friendless in the world.

In 1980, hockey was not a major sport in the U.S., and so Americans had no expectation or even hope of winning against the Soviets. What they did have at stake in 1980 was the Cold War. That they had to win. The hockey team’s victory in Lake Placid felt like part of this bigger fight. It fit the story Americans wanted to tell about themselves. And although hockey was a fairly minor sport, 45 years later, for many Americans, the “Miracle on Ice” remains their favorite patriotic sports moment.

Now to today. Now to the 4 Nations Cup. Being Canadian these past few months hasn’t been a lot of fun. The threat and now the coming reality of high tariffs on Canadian goods exported to the U.S.—and the disruptions and dislocations, known and unknown, that these tariffs will cause—is never out of mind. Even more difficult in the day-to-day is Donald Trump’s relentless and insulting commentary.  

Canada as the U.S.’s “51st state”; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau”; the U.S. using “economic force” to annex Canada, its nearest ally and inescapable geographical fact of life. It’s the kind of trolling that Trump does to everyone, to every country, whenever he wants to, because as president of the most powerful nation on Earth, he knows he can. He loves to watch the weak wobble and cringe, and those who think they’re strong discover they’re not.

Na na na na na. It sets a tone. It lets everyone know who’s boss. It’s what he’d done all his life in business. And although at a boardroom table he wasn’t always the guy with the deepest pockets, in the Oval Office of the United States of America, he knows he is. Being Donald Trump got him elected, but being president is what allows him to be Donald Trump. On November 5, nobody had as much at stake in the election’s result as he did. He needed to win to hold the world’s highest office, to avoid lawsuits and prison time. He needed to win to be him.

It's been amazing to watch world leaders of proud, historically significant countries, kings in their own domain, suck up to Donald Trump, to see billionaires and business titans, who know how the game is played—cater to political authority in public, play hardball in private—who reside proudly and smugly above and beyond politics, fold like a cheap suit. And later, when they do respond, because prime ministers, presidents, and CEOs eventually have to say something, their words sound so lame. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Trudeau said. By answering at all, you end up making any slur sound slightly, disturbingly legitimate, and you make yourself look weak.

How would Americans react if a president or prime minister of another country said the same about their president? That he’s crooked, crazy, a lunatic, a loser? That he’s the worst president in the history of the world? That their country is just another failed empire in its final death throes? That both president and country are a disgrace and everyone knows it? Probably not well.

But what do you do? What do the decision makers in other countries do? What do average Canadians, average Panamanians and Danes, what do ordinary people anywhere do? That’s why I needed to be at that game in Montreal.

Thirty years earlier, in 1995, on the weekend before Quebec’s second referendum on independence, my family and I went to Montreal to wander the city, to try to sense what Quebeckers were feeling, but mostly just to be there. On a Saturday night, we went to a Montreal Canadiens game. We wanted to be there for the singing of “O Canada.” The next day, a reporter for an English-language newspaper wrote that it was the loudest he had ever heard the anthem sung at a game. What he didn’t notice was that 10,000 people sang their hearts out, and 10,000 people were silent.

Last Saturday in Montreal, the arena was filled with fans in red-and-white Canada jerseys. The NHL and the NHL Players Association, which had organized the event, did what organizers do. They asked the fans to be respectful of both teams during the anthems. The fans decided not to be managed. They booed “The Star-Spangled Banner” loudly. They were not booing the American players. They were booing Donald Trump. Why shouldn’t he know how they felt? Why shouldn’t Americans know? How else would they know?

Five nights later in Boston, at the final game, the fans booed “O Canada,” but not very loudly.

The game was a classic. The two best teams in the world: Canada, the heart and soul, conscience and bedrock of the game; the U.S., in its development and growth, the great story in hockey in the past 30 years. Both teams played as well as they’d ever played. Their great stars played like great stars; some other players discovered in themselves something even they didn’t know was there. The U.S. could’ve won. The team was good enough to win. Canada won because of Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, and Sidney Crosby—and for the same reason Canada won against the Soviets in 1972.

Everybody, every country, has something inside them that is fundamental. That matters so much that it’s not negotiable. That’s deeply, deeply personal. Something that, if threatened, you’d do anything to protect, and keep on doing it until it’s done, even if it seems to others to make no sense. Even if it seems stupid. This is how wars start.

For Panama, some things are fundamental. For Denmark, China, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Canada—for everyone—it’s the same. And when you get pushed too much, too far, you rediscover what that fundamental is. Poke the bear and you find out there’s more in the bear than you know, than even the bear knows.

For Canada and these other countries, you don’t poke back against Donald Trump. You don’t troll a troll. You look into yourselves and find again what makes you special, why you matter, to yourselves, to the world, and knowing that, knowing that that is you, with that as your pride and backbone, you fight back.

The U.S. has its own fights. It faces these same questions. What is fundamental to America? “Greatness”? Maybe. But greatness depends on the needs of a country and the needs of the world at a particular moment and time, and being great in the ways that are needed. These next four years will not be easy for anyone—and they will be perhaps especially difficult for the United States.

As for the 51st state crap, knock it off. It’s beneath you.

For Donald Trump, everything is a transaction. You look to make a deal, you push and shove, scratch and claw—you do whatever it takes. And if that doesn’t work, you do some more, until at some point you walk away and make another deal. It’s just business.

Only some things aren’t business. Every so often, Canadians are defiantly not-American. They will need to be much more than that in the next four years. Canadians will need to be defiantly Canadian. Canada won in 1972 and again last week because winning was about more than business. It was personal.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Trump hands the world to China. New York belongs to Trump now. Intimidating Americans will not work. The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials. Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity

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Illustration by Julia Rothman

Flaco Lives

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Hélène Blanc

Read. Haley Mlotek’s new book is a divorce memoir with no lessons, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Watch. The third season of Yellowjackets (streaming on Paramount+). The show is more playful and ridiculous than ever before, Shirley Li writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Sir John Mayor says US policy will embolden Russia and China, with gains since the fall of the Soviet Union being reversed.

Elon Musk and his team of software engineers at the Department of Government Efficiency are rampaging through the government in search of fraud, waste, and abuse. The government, they claim, is misusing taxpayer money. They are willing to shut down entire agencies to prove their point. By treating the civil service as a business, as well as importing Musk’s ruthless managerial style into public agencies, the Silicon Valley disrupters believe that the country can produce a leaner and more efficient government.

Put aside for now the fact that these actions are likely illegal and unconstitutional. The central problem is the false assumption of this approach: that problems of inefficiency in federal agencies stem exclusively from the public administration. Much of the waste, inefficiency, and indeed fraud result from the government’s overreliance on private-sector organizations to conduct its work. This byzantine system of outsourcing to nonprofit and for-profit organizations adds costs and creates waste because each nongovernmental contractor exacts fees or imposes a profit margin. In addition, government officials have in recent years exposed multiple cases of embezzlement by USAID contractors, leading to millions of dollars in fines paid out by major companies and their executives.

If the country is serious about improving government efficiency, the emphasis should be on curtailing contracting and making the civil service more accountable—to American voters and to their elected representatives, not to freelance tech bros.

[Peter Wehner: The cruel attack on USAID]

The contracting swamp we have today emerged through previous attempts to streamline government by cutting the federal workforce. All such efforts ended the same way: a modest number of layoffs among public workers combined with a dramatic expansion of private-sector contracting. In fact, our postwar history shows that federal spending has ballooned while the size of the federal workforce has remained almost static: In 1946, the government employed about 2.5 million workers and ran a budget of $628 billion (in today’s dollars); in 2023, it had only half a million more workers, but its budget stood at $4.6 trillion.

How does the government disburse this colossal budget? Through contracting. A 2017 tally estimated that more than 5.2 million contract and grant employees worked for the federal government. On the largely unexamined assumption that the private sector is more efficient, past administrations of both parties have eagerly embraced contracting to make up for limited administrative capacity.

President after president has sought to cut the federal workforce—without reducing the responsibilities and demands on government agencies. That has meant ever greater reliance on contracting. President Ronald Reagan—who famously asserted that government was the problem, not the solution, to the country’s ills—oversaw shrinking the federal civil service by more than 130,000 employees in his first two years in office. Meanwhile, an equivalent number of civil servants was working solely on contract and grant administration. And over Reagan’s first term, spending on contract consultants increased from $1.1 billion to more than $1.5 billion. The Clinton administration echoed Reagan’s rhetoric and sought to win favor for the Democrats with a “reinventing government” program that cut the federal workforce by nearly 400,000 direct hires—even as it expanded the shadow government of contractor workers by nearly 300,000.

USAID, the foreign-aid agency that Musk has been busy feeding “into the wood chipper,” offers a prime example of how extensively privatized so much government work already is. The federal government first made overseas economic development a significant feature of U.S. foreign policy in the years following World War II. From foreign aid’s inception, the government contracted out much of this activity, largely because, after wartime state involvement in industry, a strident anti-statism took hold in Congress. As Cold War anti-Soviet sentiment rose, conservative politicians inveighed against the New Deal federal bureaucracy as evidence of a collectivist power grab. Congress responded by capping the growth of the civil service, but that did not limit the government’s scope or aspirations; foreign aid became a particular Cold War priority as an exercise of soft power. Expansive government aims instead swelled the number of private-sector contractors.

“The entire effort that the government agency carries out here is really carried out through private organizations,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson said in 1952, referring to the forerunner of USAID. “We do not have in the Government sufficient people to staff these operations, sufficient people to give us all the ideas, to give us all the working groups which are necessary.” So private actors would be drafted in to do the work.

Subsequent changes to foreign aid reinforced contracting as the core of U.S. foreign policy, including in the legislative text that originally established USAID in 1961, and in amendments a year later that mandated USAID to “utilize wherever practicable the services of United States private enterprise,” such as “the services of experts and consultants.” As early as 1964, USAID had committed more than $400 million through some 1,200 contracts for technical assistance from universities, for-profit firms, and nonprofits.

This contracting meant that most foreign-aid money went straight to domestic organizations. William Gaud, who led USAID during the Johnson administration, was blunt about this. “The biggest simple misconception about the foreign-aid program is that we send money abroad,” he said in a 1968 speech. “We don’t.” At the time, about 95 percent of the agency’s $1 billion–plus budget was spent directly in the United States.

USAID continued to be an important tool of U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, overseeing many of the “shock therapy” programs designed to help the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries transition to Western-style capitalism. But, as an early experiment in Bill Clinton’s “reinvention laboratory,” the agency suffered from the growing reliance on outsourcing. A 1993 Government Accountability Office report noted that expanding USAID work into newly independent countries “further burdened its operating expense budget, resulting in greater dependence on contractors and a greater potential that programs will be vulnerable to fraud, waste, or abuse for lack of adequate oversight.”

The way the contracting system favored U.S. firms was all too apparent. In the shock-therapy programs, U.S. aid was “composed for the most part of financial intangibles and technical assistance,” one U.S. diplomat complained. “The result is that very few Russians have seen anything at all of the vaunted billions … most simply do not believe the money ever existed.” Rather, money flowed from the U.S. government directly to “domestic contractors,” the diplomat added. For obvious reasons, this undermined U.S. foreign-policy goals, generating more frustration and cynicism than gratitude.

By 2001, more than 80 percent of USAID contracts went to domestic for-profit and nonprofit companies. Although Musk has singled out nonprofits that receive grants for projects he finds risible, in practice USAID has long given its most lucrative and important contracts to American corporations. By 1996, consulting and accounting firms such as Abt Associates, Booz Allen Hamilton, KPMG, and Chemonics International all held tens of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts. For such companies, this government spending was virtually their entire business: When Chemonics, for example, reported $85 million in revenue in the last nine months of 1999, 90 percent of its business came from USAID contracts. In 2009, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat, lamented that the agency had been reduced to a “check-writing agency.”

At least government-transparency mechanisms made the problems of over-relying on private-sector partners visible and public. But even that degree of accountability is disappearing in Musk’s bonfire of the agencies. USAID’s database of past research projects, for instance, provided scholars like me with valuable insights into foreign aid—and its flaws. Now that resource has been yanked offline. Likewise, inspectors general and the GAO produced reports that highlighted wasteful spending and outright fraud. Recent federal investigations have turned up staggering cases of graft and corruption. Contractors were indicted for a range of fraudulent charges while doing reconstruction and humanitarian work in Iraq and Afghanistan, including classic bribery and wire-fraud cases and engagement in illegal activities to help other contractors secure contracts. As recently as 2023, Booz Allen Hamilton agreed to pay $377 million—one of the largest procurement-fraud settlements in the country’s history—because the for-profit company was caught overbilling the government to cover its private-sector losses.

[David A. Graham: The world’s most powerful unelected bureaucrat]

Silicon Valley tech moguls were not necessary to root out waste; the government was already doing that. But last month, the Trump administration took a hammer to such oversight when the president fired more than a dozen agency watchdogs. Congress could certainly do a better job of oversight, with a greater emphasis on exposing corruption and conflicts of interest. It could also empower inspectors general as its enforcers against graft and waste. One obstacle to smarter reform is that the person charged with overhauling the government has himself been a huge beneficiary of its largesse. Musk’s companies have enjoyed more than $15 billion in contracts over the past decade (including some from USAID), a spigot that continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into his pocket every year.  

The contracting model has bloated government costs while hindering public accountability and insulating policy making from citizens. Rather than inviting billionaires to demonize the civil service, the true solution to government inefficiency is to reverse outsourcing. Severing private contractors and hiring more public servants would allow the state to cut time spent managing contractors and devote more resources to the actual work of government. Relaxing hiring regulations could help agencies hire bright and enthusiastic talent, as could raising pay for federal employees. Instead of dismantling the federal workforce, we should put the contracting system in the wood chipper.

The rise of the American software industry in the 20th century was made possible by a partnership between emerging technology companies and the U.S. government. Silicon Valley’s earliest innovations were driven not by technical minds chasing trivial consumer products but by scientists and engineers who aspired to address challenges of industrial and national significance using the most powerful technology of the age. Their pursuit of breakthroughs was intended not to satisfy the passing needs of the moment but rather to drive forward a much grander project, channeling the collective purpose and ambition of a nation.

This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-­state and indeed the U.S. military has, for the most part, been forgotten, written out of the region’s history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—­one that clashes with the Valley’s conception of itself as indebted only to its capacity to innovate. The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation.

But there is also another essential element of American success. It was a culture, one that cohered around a shared objective, that won the last world war. And it will be a culture that wins, or prevents, the next one.

This essay has been excerpted from Karp and Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic.

At present, however, the principal shared features of American society are not civic or political but rather cohere around entertainment, sports, celebrity, and fashion. This is not the result of some unbridgeable political division. The interpersonal tether that makes possible a form of imagined intimacy among strangers within groups of a significant size was severed and banished from the public sphere. The old means of manufacturing a nation—the civic rituals of an educational system, mandatory service in national defense, religion, a common language, and a free and thriving press—have all but been dismantled or withered from neglect and abuse. This distaste for collective experience and endeavor made America, and American culture, vulnerable.

The establishment left has failed its cause and thoroughly eroded its potential. The frenetic pursuit of a shallow egalitarianism in the end hollowed out its broader and more compelling political project. What we need is more cultural specificity ­in education, technology, and politics—­not less. The vacant neutrality of the current moment risks allowing our instinct for discernment to atrophy. Only the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, will make possible our continued survival and cohesion. And only by combining the pursuit of innovation with the shared objectives of the nation can we both advance our welfare and safeguard the legitimacy of the democratic project itself.

Silicon Valley once stood at the center of American military production and national security. Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, whose semiconductor division was founded in Mountain View, California, and made possible the first primitive personal computers, built reconnaissance equipment for spy satellites used by the CIA beginning in the late 1950s. For a time after World War II, all of the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missiles were produced in Santa Clara County, California. Companies such as Lockheed Missiles and Space, Westinghouse, Ford Aerospace, and United Technologies had thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley on weapons production through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

This union of science and the state in the middle part of the 20th century began in earnest during World War II. In November 1944, as Soviet forces closed in on Germany from the east, President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt was in Washington, D.C., already contemplating an American victory and the end of the conflict that had remade the world. Roo­sevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, a pastor’s son who had become the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he helped lead the Manhattan Project.

In the letter, Roo­se­velt described “the unique experiment” that the United States had undertaken during the war to leverage science in service of military ends. Roo­sevelt anticipated the next era—­and partnership between national government and private industry—­with precision. He wrote that there was “no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment”—­that is, directing the resources of an emerging scientific establishment to help wage the most significant and violent war that the world had ever known—­“cannot be profitably employed in times of peace.”

Roosevelt’s ambition was clear. He intended to see the machinery of the state—its power and prestige, as well as the financial resources of the newly victorious nation and emerging hegemon—spur the scientific community forward in service of, among other things, the advancement of public health and national welfare. The challenge was to ensure that the engineers and researchers who had directed their attention to the industry of war—and particularly the physicists, who, as Bush noted, had “been thrown most violently off stride”—­could shift their efforts back to civilian advances in an era of relative peace.

The entanglement of the state and scientific research both before and after the war was itself built on an even longer history of connection between innovation and politics. Many of the earliest leaders of the American republic were inventors, including Thomas Jefferson, who designed sundials and studied writing machines, and Benjamin Franklin, who experimented with and constructed objects as varied as lightning rods and eyeglasses.

Unlike the legions of lawyers who have come to dominate American politics in the modern era, many early American leaders, even if not practitioners of science themselves, were nonetheless remarkably fluent in matters of engineering and technology. John Adams, the second president of the United States, was, by one historian’s account, focused on steering the early republic away from “unprofitable science, identifiable in its focus on objects of vain curiosity,” and toward more practical forms of inquiry, including “applying science to the promotion of agriculture.”

Many of the innovators of the 18th and 19th centuries were polymaths whose interests diverged wildly from the contemporary expectation that depth, as opposed to breadth, is the most effective means of contributing to a field. The frontiers and edges of science were still in that earliest stage of expansion that made possible and encouraged an interdisciplinary approach, one that would be almost certain to stall an academic career today. That cross-­pollination, as well as the absence of a rigid adherence to the boundaries between disciplines, was vital to a willingness to experiment, and to the confidence of political leaders to opine on engineering and technical questions that implicated matters of government.

The rise of J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of his colleagues in the late 1930s further situated scientists and engineers at the heart of American life and the defense of the democratic experiment. Joseph Licklider, a psychologist whose work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology anticipated the rise of early forms of AI, was hired in 1962 by the organization that would become the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—­an institution whose innovations would include the precursors to the modern internet as well as the global positioning system. His research for his now classic paper “Man-­Computer Symbiosis,” which was published in March 1960 and sketched a vision of the interplay between computing intelligence and our own, was supported by the U.S. Air Force.

There was a closeness, and significant degree of trust, in the relationships between political leaders and the scientists on whom they relied for guidance and direction. Shortly after the launch by the Soviet Union of the satellite Sputnik in October 1957, Hans Bethe, the German-­born theoretical physicist and adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower, was called to the White House. Within an hour, there was agreement on a path forward to reinvigorate the American space program. “You see that this is done,” Eisenhower told an aide. The pace of change and action in that era was swift. NASA was founded the following year.

By the end of World War II, the blending of science and public life—­of technical innovation and affairs of state—­was essentially complete and unremarkable. Many of these engineers and innovators would labor in obscurity. Others, however, were celebrities in a way that might be difficult to imagine today. In 1942, as war spread across Europe and the Pacific, an article in Collier’s introduced Vannevar Bush, who was at the time a little-­known engineer and government bureaucrat, to the magazine’s readership of nearly 3 million, describing Bush as “the man who may win the war.” (Three years later, Bush published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic, praising scientists for working together in a “common cause,” and anticipating many aspects of the information age that lay ahead.) Albert Einstein was not only one of the 20th century’s greatest scientific minds but also one of its most prominent celebrities—a popular figure whose image and breakthrough discoveries, which so thoroughly defied our intuitive understanding of the nature of space and time, routinely made front-­page news. And it was often the science itself that was the focus of coverage.

[From the February 1949 issue: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

This was the American century, and engineers were at the heart of the era’s ascendant mythology. The pursuit of public interest through science and engineering was considered a natural extension of the national project, which entailed both protecting U.S. interests and moving society—indeed, civilization—up the hill. And while the scientific community required funding and extensive support from the government, the modern state was equally reliant on the advances that those investments in science and engineering produced. The technical outperformance of the United States in the 20th century—­that is, the country’s ability to reliably deliver economic and scientific advances for the public, whether medical breakthroughs or military capabilities—­was essential to its credibility.

As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has suggested, a failure by leaders to deliver on implied or explicit promises to the public has the potential to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for a government. When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.

The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social-media platforms that have come to dominate—­and limit—our sense of the potential of technology. A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—their rallying cry that they intend “to change the world” has grown lifeless from overuse—­but many of them raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-­sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the middle of the 20th century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as start-up after start-up catered to the whims of late-capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social-media platforms and food-delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

[Read: The divide between Silicon Valley and Washington is a national-security threat]

For decades, the U.S. government was viewed in Silicon Valley as an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy—more an obstacle to progress than its logical partner. The technology giants of the current era long avoided government work. The level of internal dysfunction within many state and federal agencies created seemingly insurmountable barriers to entry for outsiders, including the insurgent start-ups of the new economy. In time, the tech industry lost interest in politics and broader collaborations. It viewed the American national project, if it could even be called that, with a mix of skepticism and indifference. As a result, many of the Valley’s best minds, and their flocks of engineering disciples, turned to the consumer for sustenance.

The interests and political instincts of the American elite diverged from those of the rest of the country following the end of World War II. The economic struggles of the country and geopolitical threats of the 20th century today feel distant to most software engineers. The most capable generation of coders has never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval. Why court controversy with your friends or risk their disapproval by working for the U.S. military when you can retreat into the perceived safety of building another app?

As Silicon Valley turned inward and ­toward the consumer, the U.S. government and the governments of many of its allies scaled back involvement and innovation across numerous domains, including space travel, military software, and medical research. The state’s retreat left a widening innovation gap. Many cheered this divergence: Skeptics of the private sector argued that it could not be trusted to operate in public domains while those in the Valley remained wary of government control and the misuse or abuse of their inventions. For the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the previous one, however, they will require a union of the state and the software industry—­not their separation and disentanglement.

[Read: The crumbling foundation of America’s military]

Indeed, the legitimacy of the American government and democratic regimes around the world will require an increase in economic and technical output that can be achieved only through the more efficient adoption of technology and software. The public will forgive many failures and sins of the political class. But the electorate will not overlook a systemic inability to harness technology for the purpose of effectively delivering the goods and services that are essential to our lives.

In late 1906, Francis Galton, a British anthropologist, traveled to Plymouth, En­gland, in the country’s southwest, where he attended a livestock fair. His interest was not in purchasing the poultry or cattle that were available for sale at the market but in studying the ability of large groups of individuals to correctly make estimates. Nearly 800 visitors at the market had written down estimates of the weight of a particular ox that was for sale. Each person had to pay six pennies for a chance to submit their guess and win a prize, which deterred, in Galton’s words, “practical joking” that might muddy the results of the experiment. The median estimate of the 787 guesses that Galton received was 1,207 pounds, which turned out to be within 0.8 percent of the correct answer of 1,198 pounds. It was a striking result that would prompt more than a century of research and debate about the wisdom of crowds and their ability to more accurately make estimates, and predictions, than a chosen few. For Galton, the experiment pointed to “the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment.”

But why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy? We seem to have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses and endeavors that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could. The wisdom of the crowd at the height of the rise of Zynga and Groupon in 2011 made its verdict clear: These were winners that merited further investment. Tens of billions of dollars were wagered on their continued ascent. But there was no forum or platform or meaningful opportunity for anyone to question whether our society’s scarce resources ought to be diverted to the construction of online games or a more effective aggregator of coupons and discounts. The market had spoken, so it must be so.

Americans have, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, been so eager “to banish notions of the good life from public discourse,” to require that “citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square,” that the resulting void has been filled in large part by the logic of the market—­what Sandel has described as “market triumphalism.” And the leaders of Silicon Valley have for the most part been content to submit to this wisdom of the market, allowing its logic and values to supplant their own. It is our own temerity and unwillingness to risk the scorn of the crowd that have deprived us of the opportunity to discuss in any meaningful way what the world we inhabit should be and what companies should exist. The prevailing agnosticism of the modern era, the reluctance to advance a substantive view about cultural value, or lack thereof, for fear of alienating anyone, has paved the way for the market to fill the gap.

The drift of the technological world to the concerns of the consumer both reflected and helped reinforce a certain technological escapism—­the instinct by Silicon Valley to steer away from the most important problems we face as a society and toward what are essentially the minor and trivial yet solvable inconveniences of everyday consumer life: such as online shopping and food delivery. An entire swath of arenas, including national defense, violent crime, education reform, and medical research, appeared too intractable, too thorny, and too politically fraught to address in any real way. (This was the challenge we have aimed to address at Palantir—to build technology that serves our mos significant and vital needs, including those of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, instead of merely catering to the consumer.)

Most were content to set the hard problems aside. Consumer apps and trinkets did not talk back, hold press conferences, or fund pressure groups. The tragedy is that serving the consumer rather than the public has often been far easier and more lucrative for Silicon Valley, and certainly less risky.

The path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor. Silicon Valley offered a version of this combination. The Sunnyvales, Palo Altos, and Mountain Views of the world were company towns and city-­states, walled off from society and offering something that the national project could no longer provide. Technology companies formed internally coherent communities whose corporate campuses attempted to provide for all of the wants and needs of daily life. They were at their core collectivist endeavors, populated by intensely individualistic and freethinking minds, and built around a set of ideals that many young people craved: freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results.

Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values in organizing the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks. But the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic, in the United States and elsewhere, will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together. The technologies we are building, including the novel forms of AI that may challenge our present monopoly on creative control in this world, are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.

This essay has been excerpted from Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s new book, The Technological Republic.

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.

But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Crucially, this abuse of the state’s power does not require upending the Constitution. Competitive autocracies usually begin by capturing the referees: replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies, particularly those that investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, adjudicate disputes, or regulate economic life. Elected autocrats such as Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Nayib Bukele all purged public prosecutors’ offices, intelligence agencies, tax authorities, electoral authorities, media regulatory bodies, courts, and other state institutions and packed them with loyalists. Trump is not hiding his efforts to do the same. He has thus far fired (or declared his intention to fire, leading to their resignation) the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, EEOC commissioners, the National Labor Relations Board chair, and other nominally independent officials; reissued a renamed Schedule F, which strips firing protections from huge swaths of the civil service; expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to fill public positions with allies; purged more than a dozen inspectors general in apparent violation of the law; and even ordered civil servants to inform on one another.

[Read: The spies are shown the door]

Once state agencies are packed with loyalists, they may be deployed to investigate and prosecute rivals and critics, including politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, influential CEOs, and administrators of elite universities. In the United States, this may be done via the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS, congressional investigations, and other public agencies responsible for regulatory oversight and compliance. It may also be done via defamation or other private lawsuits.

The administration doesn’t have to jail its opponents to bully, harm, and ultimately intimidate them into submission. Indeed, because U.S. courts remain independent, few targets of selective prosecution are likely to be convicted and imprisoned. But mere investigations are a form of harassment. Targets of selective investigation or prosecution will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers; their lives will be disrupted; their professional careers will be sidetracked and their reputations damaged. At minimum, they and their families will suffer months and perhaps years of anxiety and sleepless nights.

Plus, the administration need not target all critics. A few high-profile attacks, such as a case against Liz Cheney, a prominent media outlet, or selective regulatory retaliation against a major company, may serve as an effective deterrent against future opposition.

Competitive-authoritarian governments further subvert democracy by shielding those who engage in criminal or antidemocratic behavior through captured referees and other impunity mechanisms. Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 insurrectionists and purge prosecutors who were involved in those cases, for example, sends a strong signal that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under the new administration (indeed, that’s how many pardon recipients are interpreting the pardons). Likewise, a loyalist Justice Department and FBI could disregard acts of political violence such as attacks on (or threats against) campaign workers, election officials, journalists, politicians, activists, protesters, or voters.

[Read: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

They could also decline to investigate or prosecute officials who work to manipulate or even steal elections. This may appear far-fetched, but it is precisely what enabled the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the Jim Crow South. Protected by local (and often federal) authorities in the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist groups used violent terror and election fraud to consolidate power and disenfranchise African Americans across the region.

Finally, state institutions may be used to co-opt business, media, and other influential societal actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax-exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment. Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax-exempt status, and government contracts and concessions. If they believe that those decisions are made on political, rather than technical, grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly.

Thus, if business leaders come to the conclusion that funding opposition candidates or independent media is financially risky, or that remaining silent rather than criticizing the administration is more profitable, they will change their behavior. Several of the country’s wealthiest individuals and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney, already appear to be adjusting in that way.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

Democracy requires robust opposition. Opposition parties and civil-society groups cannot function without money and without a large and replenishable pool of talented politicians, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs.

But using the state’s power against critics will likely deter many of them, depleting that pool. Talented politicians may decide to retire early rather than face an unfounded investigation. Donors may decide that the risk of contributing to Democratic candidates or funding “controversial” civil-rights or pro-democracy organizations is not worth it. Media outlets may downsize their investigatory teams, let go of their most aggressive editors and reporters, and decline to renew their most outspoken columnists. Up-and-coming journalists may steer clear of politics, opting instead to write about sports or culture. And university leaders may crack down on campus protest, remove or isolate activist professors, and decline to speak out on issues of national importance.

Civil society therefore faces a crucial collective-action problem. Individual politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents act rationally and do what seems best for their organizations. They work to protect their shareholders’ interests and stave off debilitating investigations or lawsuits. But such isolated acts of self-preservation have collective costs; as individual players retreat to the sidelines, the opposition weakens.

Some of these costs will be invisible. The public can observe when players sideline themselves: congressional retirements, university presidents’ resignations, the ceasing of campaign contributions, the softening of editorial lines. But we can’t see the opposition that never materializes—the potential critics, activists, and leaders who are deterred from getting in the game. How many young lawyers will decide to remain at a law firm instead of running for office? How many talented young writers will steer clear of journalism? How many potential whistleblowers will decide not to speak out? How many citizens will decide not to sign that public letter, join that protest, or make that campaign contribution?

Democracy is not yet lost. The Trump administration will be politically vulnerable. Unlike successful elected authoritarians such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, Trump lacks broad popular support. His approval rating has never surpassed 50 percent, and incompetence, overreach, and unpopular policies will almost certainly dampen public support for the new administration. An autocratic president with an approval rating below 50 percent is still dangerous, but far less so than one with 80 percent support. The new administration’s political weakness will open up opportunities for opposition in the courtroom, on the streets, and at the ballot box.

Still, the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

More than 30 years after leaving the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will join the EU's grid.

The Dream

A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes.

A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A suit that would see me through the immigration checkpoints of difficult countries. A suit that would convince readers that the man in the author photo has a sense of taste beyond the Brooklyn consensus of plaid shirt and pouf of graying hair.

The suit would serve as the perfect carapace for a personality overly dependent on anxious humor and jaundiced wit, a personality that I have been trying to develop since I saw my lightly mustached punim in the mirror as a pubescent boy and thought, How will I ever find love? The suit would transcend my physicality and bond with my personality directly. It would accompany me through the world’s great salons, the occasional MSNBC appearance, and, most important, the well-compensated talks at far-flung universities. The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.” Finding this perfect suit, made by the most advanced tailor out of superlative fabric, would do nothing less than transform me.

The Body

Before there is a suit, there is a body, and the body is terrible.

First there is my shortness (5 foot 5 and a half, with that “half” doing a lot of work). Being short is fine, but those missing inches are wedded to a narrow-shouldered body of zero distinction. Although I am of Russian and Jewish extraction, the continent whose clothing stores make me feel most at ease is Asia. (I once bought an off-the-rack jacket in Bangkok after the clerk examined me for all of three seconds.) However, this is not exactly an Asian body either, especially when I contrast myself with the natural slimness of most of my Asian friends. Just before my bar mitzvah, I got a set of perfect B-cup knockers and had to squeeze into a “husky” suit to perform the ritual yodeling at the synagogue. But that’s not all. Some hideously mismanaged childhood vaccination in Leningrad created a thick keloid scar running the length of my right shoulder. The shame of having this strange pink welt define one side of me led to a slumped posture favoring my left shoulder. When I finally found people to have sex with me—I had to attend Oberlin to complete the task—my expression upon disrobing resembled that of a dog looking up at his mistress after a bowel movement of hazmat proportions.

Before the Suit

The clothes before the suit were as bad as the body.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1972 and was quickly dressed in a sailor’s outfit with white tights and sexy little shorts, then given a balalaika to play with for the camera. The fact that Russia now fields one of the world’s most homicidal armies can partially be explained by photos such as this. On other occasions I was forced to wear very tight jogging pants with a cartoon bunny on them, or a thick-striped shirt dripping with medals from battles I had never seen. These outfits did make me feel like I belonged to something—in this case, a failing dictatorship. I left the U.S.S.R. before I could join the Young Pioneers, which would have entailed wearing a red tie at a tender age, while prancing about and shouting exuberant slogans such as “I am always ready!”

Top: The author, about 6 years old, in Leningrad, dressed as a sailor and forced to play balalaika under a hanging carpet. Bottom: About a year later, in Rome, his parents buy him a normal Western sweater. (Courtesy of Gary Shteyngart)

What I wasn’t ready for, however, was immigration to Queens. I arrived in New York in 1979 with the immigrant’s proverbial single shirt, although my parents had managed to snag a cute Italian V-neck sweater during the few months we spent in Rome on our way to America, a sweater that would serve me for the next half decade (as mentioned, I did not grow much). The Hebrew day school to which I was sentenced for eight years began a clothing drive for me, and I was rewarded with pounds of old Batman and Robin T-shirts, which made me look like a Soviet-refugee poster child. It’s worth noting that, growing up, I never thought, They hate me for my clothes or my poverty or my lack of English skills. This realization would come later, in hindsight. For the longest time, I thought that I was hated for the essential state of being myself; the clothes were more a symptom than a cause. My school may have been Jewish, but I somehow found myself in the throes of Calvinist predestination. For as long as I was myself, I deserved these clothes. Around this time, the idea of becoming an entirely different person took root—How will I ever find love? This is how—an idea that would be expanded for four decades, until it finally led me to The Suit.

Growing Up Tasteless

High school found me trying to blend in with a suburban outlay of clothes that my now middle-class family could finally afford. These were surfer T-shirts from Ocean Pacific and other brands that suburbanites who survived the 1980s might remember: Generra, Aéropostale, Unionbay. Unfortunately, I did not go to high school in Benetton Bay, Long Island, but in Manhattan, where these shirts were immediately a joke. (This would become a pattern. By the time I figure something out fashion-wise, I’m already two steps behind.) At a high-school job, my boss bought me a set of colorful Miami Vice–style shirts and jackets. These proved ridiculous at Oberlin, where dressing in janitor uniforms from thrift shops was considered the height of style. (Ironically, I had worked as a janitor during the summer, at the same nuclear laboratory that employed my father.)

After college, I fell in with a crowd of artsy, ketamine-addicted hipsters, and together we managed to gentrify several Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late ’90s. One of my friends, who was especially fashion-conscious, began to dress me at the high-priced secondhand emporium Screaming Mimis. The clothes she told me to buy were very itchy, mostly Orlon and Dacron items from ’70s brands such as Triumph of California, but these tight uniforms, like their Soviet predecessors, made me feel like I was playing a part in a grander opera, while also serving as a form of punishment. On nervous dates, I would sometimes have to run to the bathroom to try to angle my acrylic armpits under the dryer.

Because I was a writer who worked in bed, I mostly did not need a suit, although when I got married, in 2012, I went down to Paul Smith to get a herringbone number that I thought was just fine, if not terribly exciting. I bought a J.Crew tuxedo for black-tie benefits. Once, I did a reading sponsored by Prada and was given a nice gray jacket, pants, and a pair of blue suede shoes as compensation. Come to think of it, there was also a scarf. As a final note, I will say that I am incredibly cheap and that shopping for clothes has always raised my blood pressure. Leaving Screaming Mimis after spending more than $500 would always end in me getting terribly drunk to punish myself for the money I had blown on such a frivolous pursuit.

The Dream Begins

When I reached the age of 50, mildly prosperous and with a small family, I met a man named Mark Cho. We discovered each other because of a mutual love of wristwatches (a costly middle-aged hobby I had recently acquired), and because I knew about his classic-menswear store, the Armoury, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. The Armoury has been called “a clubhouse for menswear nerds”; if you’re looking for, say, a cashmere waistcoat in “brown sugar,” you have found your home. I had even given one of the characters in my latest novel, a dandy from a prominent Korean chaebol family, an article of clothing from that store to wear.

[Read: The future of marketing is bespoke everything]

We met for dinner at Union Square Cafe, and I liked him (and his clothes) immediately. Mark was almost always dressed in a jacket and tie, and would often sport a vest along with spectacles made of some improbable metal. What I loved about him was how comfortable he appeared in his medley of classical attire, and how, despite the fact that all of his garments had been chosen with precision, he gave the impression that he had spent very little time and thought on which breathable fabrics to settle over his trim body. He looked like he was, to use my initial formulation, at ease.

Later, I would learn that this whole look could be summarized by the Italian word sprezzatura, or “studied carelessness,” and later still I learned of something that the Japanese had discovered and refined: “Ivy style,” which is basically studied carelessness goes to Dartmouth. For the time being, I knew that I liked what I saw, that my inner lonely immigrant—the one who is always trying to find a uniform that will help me fit in—was intrigued. Mark once gave me an Armoury safari jacket, the very same one worn by the character in my novel, and its light, unflappable linen proved perfect for my summer readings around Germany and Switzerland that year. Everywhere from starchy Zurich to drunken Cologne to cool-as-fuck Berlin, the jacket would pop out of a suitcase and unwrinkle itself in seconds, yet it was also stylish and seemingly impervious to the odors of my non-Teutonic body. It was, to use Hemingway-esque prose, damn well perfect, and I immediately knew I wanted more.

I had lived in Italy in my 30s and met many aristocrats there. Those bastards had sprezzatura to burn, but when I asked them the make of their suits and jackets, they would smile and tell me it was the work of a single tailor down in Naples or up in Milan. Ah, I would say to myself, so that’s how it is. Given my outlook on life, owning a bespoke suit was not an outcome I was predestined for. The Prada jacket I had been given, which fit me well enough, was the most that my Calvinist God would ever grant me.

But over more martinis and onglets au poivre with Mark, I began to understand the parameters of a fine bespoke suit and its accessories: bespoke shirts and bespoke shoes. I also began to timidly ask questions of a financial nature and learned that the price of owning such a wardrobe approached and then exceeded $10,000. I did not want to pay this kind of entry fee. Given my own family’s experience in fleeing a declining superpower, I try to have money saved with which to escape across the border. Unlike watches, a suit could not be resold in Montreal or Melbourne.

A brief but generative conversation with my editors at this magazine soon paved the way for my dream to become possible. At a particularly unsober dinner with a visiting Japanese watchmaker, I whispered to Mark the extent of my desires. Yes, it would take a lot of work, a lot of research, and possibly travel to two other continents. But it could be done. At the right expense, with the most elegant and sturdy of Italian-milled fabrics, and with the greatest of Japanese tailors, a superior suit could be made for anyone, even for me.

Some Thoughts on Male Fashion

In religious school, I studied the Torah and the Talmud, which were okay but failed to leave a deep impression. At Oberlin, I read Gramsci’s notebooks from prison; those were fine, but a little too carceral for my airy disposition. Mark sat me down with the foundational texts more relevant to my lived experience, as they say. Or at least the experience I hoped to live. The canonical texts of male fashion, and I urge them upon any aspiring dandy, are Dressing the Man, by Alan Flusser, and True Style, by G. Bruce Boyer (that name alone deserves a cummerbund). I would also slip in an interesting national study, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, by the well-dressed intellectual W. David Marx, whom I would meet in Tokyo soon enough. Like the diligent student I had rarely been before, I took copious notes: American look, dart, London shrunk, natural shoulder, weft, warp. I have worn clothes all my life but never known a single thing about them. It was like not knowing the difference between freshly caught tilefish and farm-bred tilapia; each fills your stomach, but only one tastes good.

Formal male fashion traces back to two personalities: Beau Brummell, the sharp-witted proto-dandy of the early 19th century without whom the modern suit would be unthinkable (and who reportedly spent five hours a day getting dressed), and Edward VIII, the Nazi admirer and short-term king better known as the Duke of Windsor. These two insufferable assholes are mostly responsible for how men dress today. “With Brummell,” Flusser notes, “male style became a matter of impeccable fit and cut, exquisite detail, and immaculate cleanliness.” Before Brummell, the aristocracy dressed in rich, smelly materials; after, styles were adapted from military uniforms—think of the broad shoulders of a British pinstripe suit, for example. The duke took Brummell’s simplicity and “ran to Baroque elaboration,” Boyer wrote. “District checks, windowpane plaids, bold stripes, and tartans were his true métier.”

In the battle between the 19th-century dandy’s stark simplicity and the duke’s playful elaborations, I find myself choosing the former. My personality is colorful enough without tartans; let the suit merely contain it. Whatever the duke’s “district check” is, I will leave it uncashed.

Yamamoto-San Arrives

On May 24 of the fateful year 2024, a plane from Tokyo landed in New York City, carrying one of the most meticulously attired men in existence. His name is Yuhei Yamamoto, and he is the preeminent representative of Ivy style, that mode of dress that Americans appreciate yet only the Japanese fully understand.

The British suit, in all its City of London severity, morphed into different shapes around the world. The Italians made particularly interesting work of it. The Milanese suit was the most British-like, but as you traveled farther down the boot to Florence, Rome, and Naples, the tailors became more freehanded; the colors and fit became jauntier and more Mediterranean, more appreciative of bodies defined by crooked lines and curves and exploded by carbohydrates. Meanwhile, in America, as always, we went to work. The suit became a uniform that stressed the commonality and goodness of Protestant labor and church attendance without any further embellishments. It came to be known as the “sack suit.” In the 1950s, Brooks Brothers furthered this concept with an almost subversively casual look: a jacket with natural-width shoulders that hung straight from the body, and plain-front trousers. This, along with other American touches, such as denim, became the basis for Ivy-style clothes that the Japanese of the ’60s made into a national obsession, and that culminated in a wholly different approach to workwear, office wear, and leisure wear. Today, you can’t go into a Uniqlo without seeing the aftereffects of Japanese experimentation with and perfection of our “Work hard, pray hard” wardrobe ethos.

I met Yamamoto-san at the Upper East Side branch of Mark Cho’s Armoury empire. The moment I first saw him, I was scared. No one could be this well-dressed. No one could be so secure in a tan three-piece seersucker suit that didn’t so much hang from his broad shoulders as hover around them in expectation. No one’s brown silk tie could so well match his brown polka-dot pocket square and the thick wedge of only slightly graying hair floating above his perfectly chiseled face. This man was going to make a suit for me? I was not worthy.

Yamamoto-san examined me briefly and said, “Sack suit.”

The author’s chest is expertly measured by the master tailor Yuhei Yamamoto at the Upper East Side location of the Armoury. (Peter Fisher for The Atlantic)

The diagnosis stung at first. I was already aware of the provenance of the sack suit, which had clothed men up and down the very avenue (Madison) right outside Mark’s store for almost a century. Was I not more than an Excel jockey or a finance bro whose oppressive job had him ready to be put into a sack? Were my curves, at least the double trouble posed by my tatas (true, they had shrunk and mellowed with age), not worthy of something with a little bit more Florentine flair, if not full-on Neapolitan decadence?

“Sack suit,” Yamamoto-san repeated. He then explained through a translator that I was, in his eyes, “full of character.” I had heard this sentiment before, and not always in the form of a compliment, but wanted elaboration. “You’re a character,” he said. “You’re an authentic New Yorker. You transcend fashionable suits. As an authentic New Yorker, you need a sack suit.”

He and Mark began to talk about the master plan for my body. Yamamoto-san would make a drape-cut suit that would emphasize my slimness, and “flatter” my chest. The pants would accentuate my legs while making me look taller than 5 foot 5 (and a half).

“You can hide a multitude of sins with a good suit,” Mark said. The Calvinist inside me blanched.

For the first time in my life, I felt nonphysician, nonlover hands all over me—measuring, prodding, taking stock. The thousands of dollars being spent on this project were not just creating a garment; they were affording me a new level of care and involvement. It was the sartorial version of having a concierge doctor. “At the fitting stage,” Mark said, “you’ll feel like a woman getting haute couture. Why should women have all the fun?”

Yes, I thought. Why should they? We retired to the Armoury’s garden to smoke half a dozen short Davidoff cigars and discuss matters some more. “Clothing is a visual language,” Mark said. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?”

I puffed on my cigar, feeling seen. “Your head has to sit in a certain way on your frame,” Mark said. I pictured my head above the suit, like the dot at the top of an inverted exclamation point. The suit, according to Mark, would focus attention on my head, which was definitely where I wanted the attention to fall. After mastering English in Hebrew day school and social democracy at Oberlin, I had always made the right sounds with my head. (“I want to make a suit that accentuates my client’s character,” Yamamoto-san had told me. “I don’t want a suit that speaks more than the character.”)

“The best body type for a suit,” Mark went on, “is one that is slightly unathletic and also stoops slightly so that it hangs better.” That’s me! I thought, shocked that what I’d considered a debility had turned out to be a strength. “Yamamoto-san will make a softer, rounder, more natural shoulder,” Mark continued. “He will cut closer to the hips. You don’t want a pumpkin shape.”

“Most certainly not,” I said.

Back inside, Yamamoto-san had set the music system to his beloved Chuck Berry and had spread out ancient Esquire and GQ magazines. “I will make you a suit from the golden age of American style,” the tailor was saying. “I will make your legs even more beautiful.” We were looking at intimidating books of fabric swatches. I had signaled that I wanted the suit to be ready for nights of leisure as well as labor; drunken dinners at Frenchette as well as university readings and television appearances. This led us to the darker side of the color spectrum, until we settled on midnight blue. “Six-ply is more durable, and it travels well,” Mark was saying. “There’s more return. See how it bounces back more quickly? Fewer wrinkles.”

That all sounded great, but I was both intrigued and confused. What the hell is “six-ply”? How is yarn even made? Mark invited me to attend a fabric fair in Milan in July, then to journey to the nearby fabric mill, where the materials for my suit would be prepared. Next, we would fly to Hong Kong to have the appropriate shirts made by the fine shirtmaker Ascot Chang, and on to Tokyo for a second fitting with Yamamoto-san, as well as a fitting for a pair of shoes at the atelier of the master shoemaker Yohei Fukuda.

“Sure,” I said.

Somewhere in the heavens, my Calvinist God was preparing his lightning bolts.

The Anticipation Grows

There are many days between May and July. How many exactly I cannot tell you, as I am not a mathematician, but definitely too many when you’re waiting for a series of garments to change your life.

In the meantime, Mark threw a black-tie party to celebrate 10 years of the Armoury in New York, and I put on my J.Crew tuxedo, hoping no one would sneer at its humble pedigree. The party was sponsored by Campari, and I was soon coasting on boulevardiers and chatting with a gaggle of short menswear nerds and the attractive women who loved them. As with most Midtown parties, the mix had its share of financiers, but also included war-crimes prosecutors and museum executives. “Are you in fashion?” I overheard one attendee asking another. “No, I’m a Marxist.” (And, I later found out, an architect.)

[From the June 2009 issue: Fashion in dark times]

Alex Seo, a Korean American man dressed stunningly in a white double-breasted, peak-lapel tuxedo jacket, told me that when his grandfather, an academic, had landed in the Midwest from Korea many years ago without a proper outfit, the man who’d sponsored him had said, “Every professor should have a tweed jacket,” and then handed him his own. The story reminded me of the clothing drive that was started for me at my yeshiva, although this tale had a kinder, more midwestern ending (Alex’s father and his Armoury suit were also at the party). Looking around the room and talking to people, I realized just how many of us were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. The need for a fine suit became obvious. It was the final certificate of naturalization.

Milan and Beyond

I tried to take my mind off my desperate need for bespoke clothing. A conference brought me to Tbilisi, Georgia, and then I tooled around Istanbul, Rome, and Lucca for a bit. Finally, the fabric fair arrived, and, accompanied by my old friend, the stylish Tuscan resident, art historian, and translator Shilpa Prasad, I traveled to Milan, where Mark was waiting for us.

“We’re starting way upstream,” Mark told me, meaning that we were going deep into the nitty-gritty of how a suit is made. Amid the city’s heartless July humidity, he took us to a neoclassical palazzo, where Dormeuil, a family-run French maker of high-end fabrics, presented us with endless espresso and samples. I wasn’t here to shop, just to learn what was possible.

Testing crease-resistant fabric at Vitale Barberis Canonico, the oldest fabric mill in Italy (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

What followed was an impressive display of discernment. Mark and his colleague Jan would feel the square of a fabric swatch, then scrunch it up and watch as it regained its composure. “Fabric drives our collection,” Mark said. “For Hong Kong, this is good winter fabric,” he said of one sample. Because Hong Kong represents a large portion of his business, he is very attuned to that part of his clientele. “This one’s too hairy,” he said of another. “Hong Kong people don’t like things that are hairy.” Most people don’t, I thought, sadly.

Shilpa was amazed by how Mark and Jan knew which samples they would buy from just a cursory feel. “It’s like muscle memory,” Jan told her.

“We’ll take four meters,” Mark told the fabric salesman, and the barcode adjoining one swatch was zapped. The price for this particular fabric, which would become a three-piece suit for another client, was about 68 euros a meter. Shilpa lovingly stroked cloth flecked with gold that clocked in at 380 euros a meter, and visualized the shawl that could be made from it.

Mark explained that some fabrics are better for business suits, others for leisure suits. As an example of the former, he showed me the kind of slightly shiny wool-and-mohair blend that could have been worn by members of the Rat Pack. The fabric for my suit should bridge the gap, Mark said. It should be both beautiful and travel-resistant. “More texture, less sheen.”

The Milano Unica fair took place in a typical soulless convention center on the city’s edge. The booths where the vendors had set up shop were grouped by the type of goods they were hawking: Shirt Avenue, for example. The sellers we visited each gave us a fine cup of espresso and sometimes even a little chocolate, so that by the time I left the fair, I was orbiting Neptune.

We stopped by the esteemed Somerset cloth maker Fox Brothers, which produced the fabric that once draped Winston Churchill and Cary Grant. They favor undyed sheep’s wool and are known for their wool flannel, the kind that was used to make Fred Astaire’s trousers. The clothes made from their fabrics, one trench coat in particular, were gorgeous, but I would have needed to buy a Land Rover to complete the look.

Next we headed down the “street” to the booth for Vitale Barberis Canonico, the mill tasked with producing the fabric for my suit. After we had another coffee, the attractive representatives of the brand presented us with bolts of cloth to feel. “This reminds me of going to sari shops in Bombay,” Shilpa said as we felt our way through the sensuous wares, gasping in delight. I was reminded of Mark’s quip: “Why should women have all the fun?”

A sample of the fabric that would be used for my suit was finally presented to me—the 21 Micron. I was told that the mill’s 21 Micron is made from the wool of Argentinian and Uruguayan sheep that live high in the mountains. Regular, less important sheep are subjected to the cruelty of mulesing, where strips of wool-bearing skin are removed from around their ass, to prevent the parasitic infection of fly larvae. My sheep were not subjected to such horrors. “They are happy sheep,” one dapper representative told me with a wolfish smile.

Despite its South American origins, the fabric had a heavy British solidity. I crumpled it up in my fist as I had seen Mark and Jan do, and when I let go, the fabric opened like a flower. “21 Micron is the more exclusive fabric,” the mill’s representative told me. “It is breathable, high-twisted yarn; it will not wrinkle.” Unlike most suits, mine would be made of six-ply yarn. The fabric’s weight, exclusivity, sturdiness, and expense came from the fact that there was simply more of it.

“Six-ply is for the brave,” the dapper man assured me, a sentence I did not understand, but cherished nonetheless.

“Your suit will be business luxury,” Mark told me. “You can wear it into the ground.”

I stared into the fabric, which looked as inky blue as the eternity I hope to fall into after I expire, many fathoms deeper than the Baltic Sea by which I was born. Soon, I thought, this magical fabric will cover me from my ankles to my neck. And then, maybe, I will be another person.

The author is confronted with endless amounts of wool at Vitale Barberis Canonico. (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

The next day, Mark and I traveled west of Milan, past rice fields and solar-power farms and shirtless men yawning on balconies, to a village in the Biella region of Piedmont, where Vitale Barberis Canonico is based. The mill’s waiting room was filled with volumes that had titles such as I Am Dandy, and the magazines Monsieur and The One: Yacht & Design. Yachtless and without a French appellation, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. The executive offices surrounded a lovely Japanese garden, and as we began our tour, the members of a visiting group of fabric buyers from Taiwan, China, and Japan shyly snuck photos of Mark.

First mentioned in documents in 1663, Vitale Barberis Canonico is truly canonical, the oldest fabric mill in Italy. Our tour guides explained that the water in the Biella region has a very low concentration of minerals, making it soft, unlike the harsh water in other parts of Europe. This adds an extra softness to the fabric, much as pizza crust in Naples would be unimaginable without the city’s acqua. I touched a clump of Australian wool, and noted how superior my South American sheep was to its antipodean cousin. The seven steps for making wool fabric were explained: washing, gilling (aligning the wool fibers and removing short strands), spinning, dyeing, warping, weaving, and finishing. Giant machines are dedicated to these tasks, and they run all day, mostly without human intervention. The weaving, in which the weft, the horizontal structure, is inserted into the fabric’s vertical structure, the warp, is conducted in the world’s quietest weaving room. Touching the yarn as it was being spun by a machine was like strumming a gently weeping guitar. I was told that my six-ply yarn was the strongest that Vitale Barberis Canonico produced, and that it had been worsted to eliminate some of its hairiness (Hong Kong readers, rejoice). Finally, this exemplary fabric had been put into a massive machine called the Dolphin 1200, which finishes the fabric and prevents it from shrinking.

The author snuggling with some alarmingly soft wool at the Vitale Barberis Canonico mill (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

In the mill’s archives, we examined order books dating back to 1846, as well as a photo of King Charles III and his fun-loving wife, the Queen Consort, who both appear to be fans of the brand. I saw an advertisement for my fabric, which featured a drawing of sheep standing on a road, next to a man leaning against a sports car. A sign behind him pointed to the ruta del fin del mundo, “the route to the end of the world.” The tagline read: “21 Micron is the final destination of a long journey in search of a family of cloths of the highest quality that guarantee unparalleled strength and crease resistance.”

Is this it? I thought. Has my long sartorial journey finally come to an end?

Mom Posture

But my journey had only begun.

On the way to Asia, I watched one of Wim Wenders’s latest films, Perfect Days, and was struck with the teariness that often hits at 30,000 feet. The film follows an older toilet cleaner in Tokyo, exulting in the care with which he performs his task, the way he makes his work anything but menial. The toilet cleaner’s devotion reminded me of something Mark had said about how a true craftsman focuses on just one item, asking himself constantly, Is this as good as it can be?

In Hong Kong, Mark brought his obsession with individual crafts to a 100-year-old building off Queen’s Road Central, known as the Pedder Building. On the fifth floor, a 6,000-square-foot space called the Pedder Arcade has a distinctly Wong Kar-wai feel, punctuated by broad arches and spinning overhead fans. The Armoury may be the Pedder Arcade’s flagship store, but it is just one part of a lifestyle hub for the intelligent moneyed class, where you can buy a signed first-edition set of John le Carré’s Karla Trilogy for about $7,000. Mark himself works out of a space called “The Study,” where people feel free to drop in and smoke a cigar—some of the world’s best cigars are sold out of an anteroom, with the more intense aged Cuban variants smelling, according to Mark, “as good as God’s armpit.”

Mark is Malaysian Chinese by heritage, but grew up in London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles and speaks perfect American English, though he will occasionally break a word like forgotten into two, adding to his charm. He got his bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown and started out in finance. We are similar in that neither of our fathers was perfectly happy with the career we ultimately chose: wordsmithing and clothes selling. In Milan, I had asked Mark how he’d resolved things with his father. “He died,” Mark said.

At the Ascot Chang factory, in Hong Kong, sewers and cutters produce about 45 meticulously made shirts a day. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

In the island’s oppressive heat, Mark and I strolled over to a neighboring mall, where Ascot Chang, the renowned maker of shirts and suits, has one of its stores. Justin Chang, the grandson of the founder—the family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953—greeted us and pulled out rolls of fabric (the store has more than 7,000 variations).

I was to have four shirts made to complement my suit. Justin and Mark talked over each other as I pawed at the crisp fabrics.

We chose four fabrics for the different shirts: a spread-collar dress shirt made in a fine cotton piqué, a traditional white oxford button-down, a vintage-1970s cotton shirt with blue stripes, and my favorite, a chambray shirt with a button-down collar whose uneven yarn gave it a cool and casual look. I reveled in the by-now familiar, almost therapeutic feel of several men pressing measuring tape against my shoulders, chest, and arms. Because I am a watch aficionado, Mark requested that the diameter of the left cuff be slightly larger to expose my timepieces. The formal shirt must not have a pocket, he said, but the easygoing chambray could have a pocket with a button on it. “What does this button convey?” I asked Mark, trying to master all the rules.

“It conveys, I have a button on my shirt.”

The author visiting Ascot Chang in Hong Kong to select fabric and be fitted for four bespoke shirts (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

One of the shirts had to be rushed for my second fitting with Yamamoto-san in Tokyo in a mere two days. Back at the Pedder Arcade, as I tried on a pair of artisanal-denim jeans, Mark told me that this was a particularly difficult task for Ascot Chang, because of my body’s many quirks. “There’s a large drop to your right shoulder,” Mark said. “It makes it difficult to dial in.”

I also apparently have something called “rounded shoulders,” which results from a forward head position and a forward pelvic tilt. When I looked up my diagnosis online, I discovered that it is also called “mom posture,” a malady that usually afflicts mothers, who have to bend down to take care of their children. I wanted to congratulate myself on my devotion as a parent, but realized that my mom posture must result from a lifetime of slouching my shoulders to hide my breasts and, possibly, from constantly nursing my other child, my phone, while walking.

As I modeled the artisanal denim, Mark and I discovered something else: I have no ass. This is why all my pants fall off me.

“No,” I said, immediately predicting what Mark would prescribe. “I can’t. It’s too Wall Street, the movie.”

“Suspenders,” he said.

The next day, we left the fancy Central district and crossed the bay for the industrial hum of Kowloon East, to see the shirt that was being rushed for our Tokyo departure. In the warm, bright light of the factory, a host of workers was making my chambray shirt. I smiled sheepishly at the men and women toiling overtime to create the special differing armholes that would compensate for my dropped shoulder. Thirty-eight workers at the Ascot Chang factory produce about 45 shirts a day. The cloth cutters are mostly men; the sewers, who do the more complex engineering, such as the cuffs and collars, are mostly women.

The author touring the Ascot Chang factory. The Chang family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

The next morning, the chambray shirt was ready. I tried on my first-ever bespoke garment with trepidation. In the wooden glow of the Ascot Chang shop, I witnessed my first transformation. This was not the suit, but it was the pre-suit, an exquisite blue thing with gleaming charcoal mother-of-pearl buttons and, as I was told by Mark, “quite a strong collar for someone your size.”

But for the first time in my life, the fit was right. The fit was good. The fit was perfect. Through the industry of a thoughtful team of cutters and sewers on the edge of Asia, I had finally reached a détente with my body. I looked at myself in the mirror and there I was: a well-dressed middle-aged man.

Yamamoto-San Returns

Armed with one Ascot Chang shirt, with three more on the way, we left Hong Kong for Tokyo for the final steps of the bespoke journey—the second fitting with Yamamoto-san and a shoe fitting with Yohei Fukuda, “arguably the best shoe money can buy,” according to Mark.

Tokyo is the city for craftspeople, and I was happy to watch Mark buzz around like a hummingbird, searching for perfect accoutrements for his clients. We visited the Ginza branch of Atelier Jean Rousseau, where men in white lab coats perfected a watch strap for a customer’s Patek Philippe Ellipse. “Do you have a real rose-gold stitch?” Mark asked. “I know they cost a lot of money.”

We cabbed across Ginza to Ortus, a maker of elite bags from materials including hippo, elephant, and seal, where Mark had commissioned a briefcase for an underemployed man of means that contained nothing but a Monopoly set (the Hong Kong–tram edition, naturally, the pieces made in silver). “Does he go around Hong Kong playing Monopoly with his friends?” I asked.

“Well, he’s hoping this will make him some friends,” Mark said.

That evening I had dinner with W. David Marx, the author of the aforementioned Ametora. David is a 6-foot-4 southern WASP-Catholic-Jew hybrid, who also counts Yamamoto-san as a tailor. “It makes you look like an adult,” he told me of the suit I would soon wear. “Which is not what people want to look like anymore.”

The next morning, I climbed the steps to the second floor of Yamamoto-san’s atelier, Tailor Caid, in the hip Shibuya section of Tokyo. Welcome to Caid modern tailoring proclaimed a sign next to a silhouette of a man in a fedora toting a briefcase down an imaginary Madison Avenue. We are not fashion snobs, the sign continued, but we know a few simple rules.

Inside, Yamamoto-san was resplendent in another seersucker suit, this one light blue, a dark-blue pocket square providing contrast. A record player was spinning not just Ella Fitzgerald, but a rare Japanese edition of her work titled Ella and Nice Guys. A Harvard pennant hung in the bathroom. There were old, yellowing copies of the Japanese magazines that had made Ivy style synonymous with Japan, with titles such as Popeye and Hot-Dog Press and headlines including “We Are Real IVY Leaguers.” And, finally, I was confronted with the work in progress, draped over a wooden hanger: my midnight-blue suit held together with white basting thread.

I relieved myself beneath the Harvard pennant and, with shaking hands, put on the suit. At this stage in the bespoke process, the basting thread disfigured the jacket, dividing it into quadrants, and the buttons were nothing but stickers. But I could begin to imagine the wonder that the suit would become. The heavy six-ply fabric felt primordially satisfying, like a light suit of armor, but one that managed to cling to my body with near perfection. This second fitting would remove the near.

“There is an extended shoulder, but no pad,” Yamamoto-san explained through a translator, negating the horrors of the shoulder-pad-stricken ’80s, but also managing to support my dropped right shoulder. “There is an empty space in the chest,” Yamamoto-san pointed out. Because I stoop so profoundly, he had used the draping technique to, in Mark’s words, “give your chest a little more volume.” The jacket cleverly made my chimichangas all but invisible, while ironically providing them with new space to roam.

“Damn, this is dramatic,” the usually unflappable Mark said.

“The way you wear this,” Yamamoto-san said, “it looks like ’50s France, or Alain Delon in the ’60s.”

We talked about areas that needed improvement. I lifted my arms and turned around. “What do we do with Gary’s behind?” Mark asked as the two men searched for my ass. “Apparently you lost some butt since the first fitting.”

“He should wear his pants as snug as possible,” Yamamoto-san said. The dreaded word suspenders came up again. “When the pants are above the belly button, everything is in line.”

“He could do some squats,” Mark said, an opinion I would not dignify with a response.

We chose a beautiful turquoise lining to contrast with the outer sobriety of the suit, and also navy buttons made out of nuts. “Into each life, some rain must fall,” Ella crooned on the record player, but I was hardly listening to her.

The author with Mark Cho, the owner of the Armoury ( left), and Yamamoto-san (middle), enjoying a drink at Martiny’s bar, in New York City (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

To celebrate the suit, we retired to the tailor’s favorite bar, Le Zinc, a few minutes’ walk from his atelier. Yamamoto-san is the type of Japanese man who surrounds himself with so much perfection that it would be interesting to take him someplace awful, like Hudson Yards or Westfield Garden State Plaza. Le Zinc felt like it had floated in from a former America, too spare and beautiful to provoke nostalgia, only awe. My martini was so excellent, I struggled not to cry. “There’s a sentiment in Japan,” my tailor said. “We don’t want to come to a bar without being well-dressed. There is a sentimentalization of Western culture.”

“A Western culture that barely exists,” I said.

A few martinis and highballs into our celebration, Yamamoto-san began to talk at length. He’d idolized America since he was a child. He listened to jazz in elementary school and saw the men wearing suits, and he couldn’t wait to wear a suit as well. He fell in love with the show Bewitched, in which an ad executive named Darrin (originally played by Dick York) was married to a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery)—but more important for Yamamoto-san, Darrin worked on Madison Avenue and wore fabulous suits.

I have to pause this story for a minute. Back in Queens, when I was wearing my Robin the Boy Wonder T-shirts and watching television on my grandmother’s failing 1960s Zenith set, Bewitched had managed to bewitch me as well. My nearly pubescent eyes lightly male-gazed Samantha, but I was equally in love with Darrin and his stark but perfect suits and ties. Though separated by a continent and an ocean, the young Yamamoto-san and I had entertained the same ideas of male fashion.

“A lot of young people today are anti-aging,” he continued. “They want their clothes to show their youth. I like the idea of aging, the kind of aging you see in vintage furniture or a vintage watch. Aging is beautiful. When I see a 70-year-old man in Manhattan picking up after a dog while wearing a suit, I applaud.”

We continued our discussion over bottles of Barolo at his favorite restaurant, which featured Lucchese cuisine. I had been to the actual Lucca just a month earlier, but the Japanese version of the food, like my Ivy-style suit in progress, seemed to both canonize and elevate its inspiration. If this part reads like a love letter to Japan and its pasta makers and toilet cleaners, I assure you it is.

According to ancient Japanese custom, a night of karaoke followed, about which I recall only singing Suzanne Vega’s child-abuse classic “Luka,” to which my audience nodded politely. In the middle of the night, I tripped over the complicated stairs of my hotel suite and almost broke my nose. But I felt fine.

The Final Touch

The next day would see the last piece of my wardrobe fall into place. The back-order list for Yohei Fukuda’s shoes is so long, the atelier has stopped accepting bespoke-shoe orders from new clients. For the time being, it is near-impossible to get his shoes, so please allow me to enjoy mine by myself. Fukuda-san and his assistants make only eight pairs a month, and each takes 130 to 140 hours of work. The soles are stitched by hand, which makes them a lot more flexible. Much like Yamamoto-san, who interned with a Boston tailor, Fukuda-san attended two years of “shoe college” in Northamptonshire, England, and then worked his way up from repairing soles to creating leather masterpieces in his atelier, by Tokyo’s Olympic stadium.

Fukuda-san is perfectly bald, with a luxuriant mustache. His work has been described as “kind of British,” which means he references and perfects traditional British shoes with the same brio as my tailor’s approach to Ivy style. The British did fine; Yohei Fukuda does better.

The atelier of the shoemaker Yohei Fukuda, in Tokyo (An Rong Xu for The Atlantic)

Mark has this theory that bespoke oxfords are not really worth the money, because many fine examples can be found off the rack. But he believes in bespoke loafers. So now is the time to confess another of my body’s deficiencies: One of my legs happens to be longer than the other. Since I was a child, I’ve had to wear inserts in my shoes to account for this discrepancy, and so an easygoing loafer, the pride of America’s aristocratic New England class, is sadly not for me.

We surveyed the gleaming shoes arrayed along the length of Fukuda-san’s atelier, like icons in a church. “Derby shoes,” Mark suggested. I looked over a couple. They were not quite as formal as oxfords, nor as floppy as loafers. Unlike oxfords, they had an open-laced construction that would comfort my calloused piggies during my daily six-mile walks around the countryside.

My final row of samples to examine was rolled out, a collection of hides that would allow us to choose a color. “For derbies, the best place to start is the darkest brown,” Mark suggested. I remembered Boyer writing in True Style about how the Italians had taught the world not to be afraid of mixing brown shoes with blue suits.

“Coffee,” Fukuda-san suggested, as we flipped through the hides.

“Maroon,” Mark offered.

“Brown pepper!” I said, as I ran my hands across a suede that seemed spicier, more intense, more brown than the others. Fukuda-san measured and traced every part of my foot, as we discussed adding a big rubber heel for better traction, and a steel toe. As with Yamamoto-san’s suit, my comfort and pleasure would be the biggest factors here; there would be no room for ostentation. No one must know that these shoes cost $3,000, I thought. No one.

My derbies would be lined with forest green to remind me of the forests behind my dacha. “Would you like your shoes monogrammed?” Fukuda-san asked. I was tempted to allow this to happen, but my Oberlin education still had some sway. My shoes remain anonymous.

Yamamoto-San 3: The Transformation

Just over two months later, Yamamoto-san arrived back in New York with my suit. My shoes had emigrated through different channels.

It was November 7, two days after an important American election. I was trying to practice self-care. I couldn’t make my adopted country fall out of love with fascism, but at least I could enjoy my new shoes. Also, I suspected that our new leader would cut my taxes as he had in the past, shuffling money from his supporters into my piggy bank. As an immigrant who had moved from one failed superpower to another, I had learned to take my pleasures wherever I could.

Mark educates the author on how to tie an Old Bertie knot during his final fitting at the Armoury. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

On the night of my suit’s unveiling, Mark threw yet another party at the Armoury’s Upper East Side location. The evening was warm, almost summery. Before I was ready to put on my suit, Yamamoto-san showed me how to steam-iron it with his beloved Panasonic travel iron. The Yohei Fukuda shoes were presented to me in a beautiful blond-wood box. “There’s no nail in that box,” one of the Armoury’s salesmen said. “Like a Jewish coffin.”

But as I put on the suit, I felt less Jewish than distinctly Christian, Episcopalian if not Calvinist; in any case, born again. I walked out of the changing room and looked into a mirror. I was contained by midnight blue, my shoulders weighed down with six-ply pleasure, each of my feet covered by what felt like the product of a heavily personalized cow.

“Yokatta! ” Yamamoto-san cried—roughly, “Thank goodness!”

“Yokatta,” Mark said, smiling.

The author stroking the iridescent lining of his suit during his final fitting (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

While I stood there yammering my gratitude, I noticed that despite the tailor’s best efforts, my pants were still sliding off the ghost of my ass. “I also have no tuchus,” the Armoury salesman who’d likened my shoebox to a Jewish coffin explained. “There’s no shelf on our bodies.”

To compensate, I was strapped into a pair of suspenders, and Mark lovingly tied a polka-dot tie around my neck in an Old Bertie knot. Even though I was at least a decade older than he was, I had started to think of Mark as my parent. He demonstrated how using a Bertie knot instead of the usual four-in-hand would benefit a shorter man like me by ending my tie at the waist, not the groin, where our returning president likes his. He thrust his index finger below the knot of my tie and explained that he was making a dimple.

“Braces and polka dots, matching, wow!” Yamamoto-san said in English. He motioned to my nearly transparent Selima Optique frames. “And with glasses color, very nice!”

We’d had many discussions about whether my pants would come with buttons instead of a zipper, to avoid the dreaded “pants tent.” But after I had demonstrated to him my love of martinis and the many bathroom visits they inspire, Yamamoto-san had relented with a zipper.

I left the fitting room and walked out into the crucible of menswear society. Although my suit felt Episcopalian, men gathered around me as if I were a bar mitzvah at the bimah. They touched the fabric; they touched my shoulders; they touched my arms and my collar. They followed me out into the Armoury’s well-lit backyard.

“It looks like it was painted on you,” one man said.

“The back is so clean.”

“Your shoulders slope, and this just hugs them.”

“The neck hugs the collar with no wrinkle.”

“The stitching adds texture and visual interest.”

“The weight helps it hang, the drape.”

“That’s a good lapel length.”

“You’re shaming us all tonight.”

The author strolling through New York with his newfound self-esteem (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

I opened up my suit, shyly and then proudly, to let folks touch the iridescent lining within. Is this what it was like to be loved in this country? Yamamoto-san took me aside and told me that I must wear my suit all the time, and wear it casually, not just for special occasions. The suit was a part of me now. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?” Mark had once asked. Well, now we had divined it.

“If this becomes just for special occasions, I haven’t done my job,” Yamamoto-san said.

I promised him that I would never abandon the suit. Every week, I would find a use for it.

And I have kept my promise. I wear my suit regularly and with joy. I can do the Bertie knot in my sleep now. The different Ascot Chang shirts combine with either the polka-dot tie or its less formal counterpart, a silk foulard tie, to create different personalities. “You look like a crooner from the ’50s,” my wife, Esther, said of one combination. “You look like an English deacon,” she said of another.

“Bitch! You’re ready for anything now!” Shilpa wrote from Tuscany.

“I feel like you’re walking differently than you usually do,” my friend Sarah remarked. “You’re strutting a little.”

Only my 11-year-old son, Johnny, was unimpressed. “I wear a less comfortable version of that every single day,” he told me, pulling at the collar of his school uniform.

I began to wear my suit to all my meals and to take it into consideration when I ordered. What would my suit like to eat? I would ask. The suit wanted shrimp cocktail. Even after the noon hour, the suit wanted steak and eggs with Tabasco sauce and a Bloody Mary. I traveled with my suit to give a reading at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit was a perfect companion. It sprang out of my suitcase like a golden retriever, with not even the afterthought of a crease on it.

My head floating above the perfect triangle effectuated by my lapels, I gave one of the best readings of my life. Why shouldn’t I? I had always been content with my mind, but now I loved my body. It was no longer an object of discomfort and derision. I loved the small flickering muscles beneath my chest. I loved the roundness of my posture, my settled state. Like a character out of a James Salter novel, I loved my physique, my physicality. And I loved myself.

We did a photo shoot at Martiny’s, a Japanese-style cocktail bar on 17th Street. Yamamoto-san insisted that he would help supervise. He parted the tie for me as I lay on a couch to make me look more at ease, more Ivy style. He made sure that only half of the watch I had chosen for the shoot, a gilt-dial 1963 Rolex Explorer, would flash from beneath my cuff.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Afterward, Mark and I were walking through Tribeca past an immensely popular French bistro. It was the weekend, a prime dining hour; the place looked packed.

“Let’s get a table,” Mark said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. I mentioned several other restaurants down the street that might prove a better bet.

“Just go in and try,” Mark said. “I have to make a phone call.”

I approached the beautiful maître d’ alone, but instead of the usual sniveling noises I make in these situations, the excuses for not making a reservation, my understanding that I might have to wait for an hour or more for a table to open up, I stated forthrightly that my friend and I were in need of immediate sustenance.

A microsecond passed among myself, the maître d’, and my suit. A brief nod was issued. “Would you like the dining room or the bar?” she asked.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Behold My Suit!” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For months, thousands of protesters have marched through Tbilisi, Georgia, confronting masked police who have beaten and arrested hundreds. The demonstrations took off in November, when the ruling party halted talks to join the European Union. Georgians fear that their government is sidling up to Moscow and transforming the country into an authoritarian state.

The crisis threatens to overturn a decades-long effort by the United States and EU to preserve Georgian democracy, which has served as a bulwark against the Kremlin’s growing influence in the Black Sea region. Now the protesters stand between Vladimir Putin and a political victory that could accelerate his imperialist campaign throughout Eastern Europe.

Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Georgia has received more than $10 billion in development aid from the West, much of it bolstering the country’s democratic institutions. But Georgia’s path to democracy has never been straight. Abuses of power and electoral disputes have repeatedly undermined progress. Contested elections in October gave the Georgian Dream party commanding control of Parliament. By suspending talks to join the EU, the party quashed a goal that an overwhelming majority of Georgians supported. Protesters worry that the country’s current autocratic turn may become irreversible.

[Read: A wider war has already started in Europe]

Georgian Dream emerged in 2012 during a period of political turmoil. Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who had amassed his fortune in Russia, invested his considerable resources in establishing a political party to run against Georgia’s then-president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who faced allegations of corruption and political violence. He served as prime minister for a year and appointed his business associates to leadership positions. His party has remained in power ever since, steadily accruing control over the country’s judiciary, electoral commission, state broadcaster, and other TV stations. Today, Ivanishvili’s estimated wealth amounts to more than one-quarter of Georgia’s GDP. Georgian Dream’s ascent resembles those of other so-called hybrid regimes, which use the tools of democracy to subvert civic institutions and curtail freedoms while evading accountability.

Until recently, Georgian Dream backed EU accession. Along with opposition parties, it enshrined the goal in the constitution, and a year ago, the EU formalized Georgia as a candidate for membership. But in 2021, the party refused to adopt EU-mediated reforms that would have ensured judicial independence and other basic norms of democratic power-sharing. After Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Georgian Dream took a more explicitly anti-Western turn, adopting nationalist language that echoed Putin’s and playing up the threat of an unspecified “Global War Party” that aimed to drag Georgia into “a second front” against Russia. In May, it passed a law that designated Western-funded NGOs as “foreign agents” and imposed intrusive reporting requirements that many Georgians sense could wipe out the civic sector.

Five months later, Georgian Dream won 54 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections that observers have widely criticized. Exit polls suggested that the party had less support than the official results indicated, by a margin of 10 or more points. Demonstrations erupted in Tbilisi and haven’t stopped since.

Photograph by Ksenia Ivanova

Georgian protesters voice worries that their country might become a Russian vassal, like Belarus. Russian funds have poured into the country, particularly since the full-scale war in Ukraine and subsequent sanctions on Russia. The opposition leader Giorgi Gakharia, a former Georgian Dream prime minister, has accused the government of fostering a “grey zone” to help Russia, Iran, and China facilitate illicit trade and sidestep regulators. “With the Ukraine war, Russia needs ways to avoid sanctions,” he told me, “and the South Caucasus is ideal for this.” (Shortly after we met, two senior Georgian Dream officials, including an MP, physically attacked Gakharia, inflicting a concussion and a broken nose.)

The Kremlin already holds nearly 20 percent of Georgian territory, which it secured through a war in 2008, and is pushing to develop a new port in Russian-controlled Abkhazia. During the election campaign, Georgian Dream raised the idea of reintegrating these regions, which would be virtually impossible without close alignment with Russia. Some Georgians fear that a potential peace settlement in Ukraine might grant Russia greater influence in their country in exchange for Western security guarantees for Ukraine.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

A Kremlin-aligned Georgia would undermine the Eastern Partnership, an EU initiative that aims to spread democracy in the Black Sea region and strengthen its political, economic, and military relations with Europe. Of the six states involved in the initiative, Moscow has dominated Belarus, allied with Azerbaijan, invaded Ukraine, and interfered in a recent election in Moldova. If Georgia succumbs to the Kremlin, that leaves only Armenia, whose potential bid to join the EU will be severely complicated by the Russian influence that surrounds it.

The EU has condemned Georgia’s October election and withdrawn visa-free travel for party elites. It has also suspended aid, including 30 million euros it earlier committed for military reform. And the U.S. has imposed sanctions on key figures within the Georgian government, including Ivanishvili. But Georgia’s would-be autocrats appear to be undaunted. So far, police have avoided charges for beating demonstrators, while cultural figures and protesters face long prison sentences for minor infractions.

Many in the Georgian opposition, and some abroad, now look to outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili for leadership. To keep the opposition united and sustain the support of Western allies will require considerable diplomatic skill. Zourabichvili spent inauguration week in Washington to make her case to the new administration.

The nights in Tbilisi were already very cold when I visited in December. Now they are freezing. Still the streets are dense with protesters, and they are determined to stay.

“Georgian Dream has taken over everything, but all Georgians are gathering here,” one young demonstrator told me. “We will be here until the end.”