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Thomas Jefferson

Invading Canada Is Not Advisable

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › us-canada-relations-trump › 682046

When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada.

So I feel both morally compelled and professionally qualified to examine the Trump administration’s interesting but far from original idea of absorbing that country into the union.

There are, as Donald Trump and Don Corleone might put it, two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be if Canadians rose up en masse clamoring to join the United States. Even so, there would be awkwardness.

[Read: The angry Canadian]

Canada is slightly larger than America. That would mean that the “cherished 51st state,” as Trump calls it, would be lopsided in terms of territory. It would be 23 times larger than California, which would be fine for owning the libs, but it would also be 14 times larger than the Lone Star State, which would definitely cause some pursed lips and steely looks there. Messing with Texas is a bad idea.

The new state would be the largest in population too, with 40 million people—more than California by a hair, and considerably more than Texas, Florida, or New York. Its size would pose a whole bunch of problems for Trump: Canada is a much more left-wing country than the United States, and absorbing it could well revive the political fortunes of progressives. If its 10 provinces became 10 states instead of one, only three would probably vote for the GOP; the other seven would likely go for Democrats. That might mean adding six Republican senators and 14 Democrats. If Trump were impeached a third time, that might produce the supermajority required for conviction in the Senate.

But such political ramifications are purely academic considerations at the moment. Polling suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all Canadians cling to sovereignty. Having been denied the easy way of absorbing Canada, therefore, the United States might have to try the hard way, conquering the country and administering it as a territory until it is purged of Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever the Canadian equivalent of RINOs turns out to be.

Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, “You have been conquered into liberty,” an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants.

There were moments of brilliant leadership in this invasion, particularly in a daring autumn march through Maine to the very walls of Quebec. There was also a great deal of poltroonery and bungling. The Americans had three talented generals. The first, Richard Montgomery, got killed in the opening assault on Quebec. The second, John Thomas, died of smallpox, along with many of his men. Inoculation was possible, but, like today’s vaccine skeptics, many thought it a bad idea. You can visit the capacious cemetery for the victims on Île aux Noix, now Fort Lennox, Canada.

The third general, the most talented of the lot, was Benedict Arnold, who held the expedition together even after suffering a grievous leg wound. Eventually, however, he grew disgusted with a Congress rather less craven and incompetent than its contemporary successor and became a traitor, accepting a commission as a brigadier general in the British army and fighting against American forces.

We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is perhaps unfamiliar with the Battle of Chateaugay. The last three letters are, after all, gay, and as such, the battle has doubtless been expunged from Defense Department websites and databases, meeting the same fate as the Enola Gay. Still, it is instructive. An invading force of 2,600 American regulars encountered about 1,500 Canadian militia members, volunteers, and Mohawks under a Francophone colonel, Charles de Salaberry.  They were defeated and had to withdraw.

Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border.

Perhaps today’s Canadians are a flimsier lot. The Canadian armed forces are quite small (the army numbers only about 42,000, including reservists), although spirited and hardy. One should note with respect that 158 Canadians were killed fighting alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan. But even if the Canadian military were overcome after some initial bloody battles, what then?

Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum.

[Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally]

Parenthetically, there remains the problem of the First Nations (as the Canadians refer to them), whom they treated somewhat less badly than Americans treated Native Americans (as we refer to them). There are about 50,000 Mohawks straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and they are fearless, which is why you will find them building skyscrapers at terrifying heights above the street. As members of what used to be the Iroquois Confederacy, they were ferocious warriors, and they retain a martial tradition. It is sobering to consider that they may think, with reason, that we are the illegal immigrants who have ruined the country, and therefore hold a grudge.

There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers.

Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau***. It could help avoid embarrassment.

The Lesson Trump Is Learning the Hard Way

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 03 › american-weakness-trade-history › 682065

The Founders knew that Americans, for better or worse, had an insatiable desire for overseas trade. “They are as aquatic as the tortoises and sea-fowl,” observed John Adams, “and the love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures, is a habit in them as unalterable as their natures.” As early as 1785 he foresaw that Americans would be compelled to form “connections with Europe, Asia, and Africa,” and he advised that “the sooner we form those connections into a judicious system, the better it will be for us and our children.” Thomas Jefferson would have preferred to cease all commerce with the rest of the world and rely on the simple virtues of the “yeoman farmer,” but he knew this was impossible. “Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce … and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum.” Even that much-caricatured “Jacksonian,” Andrew Jackson himself, as president never fired a shot in anger but negotiated more trade agreements with foreign powers than any of his predecessors.

The American love of trade made using the practice as a weapon against other nations difficult. When Jefferson forgot his own lesson and tried to embargo trade with Great Britain in 1807 in response to the British navy’s abuse of American merchants on the high seas, his efforts backfired, stirring talk of secession in the New England states that conducted most of that trade. It turned out to be easier to get Americans to support a shooting war with Great Britain than a trade war.

Donald Trump is now learning the hard way how vulnerable America is when it comes to trade wars. This is not because the United States doesn’t in theory hold the strongest hand. The American market is the most desired in the world, and any restriction on access to that market should hurt other countries more than it hurts the United States. The ratio of international trade to GDP for the U.S. is roughly 25 percent, compared with more than 60 percent on average for all other nations. In Germany, foreign trade tallies up to 90 percent of GDP. That ought to make the country vulnerable and give the United States leverage. In practice, however, Americans have proved time and again that they have a very low threshold of pain when it comes to trade wars. Jefferson was not wrong to believe that Britain depended heavily on American trade when he launched his embargo in 1807; what he did not anticipate was that his own citizens would cave before Britain did.

[Read: How Republicans learned to love high prices]

The problem is, or at least has been up until now, democracy, and, more specifically, electoral politics in a federal system where narrow, local interests can have broad national political impact. A trade dispute might harm only one sector of the economy, but if that sector happens to coincide with a crucial voting bloc, it can put the United States at a disadvantage in a contest with a nominally weaker power.

A good example of this came during World War I, before the United States had entered the war and Woodrow Wilson was trying to navigate his way through British blockades and German submarine attacks on transatlantic shipping while desperately trying to preserve American neutrality. The United States was far less reliant on international trade then; it was only 11 percent of GDP. But as Wilson learned, even damage to particular sectors of the economy could threaten political upheaval. Although his personal inclinations were pro-British, for instance, London’s threats to blockade cotton as contraband of war infuriated the Democrats’ key southern constituency. Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, recalled spending “more sleepless nights thinking about cotton” than about anything else during his time in office. The rest of his sleepless nights were spent worrying about finding markets for midwestern grain, much of which had been purchased by Germany and other European nations prior to the war. These specific sectors, because they involved states and regions essential to national political coalitions, had influence on American decision making that exceeded their overall importance to the American economy.  

[Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Trump must believe, as Jefferson did, that the world needs America more than America needs the world, and he may be right—in theory. The problem is that individual voting blocs mean more to him than carrying out a consistent trade war, as he has repeatedly demonstrated during both terms in office. In his first term, the damage done to farmers by his tariffs on imports was sufficiently threatening politically that he had to spend much of the money gained by the tariffs to compensate the farmers for their losses. His vacillations and emendations in his latest rounds of tariffs this year have been similarly motivated by his desire not to alienate Republican voters in particular states—northern-tier states that rely heavily on trade with Canada and automaking states that stand to lose badly from tariffs on auto parts, steel, and aluminum crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders. It is no accident that among the Europeans’ first retaliatory tariffs have been those against Harley-Davidson and American whiskey. Other nations may know their history better than Trump does and have figured out that tariffing sectors of the economy that hit Trump voters can have an impact beyond their dollar value. The United States is a nation split down the middle politically, so marginal voting groups can have a huge effect. This significantly vitiates the American advantage.

It would be one thing if Trump’s supporters were willing to suffer economic hardship in order to show their support for the MAGA way. As Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama put it, “There’s going to be some pain with tariffs,” but “no pain, no gain.” The problem for Trump is that, so far, as in the past, even his own voters don’t have much tolerance for pain.

Trump’s Own Declaration of Independence

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 03 › trumps-own-declaration-of-independence › 681944

Long live the king!

Down with the king!

President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.

Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.

But the president has also asked advisers in recent days about moving the Declaration of Independence into the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to describe the planning.

Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original document. Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building, in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession. The original is behind heavy glass in an oxygen-free, argon-filled case that can retract into the wall at night for security. Because of light damage to the faded animal-skin parchment, the room is kept dimly lit; restrictions have been placed on how often the doors can even be opened.

But to the relief of aides, subsequent discussions appear to have focused on the possibility of moving one of the historical copies of the document, not the original. “President Trump strongly believes that significant and historic documents that celebrate American history should be shared and put on display,” the White House spokesperson Steven Cheung told us in an email.

Displaying a copy would still enshrine history’s most famous written rejection of monarchy in the seat of American power. The document is reprinted in textbooks nationwide and is recognized the world over as a defiant stand against the corrupting dangers of absolute power. It declares equality among men to be a self-evident truth, asserts that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and offers a litany of grievances against a despotic ruler.

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads the 1776 repudiation of British King George III’s dominion over the American colonies. (Spokespeople for the National Archives declined to comment on Trump’s request and whether a Declaration display in the Oval Office is imminent. White House aides also declined to share the timing of when the document might arrive in its new West Wing home, if it is coming at all.)

Since returning to power, Trump has moved quickly to redesign his working space. He has announced plans to pave over the Rose Garden to make it more like the patio at his private Mar-a-Lago club, as well as easier to host events with women wearing heels. He has also revived planning for a new ballroom on the White House grounds. “It keeps my real-estate juices flowing,” Trump explained in a recent interview with The Spectator.

Golden trophies now line the Oval Office’s mantlepiece. Military flags adorned with campaign streamers have returned. And portraits of presidents past now climb the walls—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Gilded mirrors hang upon the recessed doors. A framed copy of his Georgia mug shot appears in the outside hallway. And the bright-red valet button, encased in a wooden box, is back on the desk.

In addition to the National Archives’ original Declaration, the government has in its possession other versions of the document. The collection includes drafts by Jefferson and copies of contemporaneous reprintings, known as broadsides, that were distributed among the colonies.

Alarmed by the deterioration of the original Declaration in the 1820s, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to create an engraving of it with the signatures appended. That version forms the basis of the document since reproduced in school history books—the one with which most Americans are familiar. Adams tasked Stone with engraving 200 copies—but in what passes for a mini 19th-century scandal, Stone made an extra facsimile to keep for himself, the documents dealer and expert Seth Kaller told us.

Many of those Stone copies of the document have now been lost; roughly 50 are known to survive, Kaller said. The White House already has in its archives at least one of the Stone printings. Kaller told us that one of his clients who had recently purchased a Stone facsimile was visiting the White House when President Barack Obama asked him whether he could help procure a Stone printing for the White House.

“The client called me, and I said, ‘I can’t—because, one, there aren’t any others on the market right now, and two, the White House already has one,’” Kaller told us. In 2014, Kaller visited the White House to view the Stone Declaration, which the curator displayed for him in one of the West Wing’s rooms. (The White House curator’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether the Stone copy still resides under its purview.)

It is unclear where Trump first got the idea to add a Declaration to the Oval Office’s decor. Since returning, Trump has shown interest in the planning for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the document’s signing. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order to create “Task Force 250,” a White House commission that will work with another congressionally formed commission to plan the festivities.

Trump and the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who owns four Stone engravings and is a historical-documents aficionado, also met privately at the White House last month, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump had decided weeks earlier to replace much of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Arts so that he could install himself as chair, replacing Rubenstein.

Previously, Rubenstein had worked with the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies to have a modern copy of the Stone Declaration, placed in a replica of a historic frame, displayed at U.S. embassies around the globe.

“Because the Declaration of Independence has—like the Stars and Stripes—become a symbol of the United States, and because the Stone copy of the Declaration is the most recognizable version of that historic document, I thought it would be appropriate to have a new copy of a Stone Declaration placed in each of the American embassies around the World,” Rubenstein wrote at the time in a booklet describing the history and importance of the Stone facsimiles. “My hope was that everyone who visited an American embassy would see not just our flags, but also this unique symbol of our country.” (Rubenstein did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kaller told us that he thinks moving the original document in its special enclosure to the Oval Office would likely cost millions of dollars. But a Stone printing would be far simpler to exhibit, requiring only getting “the lighting right in a display case,” he said. The reason Quincy Adams commissioned the Stone version, Kaller added, was in part for this very purpose.

And if Trump decides he wants it, he will likely get it—even without the powers of a king.

Why Silicon Valley Lost Its Patriotism

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › silicon-valley-has-lost-its-way › 681633

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.

The Other Fear of the Founders

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › founders-fear-of-oligarchy › 681650

The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant.

As a first step to protect against this sort of alliance, America’s republican political institutions rejected the built-in privileges of aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, wrote legislation that abolished primogeniture and entail—property laws inherited from monarchical and aristocratic England that advantaged “an aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” entrenching a sense of social and political privilege.

Similarly, Gouverneur Morris, the Founder who drafted the actual text of the Constitution, worried at the Constitutional Convention that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” Morris insisted that the “rich will strive to establish their dominion,” and even considered designing a Senate populated by the established and propertied to balance the more democratic and popular House. The two classes, he reasoned, reflected in two different institutions, would contain each other. Although the Constitution did not embrace institutional class divisions, it did formally prohibit the granting of titles of nobility as a hedge against rule by the few. Yet even in a wholly republican and popular government, fears that concentrated wealth would enable the rich to have a predominant position in political life persisted.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

The remedy, many Founders believed, was a broad economic distribution among the middle class, avoiding established classes of both rich and poor and the conflict that inescapably came along with it. Defending the Constitution in “Federalist No. 10,” Madison acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” is the most durable source of political conflict, but argued that a large republic would inevitably include a great diversity of property and economic interests. Conflict within a dynamic political economy would be between different and diverse property interests, which would fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely. Noah Webster echoed this thinking in a lesser-known defense of the Constitution and the logic it rested on. A political and educational thinker famous for his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster wrote forcefully on his belief that democracy depended on the middle class and could not survive highly concentrated wealth: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” Webster observed that, historically speaking, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.

If the problem of wealth in politics has been present from the beginning, it has been particularly acute since the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United in 2010, which unleashed an unprecedented flood of money into our politics, to both parties. Yet the generic problem of money in elections doesn’t capture what is happening right now: The country faces an alliance of self-interested would-be oligarchs and a president who has little commitment to constitutional democracy. Their interests are not the public’s, and their power is immense.

Elon Musk is the most obvious instance of this. He has been appointed by Trump to head the Department of Government Efficiency, where he aims to cut $500 billion in government spending and reorganize the federal bureaucracy. DOGE’s remit is to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. Government can always be made more efficient. Yet Musk, whose companies have billions of dollars in government subsidies and contracts, seems to be engaged in “a bureaucratic coup.” He gained access to the Treasury’s payment system and halted operations at USAID; he is reportedly behind the attempted “buyout” of government employees, and his team has perhaps unlawfully accessed government employees’ private information. And despite the enormous conflicts of interest posed by his other businesses, he has not relinquished them even while wielding extraordinary governmental power (very much like Trump). The setup could allow Musk, again like Trump, to profit from his connections and potentially steer the government toward his financial interests and away from competitors’.

Beyond Musk, Trump has named a number of ultra-wealthy allies to his Cabinet, including the secretaries of the Treasury, commerce, and education. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have also signaled their support, with their respective companies donating to Trump’s inauguration and making business accommodations that seem aimed to please Trump. At the top of Trump’s agenda in the new Congress is extending his 2017 tax cuts, which will largely benefit the very well-off.

Trump openly rejected the basic rules of the constitutional order by refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election, scheming to remain in office, pardoning those who aided him in his effort to overturn the Constitution, and promising political retribution on those who tried to hold him accountable. His wealthy backers are either indifferent to this threat or eager to indulge it, thinking they are beyond rules.

[Read: The unique danger of a Trumpist oligarchy]

This combination is the embodiment of Hamilton’s warning in “Federalist No. 71” that the people are continually beset by “the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” A demagogue with contempt for the Constitution, colluding with many of the wealthiest Americans on the promise that their wealth will be translated into political power and favors is just the sort of alliance that the Founders warned would corrupt popular government: that “the people,” in Madison’s phrase, “would be misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.”

Writing to Jefferson, John Adams foresaw many of today’s problems: The people would inevitably confuse the rich and well-born for the wise and virtuous. If Jefferson contemplated the rise of a “natural aristocracy,” Adams reminded him that mankind had long admired the rich simply because they were rich, confusing their wealth for wisdom. Yet wealth is no guarantor of wisdom or virtue. A combination of the rich and the ignorant, Adams noted, could empower a demagogue at the expense of democracy.

Americans too often think they are exceptional, that history somehow does not apply to them. Adams disabused us of this notion from the beginning. There “is no special providence for Americans”; we are no different than other nations. We, too, might end our republican experiment by trusting in a demagogue urged on by our emerging oligarchs.

Birthright Citizenship Is a Sacred Guarantee

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › birthright-citizenship-blight › 681477

The attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is an attempt to reverse history, to push our nation back, way back, before the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the secession crisis that soon delivered the nation into the Civil War. Calling this action “unconstitutional” is utterly inadequate; the maneuver is the soiling of sacred text with profane lies.

Birthright citizenship is a shield of protection to anyone born in this country, as close to a national self-definition as we have; it is our legal DNA. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment should be emblazoned on small laminated cards and carried in every American’s pocket. The language is amply clear:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

That language is as fundamental to the Constitution as any other provision, perhaps even more important to the survival and growth of our pluralistic republic than the First Amendment, which protects free speech, free press, the right of assembly, and the right to petition the government. It is as inherent to constitutional function as federalism itself.

[Read: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is a Big Test for the Constitution]

The Trump administration now scoffs at this history, purporting to end this guarantee with an executive order signed on Donald Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office and tragically titled, in a fantastic act of Orwellian doublespeak, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The administration makes a phony originalist argument based on the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee extended only to the freedmen and their descendants. Quite the contrary, the amendment’s authors explicitly envisioned the immigrant population and its descendants as part of their plan. Congressman John Bingham, Section 1’s author, defended the amendment by drawing on the authority of the Constitution’s Framers, who had “invited the workers and builders whose honest toil clothes and shelters nations,” and who hailed from “every civilized nationality” to become “citizens of the Republic.” This is why, in blocking Trump’s order last week, the Federal District Court Judge John C. Coughenour said without caveat: “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Section 1’s origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion of equality among “these truths” in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred.  

Most profound, birthright citizenship is rooted in the blood of more than 700,000 Americans who died in the Civil War, a catastrophe that made possible what most historians now call the “second founding” of America. The rebirth harkened in the Fourteenth Amendment is the core of this phrase’s meaning. The Trump administration’s desire to obliterate birthright citizenship is part of a larger quest to undo most of this egalitarian tradition, to shift American history into a kind of permanent reverse gear back to an age of secure constitutional white supremacy.

[Read: The Coming Assault on Birthright Citizenship]

One cannot overstate the gravity of Trump’s proposed action, nor the historical ignorance on which it stands. The original Republicans who crafted birthright citizenship into the amendment were doing nothing less than harvesting the greatest results of the Civil War, making good on the promise of freedom for millions of any creed, color, or national origin at the time and for all time to come. Section 1 explained to the world what that war had meant. To erase any part of it now is to tarnish the legacy of William McKinley, Trump’s new favorite president, who fought in the Battle of Antietam. The Union victory there is what prompted the Emancipation Proclamation.

For Bingham, a deeply Christian abolitionist Republican from Ohio, this debate went back at least to the 1850s crises over the expansion of slavery. In 1858 he said, “Every man knows that under our free institutions, every person born of free parents within the jurisdiction of the United States … is a citizen of the United States.” Bingham, of course, overestimated such consensus, because Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford had ruled for a 7–2 majority of the Supreme Court the previous year that Black people possessed “no rights” whatsoever under American law. One of the grand purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment was to relegate the Dred Scott decision to history.

By the winter of 1866, as Congress debated the content of an amendment, it faced many overwhelming obstacles, especially bone-level, historical racism and the doctrine of federalism that fundamentally protected states’ rights. Congress had just fought an all-out war to restore the Confederate states to the Union and to end slavery with an overwhelming use of federal power.

But the Republicans, despite fierce debates, were confident. “I can hardly believe,” wrote Thaddeus Stevens, the radical floor manager for his party, “that any person can be found who will not admit that every one of these proposals is just.” They knew exactly what they intended to achieve. Bingham defended the amendment as protection of the “in-born rights of every person.” Stevens thought they had to “fix the foundations of the government on principles of eternal justice.” Senator Lyman Trumbull saw them advancing principles “which the great Author of all has implanted in every human breast.” They believed that they were enacting justice and morality, not only for freed slaves but for the country’s immigrant future, a fact they deeply understood because they had lived through the recent waves of Irish and German immigration.

[Read: The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship]

As for states’ rights, Bingham had a constant answer. For “generations to come,” he announced, he sought to “arm Congress … with the power to enforce the Bill of Rights as it stands in the Constitution … in the states.” In the states, by federal power.

In floor debates, Bingham spoke with great eloquence about the purposes of the amendment. “The day of the freedman’s deliverance has come,” he declared, “not without suffering, not without sorrow, not without martyrdom, not without broken altars and broken hearts.” But now he saw potential days of glory, not only for ex-slaves but for the immigrant. The Constitution could now “provide that no man, no matter what his color, no matter beneath what sky he may have been born, no matter in what disastrous conflict or by what tyrannical hand his liberty may have been cloven down, no matter how poor, no matter how friendless … shall be deprived of life or liberty or property without due process of law.” Above everything, “all persons born” here were forever citizens.  

Trump and his allies have picked a fight over this crucial provision in the Constitution. Americans have to engage the fight, in the courts and with every mode of persuasion. Trump and his allies’ vision is an egregious abuse of real history and the new Constitution it forged in the 1860s. If they succeed, then Grant has surrendered to Lee at Appomattox.

The Coalition Collapse That Doomed Biden’s Presidency

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 01 › coalition-collapse-biden-carter › 681254

Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.

The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.

The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.

Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.

In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.

Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.

These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.

The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.

The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.

Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”

Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.

The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment, particularly in clean-energy technologies.

In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.

Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.