When I was 17, I won $20,000 from the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Named after the prolific 19th-century novelist whose rags-to-riches tales have come to represent the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” the scholarship honors youth who have overcome adversity, which, for me, included my parents’ mental illnesses, time in foster care, and stints of homelessness.

In April 2010, the Distinguished Americans flew me and the other 103 winners to Washington, D.C., for a mandatory convention. We stayed at a nice hotel and spent an entire day learning table manners. We met Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who I remember shook hands with the boys and hugged the girls. Before the event’s big gala, we posed in rented finery, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the center of our group photo. The political commentator Lou Dobbs praised the awardees’ perseverance in his opening speech. In the words of the Horatio Alger Association, we were “deserving scholars” who illustrated “the limitless possibilities available through the American free-enterprise system.” We were proof that anyone could make it.

The Horatio Alger Association is one of the institutions that Alissa Quart, a journalist and the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, critiques in her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream. In a wide-ranging 230 pages, Quart challenges our nation’s obsession with self-reliance. According to Quart, the fiction that anyone who works hard can have a better life increases inequality and promotes policies that hurt us. Meanwhile, blaming people for their supposedly bad choices is “a kind of nationwide bullying” that the poor internalize. Bootstrapped puts words to beliefs that I struggled to articulate as a teen and that haunted me into adulthood: Both success and failure were up to me alone, I was valuable only when I triumphed, and if I couldn’t overcome, I’d be better off dead.

[Read: The perils of meritocracy]

Quart opens by investigating the origins of the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and how our culture began to idolize the so-called self-made man. In 1834, the magazine Working Man’s Advocate mocked a local inventor by suggesting that a contraption he’d fashioned would allow him to “hand himself over the Cumberland river … by the straps of his boots”—a laughable impossibility, of course, because you can’t lift your whole body by your shoes. But the term stuck, and over time became synonymous with self-reliance. Quart then points out a number of cracks in our collective myth of self-sufficiency. While Henry David Thoreau stayed at Walden Pond—for many, the mecca of American individualism—his mother did his laundry. Ayn Rand, patron saint of libertarians, collected Social Security near the end of her life. Even Horatio Alger’s novels aren’t tales of genuine independence: In most, a wealthy benefactor steps in to sponsor a handsome teenage protagonist. (These stories also take on a darker meaning when you consider Alger’s own past: A Harvard Divinity School–trained pastor, he was forced to resign after being accused of molesting two boys.)

The belief that underprivileged teens can study hard, prove their worth, and access higher education thanks to charitable largesse also seems more and more like a fable. Donors disproportionately give to elite schools with massive endowments. Only 1.5 percent of the total sum contributed goes to two-year colleges—despite the fact that state and community colleges have some of the highest upward-mobility rates. Not only do the same universities benefit again and again, often the same students do too. A recent Horatio Alger winner observed to me that a small pool of high-achieving, low-income students seemed to win multiple big awards each year. I had noticed this as a teenager too. A handful of my peers were plucked out by various nonprofit organizations and feted repeatedly. Many of them got into prestigious universities that offered full financial aid, rendering the prizes moot.

I was one of those students: I received a full ride to Harvard. At the Horatio Alger conference, a Distinguished American’s wife offered me another grant that meant I didn’t need to get a term-time job; I hardly touched the Horatio Alger money. I sat uncomfortably with all the advantages I’d had. Yes, I’d rotated among friends’ sofas and slept in my car the previous summer. But I also had a grandmother who’d taken an interest in me, insisting I get straight A’s and paying for a parochial elementary school. I’d left foster care because of boarding-school financial aid. For me, as for most of my multi-scholarshipped peers, lucky breaks compounded. Our ascensions were the opposite of self-sufficiency; if anyone had paid attention, they might have studied us to understand what interventions worked—and what held others back.

But for many people who insist that modern America is a meritocracy, the onus is on those who need help to prove that they need it. One of Quart’s sharpest points is that administrative burdens force disadvantaged people to repeatedly prove their worthiness. For example, Medicaid requires participants to frequently recertify themselves (a practice that was paused during the pandemic) to receive benefits. In recent years, more than 220,000 children in Tennessee alone lost coverage because of clerical errors. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said that the unemployment-insurance system was designed to “put as many kind-of-pointless roadblocks along the way” as possible, so that the jobless gave up. Some of these hurdles—such as some states’ Medicaid work requirements, which have been shown to insignificantly affect employment rates—are simply punishment for poverty.

Although Quart primarily criticizes such policy failures, she also shows how widespread the tendency is to overemphasize individual responsibility. For example, she condemns the “dystopian social safety net” that stretches under the abyss of unmet need. Epitomized by GoFundMe fundraising (where people solicit donations from friends, family, and strangers to help cover the cost of necessities like housing, car repairs, and expensive medical procedures), getting help often means “commodifying our suffering”—not dissimilar to students brandishing their trauma for a single semester’s tuition at a private college.  

Glorifying mettle is common across our culture—the fantasy of self-sufficiency is so pervasive because it feels good, both to witness and to experience. Quart calls out the “hygge” of Little House on the Prairie, which features a pioneer family surviving alone on the frontier, salt pork crackling over their self-started fire. I swelled with pride when my application essay for the scholarship, in which I compared my life to that of the Horatio Alger Award recipient Buzz Aldrin, delivered me into a State Department dining room. Growing up in a society that idolized individual achievement, I never failed to notice, and cling to, moments of seemingly single-handed success.

[Read: The myth of independent American families]

And when things went wrong, I blamed myself—when I was raped a few months after the conference, when I didn’t have a place to stay during school breaks, when I went nearly broke from a mouthful of root canals and fillings after years of sporadic dental care. I’d bought into the intoxicating fiction that I was the master of my fate. When it turned out I wasn’t, the failure felt personal.

By the time I graduated college, my shame that I wasn’t a smiling overcomer became unbearable. The only way I could let it go was to recognize the dark side of our fixation with independence—a message Quart arrives at far more directly than I could. She proposes commonsense changes to improve the social safety net, most of which are extensions of COVID-era policies: expanding the child tax credit, making recertification for Medicaid less onerous, and reducing administrative hurdles to seeking help.

Just as important, Bootstrapped urges readers to rethink their narratives of accomplishment. Quart encourages us to stop shaming others, and ourselves, for needing assistance and to acknowledge the ways we are all interdependent. When I was a teenager, no amount of praise for my tenacity could have replaced the help I received: encouragement from teachers who believed in me, rides from friends’ parents, a few nights in a shelter, and, yes, the financial aid that let me graduate without debt—a modern miracle. There’s a clear irony to a charity that rewards “self-sufficiency,” even as it attests to our deep impulse to help others.

At the Horatio Alger gala, a falconer released a bald eagle, which soared through the auditorium to the sound of the national anthem. The audience lit up in rapturous applause. Watching the bird, I assumed that it represented the individual triumphs of each of the scholarship’s winners. But maybe I should have been looking at the crowd, drawn together in our wonder, none of us so solitary after all.

New AI systems such as ChatGPT, the overhauled Microsoft Bing search engine, and the reportedly soon-to-arrive GPT-4 have utterly captured the public imagination. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing online application, ever, and it’s no wonder why. Type in some text, and instead of getting back web links, you get well-formed, conversational responses on whatever topic you selected—an undeniably seductive vision.

But the public, and the tech giants, aren’t the only ones who have become enthralled with the Big Data–driven technology known as the large language model. Bad actors have taken note of the technology as well. At the extreme end, there’s Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right social network Gab, who said recently that his company is actively developing AI tools to “uphold a Christian worldview” and fight “the censorship tools of the Regime.” But even users who aren’t motivated by ideology will have their impact. Clarkesworld, a publisher of sci-fi short stories, temporarily stopped taking submissions last month, because it was being spammed by AI-generated stories—the result of influencers promoting ways to use the technology to “get rich quick,” the magazine’s editor told The Guardian.  

This is a moment of immense peril: Tech companies are rushing ahead to roll out buzzy new AI products, even after the problems with those products have been well documented for years and years. I am a cognitive scientist focused on applying what I’ve learned about the human mind to the study of artificial intelligence. Way back in 2001, I wrote a book called The Algebraic Mind in which I detailed then how neural networks, a kind of vaguely brainlike technology undergirding some AI products, tended to overgeneralize, applying individual characteristics to larger groups. If I told an AI back then that my aunt Esther had won the lottery, it might have concluded that all aunts, or all Esthers, had also won the lottery.

Technology has advanced quite a bit since then, but the general problem persists. In fact, the mainstreaming of the technology, and the scale of the data it’s drawing on, has made it worse in many ways. Forget Aunt Esther: In November, Galactica, a large language model released by Meta—and quickly pulled offline—reportedly claimed that Elon Musk had died in a Tesla car crash in 2018. Once again, AI appears to have overgeneralized a concept that was true on an individual level (someone died in a Tesla car crash in 2018) and applied it erroneously to another individual who happens to shares some personal attributes, such as gender, state of residence at the time, and a tie to the car manufacturer.

This kind of error, which has come to be known as a “hallucination,” is rampant. Whatever the reason that the AI made this particular error, it’s a clear demonstration of the capacity for these systems to write fluent prose that is clearly at odds with reality. You don’t have to imagine what happens when such flawed and problematic associations are drawn in real-world settings: NYU’s Meredith Broussard and UCLA’s Safiya Noble are among the researchers who have repeatedly shown how different types of AI replicate and reinforce racial biases in a range of real-world situations, including health care. Large language models like ChatGPT have been shown to exhibit similar biases in some cases.

Nevertheless, companies press on to develop and release new AI systems without much transparency, and in many cases without sufficient vetting. Researchers poking around at these newer models have discovered all kinds of disturbing things. Before Galactica was pulled, the journalist Tristan Greene discovered that it could be used to create detailed, scientific-style articles on topics such as the benefits of anti-Semitism and eating crushed glass, complete with references to fabricated studies. Others found that the program generated racist and inaccurate responses. (Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that Galactica wouldn’t make the online spread of misinformation easier than it already is; a Meta spokesperson told CNET in November, “Galactica is not a source of truth, it is a research experiment using [machine learning] systems to learn and summarize information.”)

More recently, the Wharton professor Ethan Mollick was able to get the new Bing to write five detailed and utterly untrue paragraphs on dinosaurs’ “advanced civilization,” filled with authoritative-sounding morsels including “For example, some researchers have claimed that the pyramids of Egypt, the Nazca lines of Peru, and the Easter Island statues of Chile were actually constructed by dinosaurs, or by their descendents or allies.” Just this weekend, Dileep George, an AI researcher at DeepMind, said he was able to get Bing to create a paragraph of bogus text stating that OpenAI and a nonexistent GPT-5 played a role in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Microsoft did not immediately answer questions about these responses when reached for comment; last month, a spokesperson for the company said, “Given this is an early preview, [the new Bing] can sometimes show unexpected or inaccurate answers … we are adjusting its responses to create coherent, relevant and positive answers.”

[Read: Conspiracy theories have a new best friend]

Some observers, like LeCun, say that these isolated examples are neither surprising nor concerning: Give a machine bad input and you will receive bad output. But the Elon Musk car crash example makes clear these systems can create hallucinations that appear nowhere in the training data. Moreover, the potential scale of this problem is cause for worry. We can only begin to imagine what state-sponsored troll farms with large budgets and customized large language models of their own might accomplish. Bad actors could easily use these tools, or tools like them, to generate harmful misinformation, at unprecedented and enormous scale. In 2020, Renée DiResta, the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, warned that the “supply of misinformation will soon be infinite.” That moment has arrived.

Each day is bringing us a little bit closer to a kind of information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots. GPT-3 produces more plausible outputs than GPT-2, and GPT-4 will be more powerful than GPT-3. And none of the automated systems designed to discriminate human-generated text from machine-generated text has proved particularly effective.

[Read: ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone]

We already face a problem with echo chambers that polarize our minds. The mass-scale automated production of misinformation will assist in the weaponization of those echo chambers and likely drive us even further into extremes. The goal of the Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” model is to create an atmosphere of mistrust, allowing authoritarians to step in; it is along these lines that the political strategist Steve Bannon aimed, during the Trump administration, to “flood the zone with shit.” It’s urgent that we figure out how democracy can be preserved in a world in which misinformation can be created so rapidly, and at such scale.  

One suggestion, worth exploring but likely insufficient, is to “watermark” or otherwise track content that is produced by large language models. OpenAI might for example watermark anything generated by GPT-4, the next-generation version of the technology powering ChatGPT; the trouble is that bad actors could simply use alternative large language models to create whatever they want, without watermarks.

A second approach is to penalize misinformation when it is produced at large scale. Currently, most people are free to lie most of the time without consequence, unless they are, for example, speaking under oath. America’s Founders simply didn’t envision a world in which someone could set up a troll farm and put out a billion mistruths in a single day, disseminated with an army of bots, across the internet. We may need new laws to address such scenarios.

A third approach would be to build a new form of AI that can detect misinformation, rather than simply generate it. Large language models are not inherently well suited to this; they lose track of the sources of information that they use, and lack ways of directly validating what they say. Even in a system like Bing’s, where information is sourced from the web, mistruths can emerge once the data are fed through the machine. Validating the output of large language models will require developing new approaches to AI that center reasoning and knowledge, ideas that were once popular but are currently out of fashion.  

It will be an uphill, ongoing move-and-countermove arms race from here; just as spammers change their tactics when anti-spammers change theirs, we can expect a constant battle between bad actors striving to use large language models to produce massive amounts of misinformation and governments and private corporations trying to fight back. If we don’t start fighting now, democracy may well be overwhelmed by misinformation and consequent polarization—and perhaps quite soon. The 2024 elections could be unlike anything we have seen before.

Financial panics are nothing new. But the strange little panic we’re enduring—one that started last week with a massive bank run causing the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and that continued this morning with big sell-offs in the stocks of other regional banks—is arguably the first one in which social media, and particularly Twitter, has been a major player. And if the past few days are any indication, that does not bode well for the next major financial crisis.

Twitter has featured a useful flow of facts and analysis from informed observers and participants, on subjects including SVB’s balance sheet, the failures of bank regulation, and the pros and cons of bailing out depositors. But users have also been subjected to a flood of dubious rumors and hysterical predictions of new bank runs. Federal regulators worked assiduously over the weekend to come up with a plan that would forestall contagion and reassure depositors that their money was safe. But on Twitter, chaos loomed.

[Annie Lowrey: Silicon Valley Bank’s failure is now everyone’s problem]

The most notorious tweets of the past few days came from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, investors, and company executives, who were desperate for the government to guarantee that no SVB depositor would lose any money (even though most of SVB’s deposits were not FDIC-insured). Their rhetorical strategy of choice was to insist that unless SVB’s depositors were made immediately whole, the entire tech industry and every non-megabank in America would be at risk.

Specifically, they said we were facing a “Startup Extinction Event” that would set “innovation” back by 10 years or more. If the Federal Reserve and the FDIC made the wrong decision about SVB’s depositors, that could lead to “a bank run trillions of dollars in size.”

Jason Calacanis, an investor who spent much of the weekend tweeting red-alert messages in all caps, captured the general mood when he wrote, “YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW.”

Now, the Silicon Valley bros insisting that everything was going to hell may well have believed what they were tweeting (even if it seemed like a somewhat hyperbolic reaction to the failure of a middling bank). But they were also, as the saying goes, talking their book. Almost all of them had a clear financial interest in seeing SVB depositors — which included companies they were invested—in made whole by the government.

More to the point, by tweeting in such over-the-top language about the inevitability—not the possibility, but the inevitability—of massive bank runs across the country, they were, of course, making such bank runs more likely. Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not necessarily wrong if the theater is on fire. But encouraging panic is never the best strategy.

Predictions can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Everyone who thinks that everyone else is going to pull their money out of the bank is going to try to get in the door first. These tweets also typically drew no distinction between wealthy depositors—who may well have uninsured deposits—and the majority of Americans, whose deposits are insured no matter which bank they have them in. That, too, contributed to the atmosphere of panic.

Still, the predictions of imminent doom weren’t the worst that social media had to offer this weekend. We also got a wild proliferation of rumors about the health not just of the banking system, but of specific banks. Unsurprisingly, many of the Twitter bios of the people spreading these kinds of rumors included the words Bitcoin or crypto.

[Read: Nancy Pelosi: ‘Follow the money’]

One high-profile, and especially egregious, example of this phenomenon came from Mike Alfred, who identifies himself as an “engaged value investor” and has almost 130,000 followers. Over the course of the day on Saturday, he tweeted out (and then deleted) a series of very specific claims about what was supposedly happening to First Republic Bank, headquartered in California, whose stock went through a massive sell off on Friday on concerns that it might go under as a result of contagion from SVB’s collapse. His proof for these claims, he tweeted, was “corroborating evidence from several good sources.” Well, okay then.

You might reasonably say that although none of this is ideal, the obvious answer is for people to be skeptical of what they read, particularly when it comes from sources they’re unsure of, and not to make decisions or leap to conclusions on the basis of random tweets. And that’s obviously correct in principle. But as we’ve seen with the persistence of false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen, and the continued ubiquity of false claims about the supposed deadliness of the COVID vaccines, social media is built, in some respects, to make it hard for people to be skeptical and patient. It’s a medium that is designed to encourage herding and trend-following—which, after all, are what makes things go viral—not independent thought.

This is especially true when it comes to something like a financial panic, the nature of which makes people more likely to act on fear and impulse. In that environment, false or just overheated claims, even if they seem improbable, can nonetheless have a powerful effect. They cast a kind of shadow that helps instill uncertainty and doubt. And that’s often enough to lead to bad outcomes, given that during panics, many of us act first and think later. Social media is now going to profoundly shape any financial crisis we go through. It doesn’t feel like we’re ready for it.

By its own maneuvering, the modern Supreme Court has made itself the most powerful branch of government. Superior to Congress. Superior to the president. Superior to the states. Superior to precedent, procedure, and norms. In effect, superior to the people.

Most talked about in this regard, of course, is the Court’s ending of long-established reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the assertion of extreme power extends well beyond the issue of abortion.

For example, in a case called TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the conservative majority in 2021 narrowed Congress’s Article I power to give consumers the right to sue over data deliberately mishandled by credit-reporting agencies, reasoning that the legislature can only recognize theories of harm analogous to ones that existed as a matter of “American history and tradition.” And this year, the Court is considering a handful of lawsuits by states challenging the exercise of discretion by the executive branch on the theory that federal policy affects state budgets, which could effectively enable states—and thus the Court—to function as the ultimate overseers of federal policy. One of those, Haaland v. Brackeen, is poised to possibly upend roughly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent that recognizes American Indian tribes as political sovereigns, as well as Congress’s plenary power over American Indian affairs. The outcome of the case, which involves a decades-old federal statute that sets child-welfare standards for American Indian children, could put hundreds of U.S. tribal treaties at risk as well.

[Rebecca Nagle: The Supreme Court case that could break Native American sovereignty]

The mere fact that the Court agreed to consider these and other extraordinary claims this term exposes the right-wing majority’s appetite for asserting massive power under the auspices of judicial review.

In a November essay for the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law School professor Mark A. Lemley describes this Court as an “imperial” one that has embarked on “a radical restructuring of American law across a range of fields and disciplines.” The means run along two lines: substantive changes to the Constitution made under the guise of interpretation, and procedural power grabs executed despite traditions of deference. This has pushed our constitutional system dangerously off balance, with little opportunity for correction.

Ironically, the danger comes from the “conservative” wing of the Court, born in part out of a purported rejection of “activist” court decisions, which it criticizes as policy making—territory that belongs to the elected branches of government. All six of the purportedly conservative justices—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—have professed a commitment to textualism and originalism, methods of constitutional interpretation that theoretically should constrain judges’ discretion to the “plain” language of the text, with occasional reference to historical understandings of the Framers’ contemporaneous intent. Many folks blithely assume that the right-wing justices are more restrained than their progressive counterparts as a result. The precise opposite is the case.

Neither textualism nor originalism can possibly answer every thorny question about the ambiguous language that fills the relatively terse, 236-year-old constitutional text. Judges judge, after all—meaning they exercise discretion, often subjectively. For example, in both Dobbs and the controversial Second Amendment decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which permanently clipped the power of states to regulate public safety with regard to guns, Justices Alito and Thomas in their respective majority opinions picked and chose snippets of history that favored one outcome while rejecting others, and offered no guiding principle for deciding which “originalist” evidence is worthy of deference and which is not. Given this intellectual dissonance, the most logical conclusion is that these justices’ claimed adherence to a superior judicial philosophy is merely a smoke screen for something else: ideology. Whatever conservative ethos of restraint there once was has therefore vanished.

What will constrain this Court? Not its constitutional philosophy, and not respect for precedent either. The decision in Dobbs was stunning not just because it gutted a constitutional right many counted on. It was also a snub to the vitality of judicial precedent itself, which has long operated as a check on the power of the Supreme Court.

What about states? No, their power won’t constrain the Court either, despite the traditional conservative concern for states’ rights. To be sure, in Dobbs, the Court gave state legislatures the power to regulate abortion, but in Bruen, the same Court struck down a more-than-100-year-old New York State handgun-licensing law that regulated the carrying of concealed weapons in public. Dobbs enhanced state legislatures’ control over abortion. Bruen took it away over guns and public safety.

Conservatives’ traditional respect for the relative power of the presidency is faring no better. Under President George W. Bush, a predominant theme of legal conservatism was the “unitary executive theory,” which fastened unbridled power in the White House during times of war. At the Department of Justice, John Yoo famously wrote the “torture memos” that green-lit military interrogations, use of force, rendition, and intelligence gathering unconstrained by domestic or international law—on the rationale that the Constitution assigns all executive power to the president.

The current Supreme Court has taken a substantially different approach. To be sure, in Trump v. Hawaii, it upheld President Donald Trump’s power to restrict entry of foreign nationals from certain countries, even in the face of possible First Amendment violations, as a “fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” But this term, under the same Immigration and Nationality Act, the Court is considering a challenge brought by the states of Texas and Louisiana to the Biden administration’s guidelines that set forth priorities for use by immigration officers in determining which noncitizens to apprehend and remove. If the Court uses this case to dilute the president’s discretionary law-enforcement power over immigration, which, as the Justice Department argues, is “deep-rooted” in the separation of powers, it could turn federal judges into “virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of Executive action.”

Meanwhile, the Court has undertaken an assault on the power of executive-branch agencies to enact regulations—and on Congress’s power to empower agencies in the first place. Since its 1984 landmark decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court has deferred to agency regulations so long as those regulations comport with the authority given by Congress. Last term, the Court blew a hole in what’s known as “Chevron deference” and replaced it with an amorphous “major-questions doctrine,” which essentially gives the justices unfettered discretion to select which handoffs of legislative power to agencies it doesn’t like. If it sees a “major” question—as it did with climate-change policy in a case called West Virginia v. EPA—it will no longer tolerate congressional delegations of rule-making authority to agencies unless the delegation is sufficiently precise. But that’s a “know it when we see it” requirement that neither Congress nor agencies have any way of predicting in advance of a legislative or regulatory undertaking.

[Liza Heinzerling: The Supreme Court is making America ungovernable]

The Court has also usurped Congress’s Article I power to protect ballot access, unabashedly legislating from the bench in a case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. There, a 6–3 majority added a multifactor test for plaintiffs seeking to challenge voting restrictions under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—even though Congress saw fit to broadly forbid any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race, such as when elections are “not equally open to participation” by all. Unconstrained by the plain language of that law, the Court added hurdles to Section 2 that it apparently perceived as missing—despite a textual lack of constitutional authority to do so.

The justices’ usurpation has extended to their Article III colleagues on the lower federal bench. The Constitution references only the Supreme Court but empowers Congress to create the lower federal courts, which it did almost immediately after ratification with the first Judiciary Act of 1789. Congress also defines the scope of the judiciary’s power to hear categories of cases, which with rare exceptions are initiated in the lowest federal courts. Those courts’ decisions go to appellate courts for review. A select few of those decisions are then accepted for final review by the high Court.

The beauty of this hierarchy is that issues develop and percolate over time, nuances are hashed out, and different parties weigh in. By the time the Supreme Court accepts a case on a writ of certiorari, there is already a rich factual and legal backdrop that maximizes the potential for a transparent outcome of high quality. And the deliberative process does not end there. Over a period of months, the Court accepts lengthy briefing by multiple parties, including amici curiae, whose diverse perspectives ensure a thorough airing of matters of enormous significance to the regular citizenry. It then holds oral argument to flesh out any concerns.

Not only has the modern Court bypassed its own full briefing and argument at an unprecedented pace, issuing more “emergency” orders—which are short and devoid of meaningful explanation—than it has regular opinions, but in some instances, it has skipped the intermediate appellate courts altogether. The trouble is, many of its quick-and-dirty rulings have had enormous substantive implications. It refused to stay Texas’s six-week abortion ban—even though Roe protected abortion access until viability at about 24 weeks’ gestation—on an emergency application. It struck down New York’s occupancy restrictions for religious services and blocked Biden’s eviction moratorium—both on emergency applications during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. It reinstated for the 2022 midterms an Alabama electoral map that a lower court has said was likely illegal on an emergency application. And it used an emergency order to restore a Trump-era policy that made it harder for states to block projects that could pollute waterways, prompting Justice Elena Kagan to complain that “the Court’s emergency docket [is] not for emergencies at all,” instead “becom[ing] only another place for merits determinations—except made without full briefing and argument.”

The Constitution’s fluid nature means all this power must go somewhere—and it’s going straight back to the Court itself. The collective result of these maneuvers is that the Court now has more discretion to say with constitutional permanence what national policy is, how future policy gets made, and who decides what’s in and what’s out. And the justices keep choosing themselves.

This is not how it is supposed to work. A too-powerful, unaccountable Court is a threat to the entire system. Short of a constitutional amendment retracting their life tenure, or a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate willing to do controversial things such as restricting the Court’s jurisdiction or expanding the number of justices, there’s nothing the voting public can really do about this political power grab and its lasting impact on the lives of millions. As Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote for the Court in 1849, “If the judicial power extends so far, the guarantee contained in the Constitution of the United States is a guarantee of anarchy, and not of order.”

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4, Donald Trump gave a speech that my colleague Tom Nichols called “long and deranged,” adding that it was, “even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory.” And revealing too—not just of Trump’s worsening state of mind but of the attitudes and temperament of MAGA world which Trump has, for seven years, personified. He remains the GOP’s apotheosis.

That doesn’t mean that Trump is unbeatable in the Republican presidential primary. He’s viewed throughout much of the party as a loser; his presentation is noticeably more lethargic than when he ran in 2016; and his obsessive promotion of lies about the 2020 election is exhausting even some of his loyal supporters. He’s also having trouble drawing large or enthusiastic crowds, which he never had a problem with in the past.

Despite that, at this early stage, Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are polling as the overwhelming favorites to win the Republican nomination. And although individual surveys are scattered, two recent ones, from Emerson and Fox, show Trump leading DeSantis by 30 and 15 points, respectively. (An Emerson poll from New Hampshire earlier this month showed Trump with a 41-point lead over DeSantis in that early-primary state.) But what the polls can’t measure is just how much the party’s sensibilities have fused with Trump’s, or how many imitators Trump has spawned. His imprint on the Republican Party is almost impossible to overstate. Which is why Trump’s remarks at CPAC are instructive.

[Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be]

One section of the nearly two-hour speech particularly caught my attention, and not mine alone. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher devoted an article to the implications of these comments:  

In 2016, I declared, “I am your voice” Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

“This is the final battle,” America’s 45th president said. “They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”

To understand the modern Republican Party, you must understand the intense sense of fear and grievance that drives so many of its voters, which has in turn given rise to a profound desire for retribution and revenge, for inflicting harm on Democrats, progressives, and other perceived enemies. Those negative emotions existed before Donald Trump ran for the presidency, but he tapped into them with astonishing skill.

In September 2015, I had an email exchange with a person who worked for a theologically conservative church. In the course of sharing thoughts on the early stages of the Republican primary, I described my views and concerns: “I consider Mr. Trump to be in an entirely different category—wrong not just on the issues and philosophically unanchored, but alarmingly erratic … wholly untrustworthy, a flippant misogynist, crude and vulgar, and downright obsessive. As president, he would be unstable and dangerous. As leader of the Republican Party, he would be an embarrassment. As the de facto face of conservatism, he would be a disaster. That’s why I would not vote for him under any conceivable circumstances.”

Although Trump was not this person’s first choice in the primary, his response was instructive. “I am fed up with our side rolling over.” He then said: “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: [Barack Obama].”

Note the line of argument: My interlocutor agreed with all of the negative things I said about Trump—misogynistic, untrustworthy, erratic, psychologically unstable, and dangerous—but in the end, they didn’t matter. Trump was, to use a word I heard repeatedly to describe him, a fighter. The negative aspects of his character were assumed to be essential to that pugilism. Over time—and it wasn’t much—most of those on the right who had reservations about Trump made their peace with his flaws. Some even quietly celebrated them.

A year later I participated in an event at Stanford University with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild spent five years immersed in a community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, then a Tea Party stronghold. What was important to understand about the rise of Trump, Hochschild told me during one of our offstage conversations, was that it was tied to feelings of being dishonored and humiliated. Trump supporters feel they have been disrespected; Trump is their response, she said, their antidepressant. Hochschild understood the power of emotion in politics, how reason is so often the slave of the passions. And the passions of people who feel unseen, who feel they have been treated with contempt, are destructive and dangerous.

[From the January/February 2019 issue: The real roots of American rage]

Since the Trump era began, we’ve seen a particularly toxic mix of passions on the right: fear and desperation, anger and indignation, feelings of betrayal and victimhood, all of which cry out for vengeance. Whether the nominee is DeSantis—who bills himself as a God-given “protector” and a “fighter”—or Trump, or someone else, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party will demand that the leader of the GOP seek vengeance in its name. Donald Trump has energized a movement and a propaganda infrastructure that will outlast him.

Vengeance is different from justice. The psychologist Leon F. Seltzer puts it this way: Revenge is predominantly emotional, while justice is primarily rational; revenge is, by nature, personal, while justice is impersonal and impartial; revenge is an act of vindictiveness, justice an act of vindication; revenge is about cycles, justice about closure; and revenge is about retaliation, whereas justice is about restoring balance.

“With revenge,” William Mikulas, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida, told ABC News, “you are coming from an orientation of anger and violence or self-righteousness: ‘I want to get him, I want to hurt them … I want to make them pay.’ You’re coming from a place of violence and anger and that’s never good.”

Revenge creates a cycle of retaliation. It “keeps wounds green, which otherwise would heal,” in the words of Francis Bacon. Vengeance is insatiable, and in any society, over the long term, it can be deeply damaging. The desire for revenge reduces the capacity for legislators to work together across the aisle. It creates conditions in which demagogues can successfully peddle conspiracy theories and call for a “national divorce.” It leads Americans to see members of their opposing party as traitors. And exacting revenge tempts people to employ immoral and illegal methods—street violence, coups, insurrections—they would not otherwise contemplate. (The defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems revealed that a Fox producer texted Maria Bartiromo, a Fox news anchor, saying, “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.”)

White evangelical Christians have been a driving force in creating the politics of retribution and revenge—maybe the driving force. White evangelicals are among the GOP’s most loyal constituencies, and if they declared certain conduct off-limits, candidates and elected officials would comply. But no such signals were ever sent. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020—after all the lies, misconduct, and deranged conspiracy theories we saw unfold during the Trump presidency—85 percent of white, evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attended religious services voted for Trump. Most of them became more, not less, tolerant of Trump’s misconduct over the course of his tenure.

Human emotions can be dominant and even determinative in distorting and deforming people’s judgments. Individuals who honestly believe that the Bible is authoritative in their lives—who insist that they cherish Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the pure in heart; turn the other cheek; love your enemies) and Paul’s admonition to put away anger, wrath, slander, and malice and replace them with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, a spirit of forgiveness, and, above all, love, “which binds everything together in perfect harmony”—find themselves embracing political figures and a political ethic that are antithetical to these precepts. Many of those who claim in good faith that their Christian conscience required them to get passionately involved in politics have, upon doing so, discredited their Christian witness. Jesus has become a “hood ornament,” in the words of the theologian Russell Moore, in this case placed atop tribal and “culture war” politics.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

One recent example: Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Donald Trump who has made much of her Christian faith and worked for several different evangelical associations. “My mission is Truth, my God is the Lord Jesus Christ, and my client is the President of the United States,” she tweeted in 2020. But last week she admitted in a sworn statement that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Trump’s defeat—and she posted a video on Twitter mocking an injury from a fall that sent 81-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell to the hospital. (McConnell, although a Republican, has been a critic of Trump, earning the enmity of MAGA world.)

The antidote to the politics of retribution is the politics of forbearance. Forbearance is something of a neglected virtue; it is generally understood to mean patience and endurance, a willingness to show mercy and tolerance, making allowances for the faults of others, even forgiving those who offend you. Forbearance doesn’t mean avoiding or artificially minimizing disagreements; it means dealing with them with integrity and a measure of grace, free of vituperation.

None of us can perfectly personify forbearance, but all of us can do a little better, reflect a bit more on what kind of human beings and citizens we want to be, and take small steps toward greater integrity. We can ask ourselves: What, in this moment, is most needed from me and those in my political community, and perhaps even my faith community? Do we need more retribution and vengeance in our politics, or more reconciliation, greater understanding, and more fidelity to truth?

The greatest embodiment of the politics of forbearance was Abraham Lincoln. With a Civil War looming, he was still able to say, in his first inaugural address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have been strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Those bonds were broken; the war came. By the time it ended, more than 700,000 lives had been lost in a nation of 31 million. But the war was necessary; Lincoln preserved the Union and freed enslaved people. And somehow, through the entire ordeal, Lincoln was free of malice. He never allowed his heart to be corroded by enmity or detestation.   

In his 1917 biography of Lincoln, Lord Charnwood wrote, “This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South.”

Another Lincoln biographer, William Lee Miller, said of America’s 16th president, “He did not mark down the names of those who had not supported him, or nurse grudges, or hold resentments, or retaliate against ‘enemies’—indeed, he tried not to have enemies, not to ‘plant thorns.’” Lincoln’s previous failures did not leave scars or resentments, Miller says; he was an unusually generous human being, lacking in ruthlessness, disinclined to make himself feared, explicit in disavowing vengeance. Some believed he was too sympathetic to be a great leader. He turned out to be our greatest leader.

Lincoln was unique; we will never see his kind again. But the contrast between America’s first Republican president and its most recent Republican president is almost beyond comprehension. Each is the inverse of the other. One cannot revere Lincoln and embrace the political ethic of Trump, his many imitators, and the MAGA movement.

Sensibilities and dispositions can be shaped and reshaped; the “ancient trinity” of truth, beauty, and goodness can still inspire the human heart, even among cynics. The burning question for each of us is what we aspire to, for ourselves and for our leaders, and the kind of political culture we will help build. We are citizens, not subjects, and so it is within our power to write magnificent new chapters in the American story. But that requires letting go of hatred and vengeance and to be again touched, as we surely can be, by the better angels of our nature.

For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct? Recent studies on the link between political awareness and individual well-being have gestured toward a liberating, if dark, alternative. Sometimes—perhaps even most of the time—it is better not to know.

Like taking a drug, learning about politics and following the news can become addictive, yet Americans are encouraged to do more of it, lest we become uninformed. Unless you have a job that requires you to know things, however, it’s unclear what the news—good or bad—actually does for you, beyond making you aware of things you have no real control over. Most of the things we could know are a distraction from the most important things that we already know: family, faith, friendship, and community. If our time on Earth is finite—on average, we have only about 4,000 weeks—we should choose wisely what to do with it.

What the writer Sarah Haider calls “information addiction” is nothing short of an epidemic. In a quite literal sense, politics is making Americans sick. But the sole way to contract the illness is by seeking out the news and consuming large amounts of it. And that’s a choice. Haider chose differently, deciding to go news free for six months in late 2021 and early 2022. Having missed out on stories that were speculative, overhyped, or irrelevant, she reported being “saner, happier, and (surprisingly) more informed.” But does it make sense for other Americans, perhaps millions of them, to completely rethink their relationship to political information and knowledge? In a 2022 study, the political scientist Kevin Smith estimated that between 50 million and 85 million Americans suffer from politically induced fatigue, insomnia, loss of temper, and impulse-control problems. Moreover, 40 percent of his sample of American adults reported that politics was a “significant source of stress” in their lives, while 5 percent—which would translate to roughly 12 million people—reported suicidal thoughts due to politics.

And the problem is especially bad for young people. Last month, the CDC reported that depression and suicidal ideation are at their highest levels on record, with one in three teenage girls having seriously considered suicide. Boys aren’t faring particularly well either. Some observers insist that smartphones are the culprit, but smartphones are ubiquitous in all advanced democracies. In another study, politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning. Young conservatives, despite presumably also owning phones, experience significantly lower levels of dissatisfaction.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The trouble with boys and men]

In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair. If you’re a progressive, wanting your kids to be progressive is obviously understandable. It might be good for the world, but it might not be good for their health. The co-authors of a study on the politics of depression argue that since around 2010, left-leaning adolescents may have “experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.”

According to this line of thinking, liberals, because of their liberalism, have good reason to be depressed. After all, life is bad, America is bad, and the world is bad. As The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz recently put it on Twitter, “We’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape.” But this is not true, at least not the hellscape part. Despite claims to the contrary, the United States is not experiencing civil war, nor is it under a dictatorship. It is a democracy, and one of the wealthiest that has ever existed. Although far from ideal, the American safety net has grown more rather than less generous, as measured by public social spending as a percentage of GDP. Unemployment is at its lowest rate since the 1950s. Child poverty, according to one comprehensive analysis, has declined by 59 percent in the past three decades.

Meanwhile, on cultural questions, the 2010s and ’20s have witnessed one of the most striking progressive shifts in American history. Conservative views are not hegemonic. In major cities and mainstream institutions, the cultural left has established a dominance that would have been unimaginable decades ago. New norms around social justice—or, more pejoratively, “wokeness”—now prevail in the medical profession, in the U.S. government bureaucracy, and in universities. What my colleague Helen Lewis calls “woke capitalism” has spread through corporations that might have otherwise been indifferent to justice, social or otherwise. The rapid acceptance of gay marriage has been nothing short of remarkable. Progress comes gradually and then suddenly. In an influential 2021 essay, the writer Richard Hanania laid out an exhaustive case for why “almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left.”

[Helen Lewis: Cancel culture and the problem of woke capitalism]

If this is true, why aren’t young conservatives more depressed? Hanania suggests that it’s because they care less about politics. But it’s also likely a question of demographics. On college campuses and in major cities, conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them. A 2021 Generation Lab/Axios survey of college students found that only 5 percent of Republicans would not work for “someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate,” compared with 30 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, 71 percent of Democrats say they would not date someone who voted for the other candidate, compared with only 31 percent of Republicans.

While progressive cultural norms face growing pushback, not just from conservatives but from otherwise left-leaning communities of color, progressives can take solace and pride in having won most of the great cultural battles of the 21st century so far. Despite these myriad successes and victories, however, young progressives—who are more likely to closely follow the news and care about it—have developed a habit of thinking catastrophically. The old media adage “If it bleeds, it leads” has now been repurposed for the era of equity and inclusion: Injustices are systemic, the thinking goes, and beyond the agency or control of mere individuals. White supremacy is embedded everywhere, not just in our institutions but in our language.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

For people who view the world in these terms, being depressed is evidence of virtue. In the study on the politics of depression, for example, the co-authors note that “liberalism frequently signals a relatively greater awareness of social disparities that may be damaging to mental wellbeing, especially among less privileged groups who are the targets of societal neglect.” Meanwhile, the authors of a 2023 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology lament the implications of their own findings that knowledge of daily political events contributes to “worse psychological and physical well-being.” They offer the cautionary note that “although it is natural to want to feel better in the face of stress, feeling better can come with both benefits and costs.” Apparently, the cost of feeling better is that people may experience “less motivation to take political action” and may “divert their attention away from the injustice, thereby minimizing their likelihood of taking to the street.”

Such arguments are morally questionable, at best. Catastrophic thinking and negativity bias should not be encouraged, even if they lead to more just social outcomes. After all, how just can outcomes be if they come at the cost of the mental health of tens of millions of Americans who have been taught to expect the worst? As the writer Matthew Yglesias recently argued, “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.” He adds that “our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move.”

However difficult it may be, Americans need to find ways to disengage from the constant assault of politics. In a culture where everything is “problematic” even if it’s not, the drumbeat of everyday political events too easily arouses worry, anger, and hopelessness. Indeed, focusing on supposed catastrophes, including those far out into the future, can have even more profound effects that are at once odd and unnatural. Remarkably, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein observed last year that the question he’s been asked more than any other in his public engagements is: “Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face?” This is the platonic ideal of catastrophic thinking. Klein’s interlocutors, among other things, are probably reading too much news.

If there were a way to consume the news without catastrophizing it, then that could be one path forward. But progressives in particular have trouble doing so. For them, to be aware of the ills of the world is to feel compelled to speak and act—or at least to feel. If we can’t all go news free—which is difficult in the world as it is—we can, at the very least, establish a truce with the news. Information and knowledge can be—and often are—quite great. But they are not unqualified goods. Sometimes ignorance is, in fact, bliss.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer has quietly subpoenaed Bank of America asking for records relating to three of Hunter Biden's business associates, the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, disclosed in a letter sent to Comer on Sunday.

Photo-illustrations by Oliver Munday

Very few Americans—or, for that matter, very few people on the planet—can remember a time when freedom of the seas was in question. But for most of human history, there was no such guarantee. Pirates, predatory states, and the fleets of great powers did as they pleased. The current reality, which dates only to the end of World War II, makes possible the commercial shipping that handles more than 80 percent of all global trade by volume—oil and natural gas, grain and raw ores, manufactured goods of every kind. Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.

But what if the safe transit of ships could no longer be assumed? What if the oceans were no longer free?

Every now and again, Americans are suddenly reminded of how much they depend on the uninterrupted movement of ships around the world for their lifestyle, their livelihood, even their life. In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, forcing vessels shuttling between Asia and Europe to divert around Africa, delaying their passage and driving up costs. A few months later, largely because of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 container ships were stacked up outside the California Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, snarling supply chains throughout the country.

[Read: The ship stuck in the Suez Canal is glorious]

These events were temporary, if expensive. Imagine, though, a more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters, twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes. Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently equipped to resist such a gambit.

Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to speed their passage.

[Read: The world’s most important body of water]

Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.

The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry. Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.

If oceanic trade declines, markets would turn inward, perhaps setting off a second Great Depression. Nations would be reduced to living off their own natural resources, or those they could buy—or take—from their immediate neighbors. The world’s oceans, for 70 years assumed to be a global commons, would become a no-man’s-land. This is the state of affairs that, without a moment’s thought, we have invited.

Everywhere I look, I observe sea power manifesting itself—unacknowledged—in American life. When I drive past a Walmart, a BJ’s Wholesale Club, a Lowe’s, or a Home Depot, in my mind I see the container ships moving products from where they can be produced at a low price in bulk form to markets where they can be sold at a higher price to consumers. Our economy and security rely on the sea—a fact so fundamental that it should be at the center of our approach to the world.

It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instruments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participation in land wars, large or small. There have been only a few true seapower nations in history—notably Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Venice, and Carthage.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana and spent 26 years on active duty in the Navy, deploying in support of combat operations in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, both at sea and in the air. I did postgraduate work at several universities and served as a strategist and an adviser to senior officials in the Pentagon. Yet I have always remained, in terms of interests and outlook, a son of the Midwest. In my writings I have sought to underscore sea power’s importance and the reliance of our economy on the sea.

Despite my experience, I was never able to convince my mother. She spent the last years of her working life at the Walmart in my hometown, first at the checkout counter and then in accounting. My mother followed the news and was sharply curious about the world; we were close, and spoke often. She was glad that I was in the Navy, but not because she saw my work as essential to her own life. “If you like Walmart,” I often told her, “then you ought to love the U.S. Navy. It’s the Navy that makes Walmart possible.” But to her, as a mother, my naval service mostly meant that, unlike friends and cousins who deployed with the Army or Marine Corps to Iraq or Afghanistan, I probably wasn’t going to be shot at. Her perspective is consistent with a phenomenon that the strategist Seth Cropsey has called seablindness.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate the scale or speed of the transformation wrought after World War II. The war destroyed or left destitute all of the world powers opposed to the concept of a mare liberum—a “free sea”—first enunciated by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in 1609. The United States and Great Britain, the two traditional proponents of a free sea, had emerged not only triumphant but also in a position of overwhelming naval dominance. Their navies were together larger than all of the other navies of the world combined. A free sea was no longer an idea. It was now a reality.

In this secure environment, trade flourished. The globalizing economy, which allowed easier and cheaper access to food, energy, labor, and commodities of every kind, grew from nearly $8 trillion in 1940 to more than $100 trillion 75 years later, adjusted for inflation. With prosperity, other improvements followed. During roughly this same period, from the war to the present, the share of the world’s population in extreme poverty, getting by on less than $1.90 a day, dropped from more than 60 percent to about 10 percent. Global literacy doubled, to more than 85 percent. Global life expectancy in 1950 was 46 years. By 2019, it had risen to 73 years.

All of this has depended on freedom of the seas, which in turn has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the United States—that believe in such freedom.

But the very success of this project now threatens its future. Seablindness has become endemic.

The United States is no longer investing in the instruments of sea power as it once did. America’s commercial shipbuilding industry began losing its share of the global market in the 1960s to countries with lower labor costs, and to those that had rebuilt their industrial capacity after the war. The drop in American shipbuilding accelerated after President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981. The administration, in a nod to free-market principles, began to shrink government subsidies that had supported the industry. That was a choice; it might have gone the other way. Aircraft manufacturers in the United States, citing national-security concerns, successfully lobbied for continued, and even increased, subsidies for their industry in the decades that followed—and got them.

It is never to a nation’s advantage to depend on others for crucial links in its supply chain. But that is where we are. In 1977, American shipbuilders produced more than 1 million gross tons of merchant ships. By 2005, that number had fallen to 300,000. Today, most commercial ships built in the United States are constructed for government customers such as the Maritime Administration or for private entities that are required to ship their goods between U.S. ports in U.S.-flagged vessels, under the provisions of the 1920 Jones Act.

The U.S. Navy, too, has been shrinking. After the Second World War, the Navy scrapped many of its ships and sent many more into a ready-reserve “mothball” fleet. For the next two decades, the active naval fleet hovered at about 1,000 ships. But beginning in 1969, the total began to fall. By 1971, the fleet had been reduced to 750 ships. Ten years later, it was down to 521. Reagan, who had campaigned in 1980 on a promise to rebuild the Navy to 600 ships, nearly did so under the able leadership of his secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. During Reagan’s eight years in office, the size of the Navy’s fleet climbed to just over 590 ships.

Then the Cold War ended. The administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slashed troops, ships, aircraft, and shore-based infrastructure. During the Obama administration, the Navy’s battle force bottomed out at 271 ships. Meanwhile, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free trade on the high seas.

Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oceanic link between NATO nations in Europe and North America. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth, expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capacities. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to control the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are trying to close the global commons.

Today the United States is financially constrained by debt, and psychologically burdened by recent military conflicts—for the most part, land-based actions in Iraq and Afghanistan fought primarily by a large standing army operating far from home—that turned into costly quagmires. We can no longer afford to be both a continentalist power and an oceanic power. But we can still exert influence, and at the same time avoid getting caught up in the affairs of other nations. Our strategic future lies at sea.

Americans used to know this. The United States began its life purposefully as a seapower: The Constitution explicitly directed Congress “to provide and maintain a Navy.” In contrast, the same article of the Constitution instructed the legislature “to raise and support Armies,” but stipulated that no appropriation for the army “shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” The Founders had an aversion to large standing armies.

George Washington pushed through the Naval Act of 1794, funding the Navy’s original six frigates. (One of these was the famous USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” which remains in active commission to this day.) In his final address to the American people, Washington advocated for a navalist foreign policy, warning against “attachments and entanglements” with foreign powers that might draw the young nation into continental European wars. The strategy he advised instead was to protect American trade on the high seas, and advance America’s interests through temporary agreements, not permanent alliances. This seapower approach to the world became the sine qua non of early American foreign policy.

In time, conditions changed. The U.S. was preoccupied by sectional conflict and by conquest of the continent. It turned inward, becoming a continental power. But by the end of the 19th century, that era had come to a close.

In 1890, a U.S. Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan published an article in The Atlantic titled “The United States Looking Outward.” Mahan argued that, with the closing of the frontier, the United States had in essence become an island nation looking eastward and westward across oceans. The nation’s energies should therefore be focused externally: on the seas, on maritime trade, and on a larger role in the world.

Mahan sought to end the long-standing policy of protectionism for American industries, because they had become strong enough to compete in the global market. By extension, Mahan also sought a larger merchant fleet to carry goods from American factories to foreign lands, and for a larger Navy to protect that merchant fleet. In a few thousand words, Mahan made a coherent strategic argument that the United States should once again become a true seapower.

[From the December 1890 issue: The United States looking outward]

Mahan’s vision was profoundly influential. Politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge advocated for larger merchant and naval fleets (and for a canal through Central America). Mahan, Roosevelt, and Lodge believed that sea power was the catalyst for national power, and they wanted the United States to become the preeminent nation of the 20th century. The swift expansion of the Navy, particularly in battleships and cruisers, paralleled the growing fleets of other global powers. Leaders in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy had also read Mahan, and they wanted to protect commercial access to their overseas empires. The resulting arms race at sea helped destabilize the balance of power in the years leading up to the First World War.

This is not the place to relate every development in the evolution of America’s naval capability, much less that of other nations. Suffice to say that, by the 1930s, new technologies were transforming the seas. Aircraft, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault craft, and submarines had all been developed into more effective weapons. During the Second World War, the oceans once again became battlefields. The fighting proceeded in a way Mahan himself had never envisioned, as fleets faced off against ships they could not even see, launching waves of aircraft against each other. In the end, the war was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base. The United States began the war with 790 ships in its battle force; when the war ended, it had more than 6,700.

Alfred Thayer Mahan (Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Source: HUM Images / Universal Images Group / Getty.)

No nation could come close to challenging the American fleet, commercial or naval, on the high seas after the war. So great was its advantage that, for decades, no one even tried to match it. In concert with allies, the United States created an international system based on free and unhindered trade. It was the culmination of the Mahanist Age.

[From the June 1919 issue: The future of sea-power]

For the first time in history, open access to the seas was assumed—and so people naturally gave little thought to its importance and challenges.

A new seapower strategy involves more than adding ships to the Navy. A new strategy must start with the economy.

For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue-collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones, for its national-security needs.

In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry invited the executives of leading defense contractors to a dinner in Washington—a meal that would enter national-security lore as the “Last Supper.” Perry spelled out projected cuts in defense spending. His message was clear: If the American defense industrial base was going to survive, then mergers would be required. Soon after, the Northrop Corporation acquired the Grumman Corporation to form Northrop Grumman. The Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin. A few years later, Boeing combined with McDonnell Douglas, itself the product of a previous merger. Among the shipbuilders, General Dynamics, which manufactures submarines through its Electric Boat subsidiary, bought Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard, and the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.

[From the October 2007 issue: The Navy’s new flat-Earth strategy]

These mergers preserved the defense industries, but at a price: a dramatic reduction in our overall industrial capacity. During World War II, the United States could claim more than 50 graving docks—heavy-industrial locations where ships are assembled—that were greater than 150 meters in length, each one able to build merchant craft and naval warships. Today, the U.S. has 23 graving docks, only a dozen of which are certified to work on Navy ships.

The United States will need to implement a seapower industrial policy that meets its national-security needs: building steel plants and microchip foundries, developing hypersonic glide bodies and autonomous unmanned undersea vehicles. We will need to foster new start-ups using targeted tax laws, the Defense Production Act, and perhaps even a “Ships Act” akin to the recent CHIPS Act, which seeks to bring back the crucial semiconductor industry.

We also need to tell the companies we once encouraged to merge that it’s time for them to spin off key industrial subsidiaries in order to encourage competition and resilience—and we need to reward them for following through. In 2011, for example, the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman spun off its shipbuilding holdings to form Huntington Ingalls, in Newport News, Virginia, and Pascagoula, Mississippi. Adding more such spin-offs would not only increase the nation’s industrial depth but also encourage the growth of parts suppliers for heavy industries, companies that have endured three decades of consolidation or extinction.

Shipbuilding, in particular, is a jobs multiplier. For every job created in a shipyard, five jobs, on average, are created at downstream suppliers—well-paid blue-collar jobs in the mining, manufacturing, and energy sectors.

Most of the civilian merchant ships, container ships, ore carriers, and supertankers that dock in American ports are built overseas and fly foreign flags. We have ignored the linkage between the ability to build commercial ships and the ability to build Navy ships—one reason the latter cost twice as much as they did in 1989. The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us vulnerable. Today we remember the recent backlog of container ships in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but tomorrow we could face the shock of no container ships arriving at all should China prohibit its large fleet from visiting U.S. ports. Today we’re proud to ship liquefied natural gas to our allies in Europe, but tomorrow we might not be able to export that energy to our friends, because we don’t own the ships that would carry it. We need to bring back civilian shipbuilding as a matter of national security.

To revive our merchant-shipbuilding base, we will need to offer government subsidies on a par with those provided to European and Asian shipbuilders. Subsidies have flowed to commercial aviation since the establishment of commercial airlines in the 1920s; Elon Musk’s SpaceX would not be enjoying its present success were it not for strong initial support from the U.S. government. Shipbuilding is no less vital.

Reindustrialization, in particular the restoration of merchant-shipbuilding capacity and export-oriented industries, will support the emergence of a new, more technologically advanced Navy. The cost of building Navy ships could be coaxed downward by increasing competition, expanding the number of downstream suppliers, and recruiting new shipyard workers to the industry.

Wherever American trade goes, the flag traditionally follows—usually in the form of the Navy. But the new Navy must not look like the old Navy. If it does, we will have made a strategic mistake. As rival powers develop ships and missiles that target our aircraft carriers and other large surface vessels, we should make greater investments in advanced submarines equipped with the latest in long-range maneuvering hypersonic missiles. We should pursue a future in which our submarines cannot be found and our hypersonic missiles cannot be defeated.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

The Navy, however, is not just a wartime force. It has a peacetime mission unique among the military services: showing the flag and defending American interests by means of a consistent and credible forward presence. Commanders have identified 18 maritime regions of the world that require the near-continuous deployment of American ships to demonstrate our resolve. During the Cold War, the Navy maintained approximately 150 ships at sea on any given day. As the size of the fleet has fallen—to its present 293—the Navy has struggled to keep even 100 ships at sea at all times. The service’s admirals recently suggested a goal of having 75 ships “mission capable” at any given moment. Right now the fleet has about 20 ships going through training workups and only about 40 actively deployed under regional combatant commanders. This has created vacuums in vital areas such as the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, which our enemies have been eager to fill.

The chief of naval operations recently called for a fleet of some 500 ships. He quickly pointed out that this would include about 50 new guided-missile frigates—small surface vessels able to operate closely with allies and partners—as well as 150 unmanned surface and subsurface platforms that would revolutionize the way wartime naval operations are conducted. The frigates are being assembled on the shores of Lake Michigan. The construction of the unmanned ships, owing to their nontraditional designs and smaller sizes, could be dispersed to smaller shipyards, including yards on the Gulf Coast, along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and on the Great Lakes, where ships and submarines were built for the Navy during World War II. These types of ships, combined with advanced submarines, will allow us to exert influence and project power with equal vigor.

Across the 50 years of my life, I have watched the importance of the oceans and the idea of freedom of the seas largely fade from national awareness. The next great military challenge we face will likely come from a confrontation on the sea. Great powers, especially nuclear-equipped great powers, dare not attack one another directly. Instead, they will confront one another in the commons: cyberspace, outer space, and, most crucially, at sea. The oceans would be battlefields again, and we, and the world, are simply not ready for that.

Some voices, of course, will argue that America’s interests, diffuse and global, might best be served by expanding our commitments of land forces to places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Korea as demonstrations of American resolve, and that air and naval forces should be diminished to pay for such commitments. Others—those in the “divest to invest” school—believe in the promise of future technology, arguing that more traditional warfare platforms and missions should be phased out to fund their newer and more efficient missiles or cybersystems. The first approach continues a path of unnecessary entanglements. The second proceeds along a path of promise without proof.

A seapower-focused national-security strategy would give new advantages to the United States. It would not too subtly encourage allies and partners in Eurasia to increase investment in land forces and to work more closely together. If they build more tanks and fully staff their armies, the United States could guarantee transoceanic supply lines from the Western Hemisphere. The 70-year practice of stationing our land forces in allied countries, using Americans as trip wires and offering allies a convenient excuse not to spend on their own defense, should come to an end.

A seapower strategy, pursued deliberately, would put America back on course for global leadership. We must shun entanglements in other nations’ land wars—resisting the urge to solve every problem—and seek instead to project influence from the sea. We must re-create an industrialized, middle-class America that builds and exports manufactured goods that can be carried on U.S.-built ships to the global market.

We knew all this in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Chinese are showing us that they know it now. The United States needs to relearn the lessons of strategy, geography, and history. We must look outward across the oceans, and find our place upon them, again.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “America’s Future Is at Sea.”