American Jessica Pegula, seeded third in the French Open singles, is the latest leading WTA Tour player to feature in a BBC Sport column.

A small flock of drones descends on Moscow; Russian rebels raid over the border into their estranged motherland, mysterious fires break out in Russian cities, oil-storage depots experience explosions, and Russian trains suffer an unusual number of derailments. How does the White House react? “As a general matter, we do not support attacks inside of Russia.”

This is an administration that has done some things very well, including blowing the whistle on Russian invasion plans and building a coalition to support Ukraine. It has done other things moderately well: giving the Ukrainians high-end weapons, though only after repeated agonizing, delaying, and prevaricating. However, it often undermines its cause with speech that is strategically witless. Sometimes, this takes the form of leaks from officials to friendly journalists, who then report the officials’ fears of Russian escalation, hopes for negotiations, and doubts about Ukrainian abilities. More commonly, it appears in an unwillingness to say the obvious, which is that we want Ukraine to defeat Russian armies thoroughly and drive them from all of its territory.

And then there is this inane comment. It is politically dumb because it signals divisions between us and the Ukrainians, it casts a chill on European politicians (some more timid than ours), and it encourages Russian propagandists to go into fits of menacing fury that never amount to anything beyond the crimes their soldiers normally commit, but can still cause the blood to drain from a few pallid faces.

[Kori Schake: Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are]

The statement is, from a military historian’s point of view, ignorant of war to the point of illiteracy. What country has ever won a war by confining itself to homeland defense even when it was capable of much more? Ukraine was attacked in an extraordinarily brutal and unprovoked way; why should it not hit back? After December 7, 1941, did the United States limit itself to looking for the aircraft carriers that conducted the Pearl Harbor operation?

The comment is also operationally obtuse. Ukrainian raids into Russia demoralize its public (we know that from monitoring Russian Telegram channels) and divert Russian resources and attention away from the front lines. The more Russian troops guard the border, the fewer dig in outside Melitopol. The more resources diverted into missile and air defense, the less there are to support the occupying army. The more humiliating gaps there appear in the defenses of Moscow, the greater the likelihood of a regime that will claw at itself, as the likes of Yevgeny Prigozhin use this as a crowbar with which to torment their internal rivals.

Above all, the White House statement, and the undeniable angst that accompanies it, reflects two regrettable but common American flaws: naivete and arrogance. During a century and a half, the United States has witnessed only two substantial attacks on its territory, in 1941 and again in 2001. Both were one-off affairs. We have difficulty imagining what it would be like to have missiles rain down on our cities, smashing hospitals and schools, or to endure the wanton slaughter and rape of an invading army. Americans would not show anything like the restraint asked of Ukraine were something even remotely similar to befall not only Washington, but New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami. And if anyone asked them to do so, the responses would be short, sharp, and unprintable.

There is conceit here as well—the conceit of an exceptionally powerful country, to be sure, but one whose leaders have convinced themselves that they are expert on the processes of war. Biden-administration officials still insist that our flight from Afghanistan was a masterly move, executed in a masterly fashion. Worse yet, they believe it. They believe that they have titrated the flow of weapons to Ukraine in just the right quantities and amounts. They believe that they can control war, whose ends are driven by politics but whose means often take statesmen down unpredicted and unmarked paths.

Off the record, senior officials sometimes betray condescension toward minor powers—those brave but primitive Ukrainians, those feisty but irresponsible Poles, those endangered but deeply neurotic Balts—with whom they have imperfect empathy and to whom they give less respect than is their due. Some of that is in this statement, as it is in the patronizing assessments of Ukrainian warcraft compared with our own.

These officials would do better to recall that the United States lost the Vietnam and Afghan Wars, and, at best, pulled off far-too-costly draws in Iraq and Korea. They would do better, as well, to take a long pause to reflect on just how profoundly mistaken they were not only about the Ukrainian will to fight, but about Ukraine’s capacity to absorb modern weapons and defeat Russian forces. And they also might find it helpful to remember the failures of American statecraft in Syria and in Ukraine in 2014 that laid the groundwork for this war.

[Read: How Syria came to this]

Individually, those who issue statements such as the White House’s and share this approach to policy are (mostly) nice, decent people. They have, by and large, elegant educations at elite institutions; they are comfortable at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and have résumés of unusual academic or legal distinction. But there are things more easily learned in bar fights or repeated bouts with boxing gloves or pugil sticks (let alone infantry combat) than in lecture halls and seminar rooms. War is an elemental activity; it needs often to be waged in an elemental way, and it has to be understood with the viscera and not just the head.

The maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect, as the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz observed. There is every reason to think that the Ukrainians are not merely lashing out (although there is probably some of that) but that these attacks on Russia are part of a larger preparation for the offensives on which their country’s future depends. They are distracting, demoralizing, and unbalancing their enemy. That is wise, because at the end of the day their resources, even with our help, are limited.

Still, a press spokesperson has to reply to a journalist’s question. So, too, for that matter, does a senior official caught at a fancy Washington dinner. There is a ready response.

In February 1946, shortly before giving his famous Iron Curtain speech, Winston Churchill was asked a question he did not wish to answer as he left Washington for Miami. “No comment,” he replied. “I think ‘No comment’ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.” An honorable if not a modest man, he thanked former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles for teaching him its use and encouraging its application.

Reticence is one of the minor strategic virtues. The administration has, it bears repeating, done many of the right things. For whatever reason, Churchillian rhetoric is beyond it. Churchillian warcraft also seems a quality beyond its understanding or aspirations. But at the very least, it would do well to emulate Churchillian discretion as the next round of Ukrainian blows fall on their pitiless and brutal enemies.

In Louisville, Kentucky, not long ago, I heard the story of a woman named Mary. She grew up middle-class, cheerful at times, though she struggled with depression. She took antidepressants. After her marriage broke up in 2006, Mary switched to pain pills, and her life spiraled.

She had a son in 2016. A couple of years later, methamphetamine from Mexico flooded Louisville, and she began using meth too. After that, her mother, Carole, told me, Mary heard voices coming from a ceiling vent, saw a phantom hand reaching from the back seat of her car. She abandoned her son and lived on the street. Her teeth withered. “She became a person I didn’t recognize,” said Carole, who is now raising Mary’s son. (Carole asked that their last name not be used, because she’s concerned that the late father’s family might seek custody.)

Mary would show up on rare occasions, then head back to the street. In late 2021, she detoxed and came to her mother’s house sober, the daughter Carole remembered. Only two days later, at a playground with her son, who was then 4, Mary announced that she had to go see a friend. “I said, ‘Please don’t leave us,’” Carole told me. “‘You haven’t seen him for a year.’ We had an argument. She kissed [her son] goodbye and said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

Three days after that, a woman called saying that Mary was pale, hungry, and in need of insulin for her diabetes. She was living in a tent encampment in Jeffersonville, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville. Carole delivered money and clothes and then called the police. “I wanted them to arrest her, to get her off the streets. I wanted to save her life.” But the police could do nothing, she said, and even in midwinter, Mary refused to leave the encampment.

Early one morning in 2022, she froze to death in a tent.

A week later, I met Eric Yazel, a Jeffersonville emergency-room doctor and the county’s health officer. Yazel told me that cases of frostbite had surged as fentanyl, meth, and the ensuing tent encampments spread throughout the area. Countywide, he said, people were dying of fentanyl overdoses in record numbers. Still, like Mary, many refused to leave the encampments.

All addictive drugs, to some degree, redirect the brain’s immense power toward finding and using dope, often despite life-threatening risks. But the drugs that are prevalent now are different from what they were even a decade ago: more potent, easier to find, cheaper, and deadlier. Most people seem to have some inkling of this. Still, having spent more than a decade reporting on illicit drug distribution and use, I believe that few people truly understand the extent of the change, or its implications.

America’s approach to drugs and addiction today—which in many regions has shifted toward forbearance until users volunteer for treatment—is both well intentioned and out of date, given the massive street supplies of fentanyl and meth. It is failing just about everyone.

If we’re serious about curbing use of these most damaging illicit drugs, I believe we need to move to an approach that both the left and the right may find uncomfortable. We need to use arrests and the threat of confinement to break the hold of addiction. We also need to transform jail, and change what it means for people with a drug addiction to be in jail.

Over the past 40 years, the prevailing views on drug policy have slowly gone from one extreme to the other. In the decades following President Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” law enforcement was essentially the only tool used in the U.S. to address both drug trafficking and addiction. Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug use proliferated; jails and prisons filled.

The social costs of the War on Drugs eventually pushed many jurisdictions to question this approach. By the middle of the 2010s, support for treatment of addiction had grown. Drug courts, which suspend prison sentences in return for closely monitored entry into treatment, began to proliferate. Acceptance of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to calm or block opioid cravings grew too.

Over time, the old Reagan-era approach was displaced by a new convention, that of “harm reduction”: mitigating the bodily damage that addicts may inflict on themselves through their drug use; keeping them alive with syringe exchanges and naloxone—the antidote to opioid overdose sold under the brand name Narcan—until they are ready to voluntarily accept drug rehabilitation. Decriminalization of drug possession and use followed, at least partially, in some jurisdictions. The pandemic amounted to an unofficial experiment in decriminalization: Even if the laws didn’t change, many counties stopped making small-time drug arrests. Jails kicked folks loose.

[From the May 2019 issue: The West Virginia doctor who got his patients—and himself—hooked on opioids]

Compassionate intentions may have fueled this progression, and many of the early steps made sense. Yet as this philosophical shift was happening, so too were seismic changes in the supply of illegal street drugs.

Two synthetic drugs—fentanyl and methamphetamine, both made in Mexico—have flooded the United States. They are produced year-round by sophisticated traffickers who have access through Mexican ports to global chemical markets. No plants or growing seasons are necessary; the supply is massive, cheap, continual, and difficult to suppress.

Illicit fentanyl kills users more quickly than any other drug to ever appear on American streets. Preliminary data from the CDC show that overdose deaths hit an all-time high in 2022, at nearly 110,000—almost 70 percent of which involved fentanyl.

Fentanyl is so potent and cheap that dealers add it to other street drugs, creating opioid-addicted daily customers from, say, casual cocaine users, even at the risk of killing them. It has all but chased heroin from the market. Users could live for decades on heroin. But as one Kentucky addict in recovery told me a few years ago, when fentanyl settled into his region, “There’s no such thing as a long-term fentanyl user.” He recently relapsed and died of what is believed to be a fentanyl overdose.

Methamphetamine, for its part, has achieved alarming potency over the past decade, and the way it’s made has changed. Ingredients now include an ever-evolving lineup of toxic industrial chemicals. Meth use is now often accompanied by rapid-onset symptoms of mental illness—paranoia, hallucinations—symptoms that in many cases seem to far outlast the high itself.

A person walks their bike under the 405 freeway, where homeless encampments are often set up, in Portland, Oregon. (Jordan Gale)

Homelessness has many causes, but partly because of the way the new meth tangles the mind of its users, the drug has undoubtedly made people homeless and kept many others on the street. It is a regular feature of tent-encampment life across the country. Many users, like Mary, prefer the encampments to homeless shelters because tents provide a place to use more freely.

[From the November 2021 issue: Sam Quinones on a new, more potent form of methamphetamine]

Meth and fentanyl upend many of the prevailing beliefs about drug policy. Perhaps the most important is that people must be “ready” to leave the street for treatment. The meth now being sold in the U.S. deprives many users of the mental ability to find readiness and opt into treatment. Fentanyl deprives them of the time to do so. Unlike heroin, it requires addicts to use several times a day to keep dope sickness at bay. Each use is potentially deadly.

The prevalence of these drugs does not reduce the need for some harm-reduction measures. Syringe exchange, for example, seems an essential tool in preventing the spread of HIV and hepatitis. The common use of Narcan to revive users who overdose is just as important for saving lives.

But when you zoom out, harm reduction alone looks perverse.

Take Narcan: It keeps people alive and is necessary in the moment of overdose. But the harm-reduction model holds that we should keep reviving people who overdose and then do nothing more than hope they come to their senses and opt into treatment. Paramedics I’ve spoken with report routinely reviving people who have overdosed on fentanyl a dozen times or more within a few months—sometimes twice in the same day.

In overdose, the brain’s oxygen is reduced. How much and for how long depends on the person and the time before she is revived. Any oxygen deprivation beyond some unknown threshold, however, damages parts of the brain that govern memory, motor skills, and, especially, reason and long-term decision making. A survey of studies published in 2021 in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence concluded that a period of oxygen deprivation was likely to cause “toxic injuries to multiple organs including the central nervous system, even when a fatal outcome is averted.”

John Corrigan, a psychologist at Ohio State University who has studied brain injuries since 1982, told me that, following brain impairment, a person is less likely to control harmful behavior, perceive an action’s consequences, postpone gratification, and make plans to change. Thus, damage from repeated overdoses makes it progressively more difficult for addicts to stop using. “There’s a cumulative effect,” Corrigan said.

Addiction specialists in Pasco County, Florida, are in the middle of a three-year federal-grant program studying the effects of repeated overdose—which has grown common since fentanyl arrived there five years ago—on about 100 female clients. So far, they have found that a greater number of overdoses correlates with lower reading levels among those clients, according to Robert Neri, who oversees programs and research for WestCare, the nonprofit treatment center that is managing the effort. Fifth- and sixth-grade reading levels are common within the group.

The ability to focus, follow schedules, understand new concepts, and remember things that have just happened is likewise lower than expected. Adding to the damage from overdose is the blunt-force brain trauma that so often accompanies addiction and street life: from falls, fights, accidents, beatings. A policy of allowing a person to return to the streets to use fentanyl after a Narcan-revived overdose is not compassion; it’s an invitation to more trauma, more overdose, death.

Fentanyl is weighed on a personal scale in Portland, Oregon. (Jordan Gale) A man smokes fentanyl inside the tent that he lives in, in Portland, Oregon. (Jordan Gale)

When I began reporting on these issues 13 years ago, I was agnostic about how to help the people who became addicted to illicit drugs. But those years—spent, in no small part, within communities ravaged by drug epidemics—have altered my perspective.

Taking away a person’s freedom is never something to be done lightly. But once addicted to fentanyl or the new meth, many users are not “free” to choose treatment—or any path out of addiction—in any meaningful way. Time away from these drugs, I believe, can help them regain their agency.

“Fentanyl is so powerful,” Robert Neri, of WestCare, told me. “Where somebody might have been able to pull their lives together on heroin,” many fentanyl addicts need structure, and time “away from access to the drug.”

Tolerances among people who survive their first exposure to fentanyl grow quickly, and withdrawal symptoms are fiercer than they are even from heroin—“like living hell,” says Heather Moore, a drug-clinic director in Tucson, Arizona, where counterfeit pills containing fentanyl now go for a dollar or less. Counselors and recovering addicts in the city told me that users there sometimes smoke 50 to 100 pills a day. Choosing to enter treatment is uniquely difficult.

Neri said that treatment providers and advocates are still catching up to the many changes wrought by pervasive fentanyl: the cumulative effects of repeated overdoses on users’ brains, a stronger aversion to opting into treatment. The shift “from plant-based drugs to laboratory-based drugs” has been profound, he said, and the addiction-treatment industry has not yet adjusted.

The use of law enforcement to help address drug addiction will be tarred by some as a return to the drug war of old, just casting users into prison. I understand the concern, and—more on this later—that’s not what I’m suggesting. Still, it is worth noting that the drug war failed not because we used law enforcement, but because we only used law enforcement.

Addiction is a problem deeply set in the chemistry of the brain. Using just one tool to address it is folly. A community approach, enlisting everything at our disposal, is essential. That includes law enforcement, which can provide both leverage and a respite from drugs.

As one recovering addict in Ohio, who is now a paramedic, told me, “You’re not going to get better unless you’re willing to get better. Finding that emerging willingness is critical.” For some people, he said, that willingness may be self-generated. “For me, it was the threat of doing years in prison.”

“You’d think fentanyl would cause people to pause; it does not,” says Mary Ellen Diekhoff, a drug-court judge in Monroe County, Indiana. What has caused more people to opt into her court, Diekhoff told me—and what has also strengthened their engagement with the process the court requires—is a recent modification to state law making it more likely that those with the lowest-level drug felonies may face prison. “Treatment is not easy,” she said. “If there’s no impetus to stay, why would you? You need to have something to lose.”

A handful of cities, watching synthetic drugs ravage their communities, are moving away from convention and trying new ideas.

One of those is Denver. Supplies of methamphetamine and fentanyl have inundated the city in the past several years. In 2019, Colorado passed a law that, among other things, made possessing four grams or less of most drugs—including fentanyl—only a misdemeanor. (Fentanyl gets mixed into all kinds of substances, including other drugs and powders, but for reference: Four grams of pure fentanyl will yield roughly 2,000 potentially deadly doses.) Denver’s drug-overdose numbers are now higher than they have ever been.

The homeless population, some 6,900, is likewise believed by city officials to be at least a 10-year high. Housing prices are doubtless one reason: They doubled in the 2010s. But homelessness is nonetheless what initially prompted the city to rethink its approach to drug use.

Evan Dreyer, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff in charge of homeless response, told me when we spoke last spring that the city’s shelters housed more than 1,800 people a night—but also that 300 to 400 beds typically went unused, even in winter. (Since then, an influx of migrants and refugees have increased occupancy.) Dreyer, who has worked for the city on homelessness since 2011, said that people living on the street have routinely balked at accepting housing. When he asked them why, they would say they had pets, or romantic partners, or a lot of belongings. In some instances, the city wrote into contracts that shelters needed places for pets, for partners.

Still, Dreyer said, he and his colleagues struggled to find takers, and of those who went into housing, many returned to the street. For some, mental illness is to blame. But “what often goes unsaid in those conversations is the need to use” drugs, he told me. In February 2021, temperatures dropped below zero for several days. Relatively few people left the encampments. On each of those days, Dreyer said, an encampment resident died

The mayor’s office still believes in the importance of housing, especially in a city as costly as Denver, Dreyer said. Much of the $250 million the city will spend on affordable housing and homelessness response this year will be for lodging—shelters, single-occupancy rooms, apartments. But city officials have seen enough to understand that many factors contribute to homelessness, including addiction.

Michael Hancock, Denver’s mayor and a liberal Democrat who initially embraced some of Colorado’s drug-policy-reform measures as a way of reducing incarceration, told me he now believes that the move to decriminalize drug possession and drug use went too far. “What is it that will make individuals reject the opportunity to get off the street?” he asked. “It’s mental-health and substances issues. We have to make sure we can drive them to these services.” And as for people who are selling illegal synthetic drugs: “We must have a system that holds you accountable.”

City crews now regularly remove tent encampments, though some reconstitute. The people who are removed are offered shelter and services, including drug treatment if they are using. Last year, lawmakers made it a felony to possess more than one gram of a substance containing fentanyl, which city officials hope will lead to the prosecution of dealers. The law also made certain other crimes count as felonies unless the person charged agrees to drug treatment.

The city has expanded its use of drug courts to help push users toward treatment. Defendants can avoid prison and expunge a drug-related felony by following a program of sobriety, peer-led meetings, work, and in many cases MAT—all supervised by a judge, usually over two to three years.

In the drug courts I’ve observed across the country, the judge, prosecutor, probation officer, and others work collaboratively with the defendant as he battles for sobriety. It is not easy; screwups happen maddeningly often. But I’ve come to see a personal touch, combined with accountability, as essential when dealing with the complexities of an individual’s addiction.

Crucially, Denver is also rethinking its jail system with addiction treatment in mind. I spoke with Elias Diggins, Denver’s sheriff and jailer, who had recently opened a 64-bed men’s recovery pod in the jail. The unit now offers classes in life skills and understanding drug abuse, peer-run meetings, and MAT for opioid addiction; it also connects inmates to continuing medication once they leave the jail.

The idea, Diggins said, is to make jail into a place where solutions can begin—an opportunity presented when a person is in custody, detoxed, and away from dope on the street. Entry into the recovery pod is voluntary, and the people who choose it, with good behavior, serve out their sentence there.

Paramedics respond to an overdose call at an apartment complex in Portland, Oregon. (Jordan Gale)

Fentanyl and meth have made rethinking jail essential. County jail, where sentences of less than a year are usually carried out, is the first and most common interface an addict has with the criminal-justice system. These encounters don’t always stem from drug-possession charges; many sentences result from property crimes or other crimes involving drug use, in one way or another.

Even the traditional jail system has been a boon to many people whose lives have been captured by drugs—a time to be away from dope, to eat, to get health care, to think a bit more clearly. I’ve known quite a few people—too many to ignore—who credit their recovery to their arrest, saying they’d be dead otherwise.

In its current form, however, jail is too often traumatic, throwing lives even further off course. The clarity that drug users may achieve away from dope tends to be wasted. Typical jail activities don’t extend much beyond sleeping, playing cards, watching the History Channel, and trading crime stories. Negativity and tedium often mix with predation to intensify mental illness, criminality, and addiction. Street drugs are prevalent in many jails—overdoses among inmates have risen nationally in recent years. Those in custody trying to leave dope behind are sometimes ostracized as “quitters” or accused of snitching.

But in a growing number of places—Denver and Columbus, Ohio, among them—jail is being redesigned as an opportunity for addicts and a long-term investment in recovery.

One model for this new approach is Kenton County (population 166,000), in Northern Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. In August 2015, Kenton County’s jail opened a 70-bed men’s recovery pod for inmates who were in and out of custody because of addiction. As in Denver, medication-assisted treatment—Suboxone or naltrexone—is provided to block cravings. Inmates volunteer to go into the pod, agreeing to participate daily in their recovery. They rise by 6 a.m. and make their bed. Their day is then filled with GED classes, plus classes on parenting, anger management, and other life skills. Inmates run 12-step meetings. The jail employs nine social workers. This is the kind of treatment addicts would receive in a rehab center on the outside. Jail ensures that they stay long enough for their brain to get a needed respite from dope.

Judges can also order people into the recovery pod, or offer it as a chance for defendants to knock time off their sentences. Marc Fields, Kenton’s jailer, told me that plenty of people opt in hoping to game the system. But as their mind defogs, he said, many slowly find readiness for sobriety in a way they don’t on the street.

Kenton County has added a 35-bed recovery pod for women. Both pods are policed and kept up by inmates committed to recovery. They are the cleanest pods in the facility, generally free of drugs, weapons, and fights, Fields said. At a time when fentanyl overdoses are taking place in jails and prisons nationwide, Kenton’s recovery pods report none. Inmates who don’t abide by the rules can be booted to traditionally run parts of the jail, from which they can work their way back to a recovery pod, if they wish. A waiting list to get into the pods has existed since soon after they opened.

Kenton County’s jail experiment has helped forge a local constituency to support recovering drug addicts once they’ve resumed life on the outside, as well. The Life Learning Center, a large nonprofit, expanded its mission in response to the jail experiment and now serves inmates leaving Kenton’s recovery pods. As an inmate’s release date nears, jail staff help them arrange sober housing. When they’re released, a shuttle first takes them directly to the center, allowing them to avoid city buses, where they might meet old friends and use again. A Life Learning Center social worker signs them up for Medicaid and helps get them continued treatment with Suboxone or naltrexone. The center provides clothes, food, a workout space, tattoo removal, visits to a salon to get hair and nails done, and 12-step meetings. A continuum of care is common in other forms of medicine, but not in addiction treatment. In Kenton County, it began with the jail recovery-pod experiment.

Those who complete their jail time in a recovery pod and get post-release care seem to do much better than those who serve time in other parts of the jail. The Life Learning Center’s study of graduates from 2018 to 2020 found a 24 percent recidivism rate among those who came out of the jail’s recovery pod and completed the center’s after-release program; nationwide, recidivism rates hover above 80 percent for inmates who get no treatment in jail or in an after-release program.

Communities across America are now beginning to receive funds dislodged from drug companies as part of settlements for their role in creating the opioid epidemic. The country will be stronger if these billions of dollars help create recovery-ready communities. Addiction recovery, among many benefits, is a key to the resuscitation of many neighborhoods and small, rural American towns.

In an era of rampant fentanyl and meth use, drug courts and a reimagined jail—alongside robust support for voluntary treatment—should be foundations for that revival. An arrest can be an act of compassion when the odds are that, outside, meth will drive a user mad and fentanyl will kill him.

Kenton’s recovery-focused jail pods—and those being developed in Denver, in Columbus, and elsewhere—are giving us ideas of what works and what doesn’t. They are not panaceas; this crisis has no single solution. But in a polarized debate, they offer a third way—rejecting both the “throw away the key” philosophy of yore and the “harm reduction” doctrine that we should simply wait for addicts in tents to develop readiness for treatment on their own, or that selling fentanyl ought to be a misdemeanor. I find them to be welcome jolts of innovation at a time when towns everywhere are desperate for new ideas.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

Shu-Sin was the king of Sumer from about 2000 B.C.E. Although his wife’s name is lost to history, her legendary words are not. Carved on a cuneiform tablet is an ode to their love, containing these lines:

Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,
Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,
Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,
Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.

And down to today, this kind of romantic attachment is one of the best predictors of happiness that social scientists have identified. For example, my review of the General Social Survey finds that although 27 percent of married Americans said they were “very happy” with their lives, only 11 percent of those respondents who were never married, divorced, separated, or widowed answered this way. (Obviously, marriage is not the only romantic arrangement, but it is the one most often studied.) And research in the Journal of Research in Personality has shown that marriage can protect happiness in adulthood.

These findings may help explain the well-documented decline in American happiness, especially among young adults. In a nutshell, the U.S. is moving from a society based on couples to one based on singles. The percentage of adults who are currently married has fallen from almost 70 in 1960 to about 50 today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Pew Research Center shows that roughly four in 10 adults ages 25–54 are neither married nor living with a partner, up from 29 percent in 1990.

The solution to the happiness deficit—for the nation as well as among individuals—is simply to encourage more people to pair off, right? Maybe not. A closer look at the singles trend suggests that the problem is not a lack of available partners, but that young adults may inadvertently be avoiding romantic attachment. That is the challenge we face.

Psychologists commonly measure the health of attachment through two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance (the latter meaning a resistance to intimacy). To score lower on each dimension is better: Healthy bonding is neither anxious nor avoidant, hence the phrase secure attachment. In contrast, an insecure bond can involve someone being anxious but not avoidant, avoidant but not anxious, or both. (The terms psychologists use to describe each category are fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing, respectively.)

Unfortunately, insecure attachment is becoming more and more common. According to a 2020 analysis in the journal Emerging Adulthood, over the past two decades, successive groups of studied college students have shown an increasing likelihood of experiencing one of the insecure “styles,” rising from 61 percent of them during 2002–06 to 71 percent during 2016–19. One particular insecure style—avoidance—is associated with a greater preference for singlehood. That tells us that the underlying problem is chiefly one of greater avoidance.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Love is medicine for fear]

Scholars have found novel evidence of this trend in indirect ways as well. For example, a 2022 study asked 469 adults whose average age was 34 to name their favorite song; the researchers then analyzed the lyrics. They found that people who scored higher in attachment avoidance preferred songs with lyrics that expressed this style. (An example the researchers give is the late Tina Turner’s avoidant masterpiece “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which features the lyric “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”) They then looked at the 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015 and found that avoidant themes appeared on the list more and more over this period.

The prevalence of avoidant attachment is a more plausible explanation for the increase in unhappiness among young adults than their simply being uncoupled. After all, we also know that singlehood can make some people happier, and that a bad romantic partnership is clearly worse than no relationship at all. But in contrast to that mixed picture, many studies show that avoidant attachment is associated with lower satisfaction with life.

So what is provoking this mass romantic avoidance? Two psychologists provided clues in a paper published in 2022 that was based on surveys of university students in Cyprus, including what led them to prefer being single. Strongly predictive of singledom, the researchers found, was not only a preoccupation with work and career but also the pervasiveness of so-called dark-triad personality characteristics (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). In other words, people may avoid romantic commitment if they are especially self-centered or work-focused.

Additional findings suggest that young adults are registering higher on both counts. Survey research measuring differences between generations showed that roughly 70 percent of college students scored higher on measures of narcissism than the average student did 30 years prior. And, as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson has written, young adults have a growing propensity to follow an ideology he calls “workism,” a belief that work provides one’s sense of identity and purpose. He also cites research showing, for example, that the main effect for young women of attending a selective college is longer work hours. Such dedication is usually regarded as admirable—yet it often comes at the cost of human connection.

I believe romantic-attachment avoidance is the missing link in the research between singlehood and the epidemic of unhappiness among young adults. Happiness is decreased by emotional isolation; we need people who know us deeply and with whom we can be vulnerable. All of this suggests that to get happier, “Pair up” is probably not the right advice. Better to solve the avoidance problem per se.

Some of the causes of avoidance are obvious, such as the way social media encourages an intense focus on oneself rather than others. Research shows that social-media use is associated with greater narcissism (as well as depression and anxiety). In addition, a diminished influence of traditional institutions that provide meaning, including religion and family, can explain why young people are turning to work to find a sense of life’s purpose.

[Listen: The complexities of human love]

But it is too easy to exculpate ourselves as a society by pointing to technology and trends we can scarcely control, and young adults may not be in a position to address their avoidant behavior. The rest of us can help. As an academic and a parent of young-adult children, I see vividly how people my age and in my position simultaneously encourage young adults to feel at the center of their own universe and set them up to seek as much professional achievement as possible. Modern parents, and universities in loco parentis, bear a lot of responsibility for convincing young adults both that they are No. 1 and that their worth as people can and should be measured by worldly success. We are inadvertently leaving them isolated, lonely, and bereft of what really matters: secure, loving connections with others.

If we want to create a happier future for ourselves and others, we will need to invite more love and romance into life (as well as such downstream delights as families and babies). Or as E. M. Forster put it pithily in his novel Howards End, “Only connect!” The trends are discouraging, but the good news is that a plausible source of our romantic-avoidance problem is not a mystery, and we can combat it by speaking the truth about life and work, as opposed to propagating self-inflating, workaholic nonsense that pushes love away.

To that end, let me propose a place to start, with three simple messages: You are not better or more special than others; you are not alive simply to work; happiness comes from loving and being loved. These three ideas transgress conventional modern thinking—and that’s exactly the point.

Last month, General Motors announced that it would stop producing the Chevy Bolt, an electric hatchback known for its low price (under $20,000, after federal incentives) and modest size (about 3,600 pounds, or roughly half a Rivian R1T truck). Although the Bolt has been GM’s most popular EV, the company is retooling its factory to build electric pickups instead. The new Equinox EV, which will be about 21 inches longer, 500 pounds heavier, and at least $3,000 more expensive than the Bolt, will become GM’s entry-level electric model.

Americans considering a new electric vehicle can choose from an unprecedented array of options, but most of them lie on the spectrum between big and gigantic. Among the SUVs and trucks dominating carmakers’ growing EV lineups are the Cadillac Lyric (which weighs about 5,900 pounds), the Chevy Silverado EV (more than 8,000 pounds), and the GMC Hummer EV (more than 9,000 pounds). “If someone wants a small EV, it will be very difficult” to find one, Carla Bailo, the former CEO of the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research, told me.

Policy makers have high expectations for electric vehicles, which could help wean the American transportation system off fossil fuels. The Biden administration has announced several initiatives to accelerate the transition to EVs, in the name of fighting climate change and protecting autoworker jobs. Yet the relentless enlargement of American EVs is an ominous development for road safety, because added weight and height make cars more dangerous for anyone walking, biking, or inside smaller vehicles. Deaths among both pedestrians and cyclists recently reached 40-year highs in the U.S., and researchers have found vehicle size to be a cause. Bigger cars pose greater danger because of their height, which expands blind spots and makes the vehicle more likely to strike a person’s torso instead of their legs, and because of their weight, which adds force in a crash and elongates braking distances. Because of their large batteries, electric vehicles are about one-third heavier than equivalent gas-powered models.  

[Angie Schmitt: Big cars are killing Americans]

Unfortunately, few shoppers consider risks to nonpassengers when selecting their next car, and electrification-enthused federal officials have avoided acknowledging the obvious risks of oversize EVs, let alone proposing solutions. Unless that changes, the electrified future of American cars is poised to be a deadly one.

As I wrote in The Atlantic in January, automakers’ push for ever-larger EVs echoes their strategy with gas-powered models. When Sergio Marchionne, the late Fiat Chrysler CEO, nixed all of Chrysler’s sedans in 2016, he set an example for the rest of the U.S. auto industry, which would rather make large, highly profitable SUVs and trucks than cheap mass-market cars. Four out of every five new vehicles sold in the U.S. are either SUVs or trucks, which are themselves gaining inches and pounds relative to comparable vehicles in the recent past.

These trends have boosted automakers’ bottom line. “A small car can get you profit margins of 2 to 3 percent, max. But with trucks and SUVs, you can get 20 to 30 percent profit,” Bailo said. “You can put in a large battery, take the profit down to 8 percent, and you’re still looking pretty good.”  Of the 23 EVs introduced over the past two years, 17 are SUVs, and all but four have a starting price of more than $45,000. Meanwhile, potential buyers seeking a smaller electric car for less than $35,000 are down to the Nissan Leaf and the Hyundai Kona.

Automakers offer an intuitive response when asked how their hefty EV lineups affect road safety: They are merely providing the big cars that Americans want, only now in a climate-friendly format. After all, consumer spending has been moving toward larger models for decades. “Over the years, policymakers would often ask: ‘When are we going to see a broader set of offerings in the #electricvehicle space? When are we going to see SUVs? When are we going to see pickup trucks?” John Bozzella, the CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, wrote earlier this year on LinkedIn. “Here. We. Are.”

But car executives are hardly passive bystanders in that shift. This is an industry that invests billions of dollars annually in advertising—much of it now touting the style, performance, and supposed greenness of the biggest EV models. Never mind that the environmental benefits of electric SUVs and trucks are dubious at best. Manufacturing large batteries entails more extraction of minerals like lithium and cobalt, while charging them requires additional electricity. Their extra weight also generates more particulate emissions from brake pads and tires.

Under current market conditions, it’s unclear how or if the trend toward EV enormity will end.  Electricity—unlike gasoline—seldom undergoes price swings that might send buyers rushing toward smaller models (as happened with conventional cars during the oil crises of the 1970s). Profit-minded automakers have little reason to change course, and Americans aren’t forcing them to.The trend has become self-amplifying. The decision of some drivers to purchase large vehicles pushes everyone else to do the same. Consumers face a prisoner’s dilemma: The choices they make in protecting their individual interest (in this case, by buying a bigger car) end up leaving everyone worse off (by making collisions more dangerous, and by increasing the cost of a new vehicle).  

Only one force in the United States—the federal government—can halt the growth in EVs’ size and weight.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, could revise its emissions standards to consider not just tailpipe emissions (which EVs do not produce) but also pollutants from charging electric batteries, which scale with vehicle size. “If all EVs are treated as having no emissions, carmakers could meet EPA rules by selling big EVs,” Peter Huether, a senior research associate at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me. “But if upstream emissions are included, there is an incentive to sell more efficient EVs.”

Alternatively, Congress could follow Norway’s lead and affix a weight-based tax to the heaviest cars—however they are powered—thereby nudging buyers toward smaller, lighter models. And it could require buyers of the most egregiously oversize vehicles, such as the 26,000-pound Ford F-650 recently acquired by the University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders, to obtain commercial driver’s licenses.

[David Zipper: Electric vehicles are bringing out the worst in us]

The feds can also tackle car-safety regulations directly through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the Department of Transportation. NHTSA recently proposed new crash tests that would for the first time evaluate the danger that a vehicle’s design poses to pedestrians (other countries adopted such tests many years ago). But even if models’ pedestrian-crash-test ratings are shared at dealerships (and it isn’t clear that they would be), they are merely an educational tool. Yesterday, NHTSA suggested adjusting the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to require that new cars be equipped with automatic emergency-braking systems that detect pedestrians, but the new rule will take at least four years to go into effect. Moreover, unlike vehicle-size restrictions, which the highway-safety agency has consistently declined to pursue, the proposed emergency braking will not protect cyclists—and will provide minimal value to pedestrians if the vehicle is traveling above 40 miles per hour.

The DOT spokesperson Dani Simons defended the agency’s response to expanding vehicle size by noting the complexity of the federal regulatory process. “You need to be extremely precise,” she told me. “If NHTSA does a rule-making, they have to set some kind of cutoff, like saying that cars 10,001 pounds and over are dangerous, but those below that are okay. You'll need some way to be able to measure and enforce it, and you have to have research to defend it.” Mark Rosekind, who led NHTSA during the Obama administration, also counseled patience. “The problem from the federal side is that a big ship can take a long time to change direction,” he told me.

Putting aside byzantine federal regulatory processes, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—the most visible and media-savvy occupant of the position in recent memory—could still do far more to draw attention to the problem. The agency can hold open forums exploring the crash risks of EVs, publish reports highlighting safety problems with larger cars, and send public letters to automakers inquiring about their plans to offer Americans the option of buying smaller EV models. None of this seems to be happening.

By setting a goal that half of all new car sales be electric by 2030 and vowing to end the federal purchase of gas-powered cars by 2035, the Biden administration has gone all in on electrification. The White House would much rather talk about EVs’ ability to create jobs than their potential to worsen the road-safety crisis. And because SUVs and trucks dominate American car sales, anything perceived as criticism of those vehicles risks alienating drivers while antagonizing carmakers and the United Auto Workers union (a key Democratic constituency in swing states).

Instead of raising concerns about larger models, President Joe Biden has embraced the very embodiment of EV bloat: the Goliath-like GMC Hummer EV, whose battery alone weighs more than a Honda Civic. Biden took a joyride in an electric Hummer in 2021, which GM credited for boosting preorders. In January, the president tweeted a picture of himself inside one while touting new federal rebates—even though the 2023 Hummer EV’s suggested price, which starts at $87,000, makes it too expensive to qualify for them.

The tension between EV size and road safety is an awkward one for Buttigieg, whose National Roadway Safety Strategy commits the federal government to a goal of zero traffic deaths, but who frequently touts the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for car electrification. In a February interview in Fast Company, Buttigieg was asked how regulations could address the danger that trucks and SUVs pose to pedestrians. He punted: “I think it’s important to do further research to look at how all the different trends in how vehicles are designed—their size, or composition, their weight, their proportions, even their shape—can affect safety.”

That’s an excuse. Ample research already ties vehicle size to the rising number of crash deaths in the U.S. (a trend that other rich countries are not experiencing). Politics seems to be preventing Buttigieg from admitting what others, including National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy, have been saying with growing urgency: America’s penchant for big cars is killing people, and electrification could exacerbate the problem.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that state and city officials are not under the same political constraints as the Biden administration. Although creativity is required, they can adopt their own policies to counteract EVs’ expanding size. Some of them already are.

The District of Columbia, for instance, recently revamped its vehicle-registration program to charge those owning most cars weighing more than 6,000 pounds $500 a year, seven times more than owners of small sedans. ( D.C. made one notable concession to EVs’ battery weight: They can weigh up to 7,000 pounds before the $500 fee kicks in.) A recent bill proposed in California’s legislature suggests a similar change. Another novel approach comes from Colorado, where new legislation would provide a $2,500 subsidy to those buying EVs with suggested retail prices below $35,000—a threshold that would exclude all but the most modest models.

As admirable as these state and local efforts are, their reach will be limited. In the 1960s, Congress decided that the federal government itself would oversee automotive safety. (Ironically, that move was taken in part to address the concern, raised in Ralph Nader’s classic book Unsafe at Any Speed, that car companies wielded excessive influence in statehouses.)

A serious response to EV bloat requires robust federal action, but little evidence suggests that it’s coming. Instead, GM’s decision to convert its Chevy Bolt plant to produce pickup trucks seems like a harbinger of deadly crashes ahead. Brace yourself.

Lucas Peilert contributed research to this article.

Any day now, the Supreme Court could strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions—an outcome that would represent a dramatic setback for racial equality in the United States. What should schools do in response? Some advocates have proposed giving preference to applicants with low socioeconomic status, regardless of race—for example, students whose parents have low levels of wealth. Because African Americans tend to have less wealth than white Americans, the thinking goes, wealth-based affirmative action would still give a boost to Black students.

But wealth-based preferences are not an adequate substitute for race-based affirmative action. Not only will they fail to achieve the level of Black student enrollment that proponents promise; they also will exclude deserving middle-class Black students. And they won’t account for the historical harms that made affirmative action necessary in the first place. Regardless of the Court’s ruling, university administrators should not give up on race-based affirmative action; they should dare to keep employing it, in hopes of mounting future legal challenges and with a willingness to accept legal consequences for their civil disobedience.

Several of the justices on today’s Supreme Court take the fanciful position that inequality can be attacked only by ignoring the race of its victims. Advocates of wealth-based affirmative action embrace this hope. But my books, The Color of Law and Just Action (co-authored with Leah Rothstein), demonstrate that America needs race-specific remedies to redress race-specific crimes.

African Americans today still suffer from the effects of unlawful and unconstitutional public and private policies of the past that were explicitly designed to maintain them in a subordinate status. These policies were so powerful that they continue to keep Black college applicants at a disadvantage. Median Black household wealth is, at most, 13 percent of the white median. This gap is largely attributable to federal policies that, in the 20th century, denied subsidies for homeownership to African Americans. White families, meanwhile, received government support that allowed them to accumulate equity as their homes appreciated in value; much of this equity was then bequeathed to subsequent generations. Hispanic and Asian Americans, as well as members of other groups, were also sometimes disfavored, but public and private discrimination against them was less harsh, diminished much sooner, and was less consistent.

The argument in favor of wealth-based affirmative action was articulated earlier this year in a Slate article by three academics—Peter Dreier, Richard Kahlenberg, and Melvin Oliver. They wrote that by giving preference to students on the basis of their low household wealth rather than their race, colleges and universities can still “preserve important gains in racial diversity.” The authors focus on wealth instead of income, they note, because the racial wealth gap is larger than the racial income gap.

For one of these authors, Kahlenberg, class-based preferences are not a second-best alternative following a potential Court defeat of race-based preferences; he is part of the plaintiff team that challenged the admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina in the two affirmative-action cases before the Court this term.

[Richard D. Kahlenberg: The affirmative action that colleges really need]

Proposals like that of Dreier, Kahlenberg, and Oliver are flawed on two counts.

First, low-wealth admissions preferences will not achieve the racial diversity that proponents expect. They seem to forget that in this country, there are many more white Americans than African Americans overall. Although a larger share of the Black population is low-wealth than the share of the white population in that status, the potential pool of low-wealth applicants will still have a much larger number of white than Black students. According to the most recent Federal Reserve data (2019), only 31 percent of youths from households in the bottom quarter of the national wealth distribution (net worth of $12,400 or less) are Black. If students in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (net worth of $121,700 or less) were given preference in admissions, an even smaller share of the low-wealth eligible applicants—24 percent—would be Black.

Black students might be expected to be overrepresented in any wealth-based affirmative-action program because their overall share of the population of 17-year-olds—the age at which students typically apply to college—is only 15 percent. But much, if not all, of this apparent advantage could disappear because of the ongoing effects of residential segregation.

Compared with those in poor white households, poor African Americans are more likely to live in places with higher poverty levels, more pollution-spewing industry, greater overcrowding, lesser-quality retail outlets, more exposure to violence and the trauma of discriminatory policing, fewer markets selling fresh food but more fast-food outlets, fewer bank branches but more payday lenders charging exorbitant interest rates, and less access to transportation for better job opportunities. Among 17-year-olds, African Americans are nearly five times as likely as white Americans to be incarcerated in juvenile-detention facilities or adult prisons on any given day. This concentration of disadvantages results in schools that are overwhelmed by students’ social and economic challenges. Students in these schools are less likely to have grades and test scores that make them eligible for competitive colleges compared with white students from families in similar economic circumstances.

Poverty among low-income white households also tends to be more episodic, while Black poverty is more sustained. During the Great Recession, Black homeownership rates fell faster and later recovered more slowly than white homeownership rates, with greater declines in home equity. More Black than white homeowners relocated to poorer neighborhoods. We can’t expect low-wealth Black students to apply for college at the same rates as low-wealth white students under these circumstances.

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

The second flaw in wealth-based affirmative action is that even if it resulted in more Black students, it would exclude middle-class Black youths whose families’ multigenerational experience of discrimination and exclusion still leaves them at a disadvantage compared with their white peers. About half of all Black children are from families in the Federal Reserve’s low-wealth category. But the other half are not, including the 26 percent of Black households in the next-to-bottom quartile (net worth more than $12,400, but less than the national median of $121,700). Many Black households in that quartile are among the 45 percent of African Americans who are homeowners but who generally have less equity in their property than the 75 percent of white Americans who own homes.

Many predominantly middle-class Black communities are adjacent to low-income areas, and they tend to have higher poverty rates than places where middle-class white people reside. As a result, middle-class Black children are more likely to attend under-resourced schools than economically similar white children, and they are more often subject to discriminatory police practices such as “stop and frisk.” They also are more frequently exposed to, and sometimes pulled into, petty criminal and violent behaviors. Students from these middle-class Black neighborhoods who avoid such temptations are more likely than low-wealth Black students to be academically competitive, and they deserve affirmative action.

The level of economic inequality in America is unacceptable. But college-admissions preferences cannot aim to reform the entire lopsided social structure. That’s a job for economic policy. What higher-education recruitment and affirmative action for African American youth can reasonably achieve is something more modest: helping those from the lowest economic quartile be the first in their family to attend community or state college, and helping typical youth from the middle two quartiles compete for admission to more selective institutions.

Of course, there are low-wealth families with children who excel, and middle-wealth families whose children don’t. But typical academic achievement of children at the low end of the socioeconomic scale is considerably below that of children at higher end. Proposals like Dreier, Kahlenberg, and Oliver’s would leapfrog the most disadvantaged Black youth into elite environments, skipping over Black middle-class students whose families’ multigenerational experience of discrimination and exclusion leaves them at continuing disadvantage. Policies focused on low-wealth students, deferring to the Supreme Court’s insistence on race-blindness, will miss these promising young people.

[Drew Gilpin Faust: The blindness of ‘color-blindness’]

In a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kahlenberg asserted that in America, “unequal opportunity is increasingly associated with class rather than race” (my emphasis). The reality is that opportunity is associated with both class and race. De-emphasizing race, as Kahlenberg and others argue for, only gives cover to opponents of racial justice, allowing them to point to the support of race-blind liberals as proof that opposition to affirmative action advances civil rights.

Kahlenberg also has justified his opposition to racial preferences by noting that they antagonize white people, and thus can impede the formation of majority coalitions to pursue economic programs that would benefit all races and ethnicities. He’s correct. For hundreds of years, racial justice has antagonized many members of, if not most of, the white population. Desegregating lunch counters antagonized white people; desegregating buses antagonized white people; desegregating schools antagonized white people (and still does). The best hope for creating interracial alliances is not to downplay race. It’s to educate Americans of all races about the causes of Black disadvantage and our obligation to address it.

If the Supreme Court deems race-based affirmative action unconstitutional, protesting the Court’s decisions or accepting inferior substitutes for race-based affirmative preferences won’t be sufficient. Admissions officers at competitive universities should continue to pursue affirmative action for Black applicants as they build a stronger case for it.

In the late 1850s, Republicans led by Abraham Lincoln called on Americans to disregard the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision by taking continuous action to protect the freedom of runaway slaves and to enforce free African Americans’ citizenship rights, both of which the Court’s ruling had prohibited. Lincoln anticipated that every act of defiance, each with its own set of facts, would lead to new litigation that might generate dissenting opinions. These would cascade to an ultimate reversal of Dred Scott by a Supreme Court that finally came to recognize that the decision had been contrary to the Constitution. In more recent history, abortion opponents spent 40 years passing law after law that openly defied Roe v. Wade, which eventually culminated in the Dobbs decision that reversed it.

[From the October 1957 issue: Dredd Scott—a century after]

University presidents should have no less courage. They should continue to implement race-specific affirmative action, in defiance of the Supreme Court.

In 1978, the Court ruled that colleges could consider race in college admissions only for the purpose of ensuring diversity in an entering class. Affirmative action for African Americans, in other words, was permissible because it enhanced the educational experience of white students. Civil-rights advocates bought into this argument. But the real reason we need affirmative action is that it is an important part of our society’s ability to remedy the effects of past discrimination—effects so powerful that they continue to depress applications from Black students today.

University presidents who defend their affirmative-action programs on these grounds will offer lower-court judges and dissenting justices a new opportunity to support affirmative action as a legitimate remedy for past harms. In a future we cannot now foresee, they might inspire Supreme Court justices to reject the race-blind ideologies that are currently an obstacle to reform. In the meantime, by continuing to implement race-based affirmative action, colleges can help narrow the racial inequality that so strongly persists in our society.