In rejecting the independent state legislature theory, a thoroughly right-wing Supreme Court sent the message that it will not simply accept whatever ludicrous partisan legal theory its comrades in the conservative legal movement come up with. At least, not every single time.

The theory, as advanced by North Carolina Republicans seeking to ignore a state-supreme-court ruling that their partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution, argued that only state legislatures could set federal election rules, and thus other state actors, like state courts and governors, had no power to intervene. This would allow state legislatures near-unchecked power to disenfranchise their own constituents. The most extreme possible interpretation of the theory, articulated by Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign—that state legislatures can choose to overturn federal election results—helps illustrate the potential stakes.

Yet the theory itself was based on little more than a pedantic misreading of the Constitution and partisan self-interest. Of relatively recent vintage, the theory was cooked up by conservative legal activists and given a veneer of “originalism,” despite, as Thomas Wolf and Ethan Herenstein wrote last year, a century of precedent and practice going in the other direction and a near total absence of historical evidence to support it. Indeed, one of the historical documents submitted by the North Carolina GOP was a literal hoax, emblematic of the conservative movement’s frequent approach to historical analysis. That makes it an excellent example of undead constitutionalism, the right-wing twin of the doctrine of living constitutionalism, in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with contemporary conservatives’ ideological priorities.

“The argument advanced by the defendants and the dissent … does not account for the Framers’ understanding that when legislatures make laws, they are bound by the provisions of the very documents that give them life,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “The legislature acts both as a lawmaking body created and bound by its state constitution, and as the entity assigned particular authority by the Federal Constitution. Both constitutions restrain the legislature’s exercise of power.”

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on the grounds that the case was moot because a newly elected conservative majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the original decision—and he has a point—but then spent the next two sections of his dissent explaining why the crackpot theory was reasonable. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Thomas’s dissent fully, while Justice Samuel Alito joined only the part arguing that the case was moot.

A win for the North Carolina GOP in Moore v. Harper would have extended the Roberts Court’s record of eroding American democracy by gutting voting-rights protections. It also would have been an act of shocking dishonesty on the part of the Supreme Court, which ruled a few short years ago, in another decision curtailing voting rights, that voters could use their state supreme courts and constitutions to push back against partisan gerrymandering. The Court’s decision today sends the message to the conservative legal movement that as conservative as the majority may be, their comrades cannot count on five guaranteed votes for whatever nonsense they come up with. In some cases, such as the clash over the Biden administration’s COVID-vaccine mandate and the recent school-prayer case, the justices are happy to oblige. But not always.

The conservative legal activists who advanced the independent state legislature doctrine will now complain that the Court caved to liberal pressure, part of a chorus of whining that has grown louder amid investigative reporting on the conservative justices’ coziness with right-wing billionaires who have clear ideological interests before the Court.

Perhaps the public criticism of the Court, particularly regarding voting rights, has caused the justices to think more carefully before embracing harebrained legal theories. Some conservative defenders of the Court clearly worry that’s the case, and warn darkly that liberals are trying to “delegitimize” the Court. But the idea that placing pressure on the Court is somehow immoral or inappropriate is laughable. Such complaints are merely another example of Republicans insisting that it is unfair for their political opposition to engage in politics.

The public has the right to criticize the powerful, unelected tribunal that has the power to shape every aspect of their lives. Also, conservatives are constantly engaged in such pressure campaigns, both in public, as a way to encourage the right-wing justices to embrace specious legal theories, and in private, in the form of cultivating social ties with the justices and rewarding them with lavish vacations and expensive gifts. When Republicans complain of liberal efforts to “delegitimize” the Court by engaging in substantive criticism of its rulings and conduct, what they are saying is that they’re the only ones who have the right to exert such pressure. National Review’s argument that “activists have concluded that since they lack ideological control over the Court, it must be delegitimized” is offered as a criticism of the left; it is also a straightforward description of the conservative legal movement from the 1960s to the moment Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as the sixth Republican-appointed justice.

Other commentators may insist that, despite the Roberts Court’s alarming record on voting rights, this ruling and a prior decision rejecting racial gerrymandering in Alabama show that it is not as hostile to democracy as it might seem.

But the idea that the Roberts Court has fully retreated from its efforts to chip away at Americans’ right to self-determination is overstated. As the voting-rights scholar Rick Hasen writes, the language in Roberts’s opinion furnishes a “new tool to be used to rein in especially voter-protective rulings of state courts.” This is a John Roberts specialty, an incremental conservative win that looks like a loss only because it rejects the most extreme right-wing interpretation of the law.

On an empty patch of land in my hometown, a new economic order may be taking shape.

Growing up around Syracuse, New York, at the turn of this century had its share of joys: post-blizzard sledding, minor-league baseball games, chance sightings of Syracuse University basketball players at Wegmans. But the area’s best days seemed to be slipping ever further into the past. One major employer after another abandoned the area for leaner workforces and cheaper pastures abroad. To those of us coming of age then, the blaring signal was that if we wanted opportunity and security, we’d better get out. So many of us did—leaving home, and our families, for the “superstar” cities (in my case, New York) where the good-paying jobs were.

That story of decline and exodus was repeated in any number of cities and towns around the country during those years. It was driven in no small part by place-agnostic policy choices that let the “invisible hand” of the market pick where jobs would go. This led to concentrated growth in a few big cities, while regions like Central New York and much of the Midwest were relegated to stagnation or worse. It fostered animosity among the people who had been sold out, forging a ready-made constituency for Donald Trump and the politics of resentment.

[Ronald Brownstein: Bidenomics really is something new]

But perhaps that story is changing. In October, the semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology announced that it will spend as much as $100 billion over the next 20 years to build a plant outside Syracuse. It’s an unheard-of amount of money for Central New York. The deal was sealed by last summer’s CHIPS and Science Act, a bipartisan $50 billion investment in American-made semiconductor chips. It is, to date, the biggest example of—and the biggest bet on—the Biden administration’s rediscovery of an old idea about the economy: that geography matters. This approach recognizes that when it comes to growth and opportunity, the question is not just how much, but where and for whom. If it succeeds in places like Syracuse, it could transform the American economic and political landscape.

An earlier era of government policy put Syracuse on the map. Nineteenth-century nation-builders such as Henry Clay pushed for an “American System” to support domestic industry and build connective infrastructure. The shining success was the Erie Canal, running from Albany to Buffalo, as upstate–New York schoolchildren still learn through field trips and song. Syracuse sat at its center and was soon transformed from empty swampland into a boomtown. The city grew into a full-fledged manufacturing hub by the 1900s, producing everything from automotive gears to steel to typewriters. The name of my hometown and Micron’s new base just north of Syracuse memorializes the area’s American System heritage: Clay, New York.

During the Great Depression, Syracuse was among the earliest beneficiaries of place-conscious New Deal policy. Then-Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1931 regional-relief legislation put hundreds of residents to work building a park and parkway along Onondaga Lake, on the city’s northwestern edge. (He would nationalize this type of initiative as president to support hard-hit places through programs such as the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority.) In the 1940s, the parkway was essential for transporting workers to a massive new General Electric campus north of the city known as Electronics Park. GE joined the air-conditioner producer Carrier and other manufacturers to form the area’s economic backbone during the postwar boom.

That golden age came under strain in the 1970s. After decades of American industrial dominance, competitors in Europe and Japan began catching up. At the same time, Milton Friedman–style laissez-faire economics was on the rise. So was inflation. Policy makers prioritized national growth and low prices for consumer goods above all else and believed that the best way to achieve them was to get government out of the way. Where that growth took place and those consumer goods were produced was mostly irrelevant. The proceeds, it was claimed, would trickle down to everyone.

This combination of macroeconomic forces and policy choices bludgeoned industry in Syracuse. The GE plant started shifting jobs—including in semiconductor production—overseas during the ’70s. About 20 years after Ronald Reagan visited the Syracuse plant as a GE spokesman, the company closed operations there entirely during his presidency. Other companies followed suit, shedding thousands of jobs in the ’80s and ’90s. Then, after China was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2001, with the United States’ support, a flood of cheap Chinese imports further undercut the local manufacturing base. In the biggest blow, Carrier moved production overseas in 2003, explaining that it could make air conditioners “three times cheaper in Asia.”

Deindustrialization left a void that Syracuse has struggled to fill. There are fewer private-sector jobs in the area today than there were in 2001. The city’s population fell for decades. It has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the nation. GE’s old Electronics Park campus, where 17,000 people once worked, is surrounded by a sprawl of mostly empty parking lots; its current tenants employ fewer than 3,000 people. Until last year, Carrier’s name still graced the university’s famed sports dome, two decades after the company last produced an air conditioner in Syracuse.

The dramatic rise in economic inequality in the U.S. since the 1980s is usually pictured in vertical terms, as a pulling-away of the top earners from everyone below. But the shift toward market fundamentalism also had drastic horizontal effects, creating a map of winners and losers. Merger-friendly regulators waved through corporate acquisitions that saw regional businesses gobbled up by large multinationals headquartered in coastal hubs. The Midwest was already seven years into a recession before the 2008 financial crisis. The few elite cities where job growth clustered, meanwhile, became crushingly expensive to live in. And a pandemic exposed the downsides of place-agnostic economics: Crises anywhere could snap supply chains and throttle economies everywhere.

In response, President Joe Biden’s administration has embraced industrial policy—that is, direct government support for particular domestic industries—through legislation investing in semiconductors, clean energy, and infrastructure. Crucially, but with less fanfare, the administration has also been designing these efforts to reverse decades of geographic redistribution. It aims to invest “in places and communities that risk being left behind,” as the White House economic adviser Heather Boushey said in a recent speech. Brookings Institution researchers identified $80 billion worth of place-based programs in Biden’s laws, with the CHIPS Act leading the pack.

[Read: Why the economic fates of America’s cities diverged]

“There is no doubt that without the CHIPS Act, we would not be here today,” Micron’s chief executive said upon announcing its Syracuse investment. Micron stands to reap billions from the act’s pot of money for new semiconductor plants and could collect even more from a separate investment tax credit. In exchange, the 20-year project is forecasted to directly create 9,000 good-paying jobs, generate another 40,000 jobs at local companies, and raise $17 billion in state tax revenue. Micron has also pledged to fund local child care, achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and spend millions on other community investments. (New York mandated some of these commitments to unlock state subsidies, in part to avoid the kind of blowback that killed the Amazon HQ2 deal in Queens.)

Having been burned before by big promises of new industry that never materialized, many in Syracuse are taking a believe-it-when-we-see-it caution with Micron. But the economics of hope are already gaining visible momentum. Even before Micron breaks ground, the county is preparing for a house-building spree. Underused spaces are being targeted for residential and commercial development. Public transit is being expanded to get workers to and from Micron. Colleges are adding degrees and training programs to seed a semiconductor workforce. Local breweries are crafting semiconductor-inspired lagers.

Biden, who attended Syracuse University for law school, has been a vocal booster of the Micron project. Effective place-based economics may prove politically beneficial for him and the Democratic Party. In 2020, Biden drew support overwhelmingly from the most economically vibrant parts of the country. As opportunity has concentrated in fewer places, so too have the college-educated voters whom Democrats rely on. If more areas grow, the party’s electoral map may too.

Ultimately, Bidenomics will be judged by whether it actually delivers for the people and places that lost out under the old economic-policy consensus. From my adopted home 250 miles away, I’m watching Micron’s arrival with cautious optimism. Americans have long been lauded for our willingness to pick up and move, to “go west” toward new frontiers and opportunities. But maybe we shouldn’t have to. And maybe, in a few decades, we won’t. A generation from now, Syracuse may be churning out semiconductors like it once did televisions and air conditioners. Maybe more children will be able to envision a good middle-class life where their roots are—not just in Syracuse, but in places like Detroit, Columbus, northwestern Indiana, and more. The old order had too little use for too many places. We may be witnessing the birth of a new one that spreads possibility and meaning across more of America.

The government is paralyzed by toxic polarization. Our economic and social systems make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. Marginalized groups continue to fight against centuries of systemic injustices. A pandemic has killed more than 1 million Americans. Meanwhile, preventable “deaths of despair”—including suicide and deaths related to substance abuse—are on the rise. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to have children, citing not only economic concerns but moral ones: How could anyone bring an infant into a world as benighted by cruelty and injustice as this one? The thinking goes like this: The inevitable march of climate change will probably wipe out humanity, anyway. At least, if artificial intelligence doesn’t get there first.

This dismal assessment of America’s prospects feels inescapable in some circles right now.

“Cultural pessimism is more widespread and much more public than it used to be,” Rhys Williams, a Loyola University Chicago sociologist who specializes in the relationship between politics, religion, and social movements in America, told me.

[Read: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

The posture of broad doomerism can feel like a natural response to the major events of the 21st century so far. At times, it can even feel socially expected. After all, how could any reasonable person look at economic strife and racial injustice and mass death and not feel despair?

But part of cultural pessimism’s pervasiveness comes from the fact that it’s self-reinforcing, as a highly marketable narrative of despair that sells resigned inaction (to say nothing of scented candles, bath bubbles, and other products meant to soothe). To break out of the spiral of doom requires not just practical social change, but also a collective reimagining of what the world can be.

It’s possible to treat our collective pessimism not as a function of “the worst possible timeline,” to quote an ubiquitous meme derived from the TV show Community, but rather a natural corollary of our distinctly American optimism: our tradition of idealistic cultural narratives that things ought to be better than they are. If the technological and economic improvements that have marked so much of modern life have allowed us to question—and even become angry about—areas where we perceive work yet to be done, then we’re simply participating in a long-standing American tradition of working toward perfection in an imperfect world.

Such a framework doesn’t lead automatically to social change, of course. But it can provide a compelling collective vision, and hope, for the best of societal ideas. And it can help lead to the kind of social culture necessary for any kind of change to occur—that is, an environment where individuals have both the opportunity and the desire to organize with members of their community in pursuit of collective gain.

This mindset change might seem a long way off. According to one bipartisan NBC study from early 2023, 71 percent of Americans say we’re on the wrong track as a country—the eighth time in the past nine quarters that this survey percentage has crossed 70 percent, marking the longest period of severe American pessimism since polling began more than 30 years ago.

But why now? America has been through public crises before and emerged with greater levels of trust and hope. Just think of October 6, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when public trust in government reached its highest level since before the Nixon administration. Or March 2004, at the dawn of the Iraq War, when a full 71 percent of Americans expressed approval of George W. Bush’s presidency.

So, what’s changed? One strain of answer—recently expressed by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind (which originated in this magazine)—is that the rise of social-justice language, and our increased cultural focus on problems as entrenched and systemic—has conditioned the American public, particularly on the left, to see themselves as helpless victims, unable to effect change. As evidence, Lukianoff and Haidt point to a recent study in SSM—Mental Health that suggested both an increase in self-reported mental-health issues among teenagers, dating back to 2012, and a marked disparity between the mental health of young liberals and young conservatives.

The “wokeness has made us weak” narrative overlooks the degree to which both the rise of social-justice discourse and an ever-more-pervasive sense of cultural pessimism are downstream of a wider phenomenon: an ubiquitous sense of alienation from the foundational mythos of the “American dream” and—no less vitally—from one another. Just as the years since the 2008 financial crisis have shaken our cultural conviction that virtuous hard work leads to economic stability, so, too, has the social-media era transformed our shared political life into a source of alienating infotainment, monetized by the demands of the attention economy. (The rise in depression covered by the Mental Health study also correlates with the increased availability of smartphones and social media for teenagers.)

[Read: The age of social media is ending]

“Social media has pulled back the curtains a bit on institutions and the elites who run them and afforded a rather unflattering view of what goes on behind the scenes,” the Yale sociology professor Philip Gorski told me—“things that in the years of three broadcast-news channels and no national newspapers would never really have penetrated in the public consciousness.” Ordinary social-media users had access, for example, to information about the early failings of the CDC to issue functional COVID-19 tests in early 2020, during the crucial first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, Gorski says, fewer and fewer of us are getting to know the people around us at all. He cited “the gradual decline of voluntary association” in America, as fewer and fewer of us attend religious services, belong to community organizations, or even have close friends. And he said that most Americans “are very unlikely to encounter people who are very much unlike them, much less to come to trust them.” Even if they do, Gorski told me, our political and civic lives have become so self-segregated that “the odds that they’ll really encounter somebody significantly different from them along any number of dimensions is just so much lower than it used to be.”

Williams, of Loyola University Chicago, agreed, saying that today “preexisting communities of solidarity or communities of memory are more difficult to form.” And without real-life, in-person social interactions—particularly with those who don’t share our ideological priors or identities—we struggle more and more to envision the kinds of necessary societal changes that require not just individual but collective action.

“What we’re seeing,” says Musa al-Gharbi, a doctoral student at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite, “is this self-reinforcing negative cycle.” He also calls it a “doom loop” where “cynicism and despair can often encourage nihilism” or there are “people taking cosmetically radical symbolic positions because they don’t do anything, practically speaking.” Cynicism “encourages those kinds of behaviors, which can erode public trust, which can further undermine our capacity to actually achieve change, reinforcing our sense of pessimism.” The academic language of the systemic—a term with specific social-justice applications—has morphed into a wider sense that the system is so rigged that we might as well not bother doing anything at all. If cultural despair is evidence of the gap between ideals and reality, today’s pessimism suggests that the gap feels unbridgeable.

Such a reading might also account for why young liberals seem to report so much more depression than their conservative counterparts. “The expectation versus experience is really the key,” Williams said.

One easy reading of such a mindset might be that progressive idealism is inherently bad for our mental health—expecting grand change can only lead to depression and failure. But the role that expectations play in our sense of contentment also invites us to consider ourselves not as potential dwellers in our end-stage utopia but rather as participants in an unfinished—and perhaps unfinishable—journey toward a more just world. It is a journey that is worth undertaking for its own sake, rather than because we believe results are imminent. We can expect less while still hoping—and working—for more.

Such a mindset shift might help people better reframe their own despair: If someone is dissatisfied, it’s because that person can envision how much better our society could be. But to get there, suggests Cece Jones-Davis, an activist and author who lectures frequently on effective organizing, we have to learn once more to live and work with one another, in communities that require us to lay aside our personal narratives and preferences. We have, in other words, to start small: focusing on achievable local concerns, rather than grand national narratives.

“Once we … bring all the things that we think about every issue in the world” to the table, Jones-Davis said in a telephone interview, “then things fall apart.” Conversely, she said, “when you start small, you’re having smaller circles, smaller conversations; you’re getting to know people; you’re building trust among groups … and everybody starts to get to know everybody.” By forging human relationships at a sustainable scale—and by mobilizing those relationships toward the common good—we can develop pathways toward change.

The doom spiral of cultural pessimism can best be combated by—as internet parlance has it—“touching grass”: encountering human beings in the kind of real-life social situations where change, however small or modest in scale, is possible. That kind of in-person work can help to turn our collective disillusionment into an engine of hope, a reminder that our present disappointments are inextricable from a belief that a better world is something we owe to ourselves—and to one another.