In April, lawyers for the airline Avianca noticed something strange. A passenger, Robert Mata, had sued the airline, alleging that a serving cart on a flight had struck and severely injured his left knee, but several cases cited in Mata’s lawsuit didn’t appear to exist. The judge couldn’t verify them, either. It turned out that ChatGPT had made them all up, fabricating names and decisions. One of Mata’s lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz, had used the chatbot as an assistant—his first time using the program for legal research—and, as Schwartz wrote in an affidavit, “was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

The incident was only one in a litany of instances of generative AI spreading falsehoods, not to mention financial scams, nonconsensual porn, and more. Tech companies are marketing their AI products and potentially reaping enormous profits, with little accountability or legal oversight for the real-world damage those products can cause. The federal government is now trying to catch up.

Late last month, the Biden administration announced that seven tech companies at the forefront of AI development had agreed to a set of voluntary commitments to ensure that their products are “safe, secure, and trustworthy.” Those commitments follow a flurry of White House summits on AI, congressional testimonies on regulating the technology, and declarations from various government agencies that they are taking AI seriously. In the announcement, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others pledged to subject their products to third-party testing, invest in bias reduction, and be more transparent about their AI systems’ capabilities and limitations.

[Read: America already has an AI underclass]

The language is promising but also just a promise, lacking enforcement mechanisms and details about next steps. Regulating AI requires a lumbering bureaucracy to take on notoriously secretive companies and rapidly evolving technologies. Much of the Biden administration’s language apes tech luminaries’ PR lines about their products’ world-ending capacities, such as bioweapons and machines that “self-replicate.” Government action will be essential for safeguarding people’s lives and livelihoods—not just from the supposed long-term threat of evil, superintelligent machines, but also from everyday threats. Generative AI has already exhibited gross biases and potential for misuse. And for more than a decade, less advanced but similarly opaque and often discriminatory algorithms have been used to screen résumés and determine credit scores, in diagnostic software, and as part of facial-recognition tools.

I spoke with a number of experts and walked away with a list of five of the most effective ways the government could regulate AI to protect the country against the tech’s quotidian risks, as well as its more hypothetical, apocalyptic dangers.

1. Don’t take AI companies’ word on anything.

A drug advertised for chemotherapy has to demonstrably benefit cancer patients in clinical trials, such as by shrinking tumors, and then get FDA approval. Then its manufacturer has to disclose side effects patients might experience. But no such accountability exists for AI products. “Companies are making claims about AI being able to do X or Y thing, but then not substantiating that they can,” Sarah Myers West, the managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former senior FTC adviser on AI, told me. Numerous tech firms have been criticized for misrepresenting how biased or effective their algorithms are, or providing almost no evidence with which to evaluate them.

Mandating that AI tools undergo third-party testing to ensure that they meet agreed-upon metrics of bias, accuracy, and interpretability “is a really important first step,” Alexandra Givens, the president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for privacy and human rights on the internet and receives some funding from the tech industry, told me. Companies could be compelled to disclose information about how their programs were trained, the software’s limitations, and how they mitigated potential harms. “Right now, there’s extraordinary information asymmetry,” she said—tech companies tend to reveal very little about how they train and validate their software. An audit could involve testing how often, say, a computer-vision program misrecognizes Black versus white faces or whether chatbots associate certain jobs with stereotypical gender roles (ChatGPT once stated that attorneys cannot be pregnant, because attorneys must be men).

All of the experts I spoke with agreed that the tech companies themselves shouldn’t be able to declare their own products safe. Otherwise, there is a substantial risk of “audit washing”—in which a dangerous product gains legitimacy from a meaningless stamp of approval, Ellen Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers, told me. Although numerous proposals currently call for after-the-fact audits, others have called for safety assessments to start much earlier. The potentially high-stakes applications of AI mean that these companies should “have to prove their products are not harmful before they can release them into the marketplace,” Safiya Noble, an internet-studies scholar at UCLA, told me.

Clear benchmarks and licenses are also crucial: A government standard would not be effective if watered down, and a hodgepodge of safety labels would breed confusion to the point of being illegible, similar to the differences among free-range, cage-free, and pasture-raised eggs.

2. We don’t need a Department of AI.

Establishing basic assessments of and disclosures about AI systems wouldn’t require a new government agency, even though that’s what some tech executives have called for. Existing laws apply to many uses for AI: therapy bots, automated financial assistants, search engines promising truthful responses. In turn, the relevant federal agencies have the subject expertise to enforce those laws; for instance, the FDA could have to assess and approve a therapy bot like a medical device. “In naming a central AI agency that’s going to do all the things, you lose the most important aspect of algorithmic assessment,” Givens said, “which is, what is the context in which it is being deployed, and what is the impact on that particular set of communities?”

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

A new AI department could run the risk of creating regulatory capture, with major AI companies staffing, advising, and lobbying the agency. Instead, experts told me, they’d like to see more funding for existing agencies to hire staff and develop expertise on AI, which might require action from Congress. “There could be a very aggressive way in which existing enforcement agencies could be more empowered to do this if you provided them more resources,” Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, told me.

3. The White House can lead by example.

Far-reaching legislation to regulate AI could take years and face challenges from tech companies in court. Another, possibly faster approach could involve the federal government acting by example in the AI models it uses, the research it supports, and the funding it disburses. For instance, earlier this year, a federal task force recommended that the government commit $2.6 billion to funding AI research and development. Any company hoping to access those resources could be forced to meet a number of standards, which could lead to industry-wide adoption—somewhat akin to the tax incentives and subsidies encouraging green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act.

The government is also a major purchaser and user of AI itself, and could require its vendors to subject themselves to audits and release transparency reports. “The biggest thing the Biden administration can do is make it binding administration policy that AI can only be purchased, developed, used if it goes through meaningful testing for safety, efficacy, nondiscrimination, and protecting people’s privacy,” Givens told me.

4. AI needs a tamper-proof seal.

Deepfakes and other synthetic media—images, videos, and audio clips that an AI system can whip up in seconds—have already spread misinformation and been used in nonconsensual pornography. Last month’s voluntary commitments include developing a watermark to tell users they are interacting with AI-generated content, but the language is vague and the path forward unclear. Many existing methods of watermarking, such as the block of rainbow pixels at the bottom of any image generated by DALL-E 2, are easy to manipulate or remove. A more robust method would involve logging where, when, and how a piece of media was created—like a digital stamp from a camera—as well as every edit it undergoes. Companies including Adobe, Microsoft, and Sony are already working to implement one such standard, although such approaches might be difficult for the public to understand.

Sam Gregory, the executive director of the human-rights organization Witness, told me that government standards for labeling AI-generated content would need to be enforced throughout the AI supply chain by everybody from the makers of text-to-image models to app and web-browser developers. We need a tamper-proof seal, not a sticker.

[Read: It’s time to worry about deepfakes again]

To encourage the adoption of a standard way to denote AI content, Goodman told me, the government could mandate that web browsers, computers, and other devices recognize the label. Such a mandate would be similar to the federal requirement that new televisions include a part, known as a “V-chip,” that recognizes the maturity ratings set by the TV industry, which parents can use to block programs.

5. Build ways for people to protect their work from AI.

Multiple high-profile lawsuits are currently accusing AI models, such as ChatGPT and the image-generator Midjourney, of stealing writers’ and artists’ work. Intellectual property has become central to debates over generative AI, and two general types of copyright infringement are at play: the images, text, and other data the models are trained on, and the images and text they spit back out.

On the input side, allegations that generative-AI models are violating copyright law may stumble in court, Daniel Gervais, a law professor at Vanderbilt, told me. Making copies of images, articles, videos, and other media online to develop a training dataset likely falls under “fair use,” because training an AI model on the material meaningfully transforms it. The standard for proving copyright violations on the output side may also pose difficulties, because proving that an AI output is similar to a specific copyrighted work—not just in the style of Kehinde Wiley, but the spitting image of one of his paintings—is a high legal threshold.

Gervais said he imagines that a market-negotiated agreement between rights-holders and AI developers will arrive before any sort of legal standard. In the EU, for instance, artists and writers can opt out of having their work used to train AI, which could incentivize a deal that’s in the interest of both artists and Silicon Valley. “Publishers see this as a source of income, and the tech companies have invested so much in their technology,” Gervais said. Another possible option would be an even more stringent opt-in standard, which would require anybody owning copyrighted material to provide explicit permission for their data to be used. In the U.S., Gervais said, an option to opt out may be unnecessary. A law passed to protect copyright on the internet makes it illegal to strip a file of its “copyright management information,” such as labels with the work’s creator and date of publication, and many observers allege that creating datasets to train generative AI violates that law. The fine for removing such information could run up to tens of thousands of dollars per work, and even higher for other copyright infringements—a financial risk that, multiplied by perhaps millions of violations in a dataset, could be too big for companies to take.

Few, if any, of these policies are guaranteed. They face numerous practical, political, and legal hurdles, not least of which is Silicon Valley’s formidable lobbying arm. Nor will such regulations alone be enough to stop all the ways the tech can negatively affect Americans. AI is rife with the privacy violations, monopolistic business practices, and poor treatment of workers, all of which have plagued the tech industry for years.

But some sort of regulation is coming: The Biden administration has said it is working on bipartisan legislation, and it promised guidance on the responsible use of AI by federal agencies before the end of summer; numerous bills are pending before Congress. Until then, tech companies may just continue to roll out new and untested products, no matter who or what is steamrolled in the process.

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Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment was: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” This weekend, Mike Pence—like most of the GOP field—struggled mightily to criticize Donald Trump while barely mentioning Trump’s name.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ibram X. Kendi: Working class does not equal white. Trump is acting like he’s cornered. The burden of proof is on the language police.

Scared to Say His Name

Let us remind ourselves to speak well of Mike Pence for one moment. Not only did he do his constitutional duty on January 6, 2021, thereby averting the collapse of the U.S. government and the bloodshed that likely would have followed, but lately he seems to be exerting visible caloric effort to criticize the man he served as vice president. And yet, like so many other leading Republicans, Pence seems to be under a kind of necromancer’s curse in which he risks being struck dumb when trying to say Donald Trump’s name.

Yesterday, the CBS correspondent Major Garrett asked Pence whether he’d still vote for Trump. It was an opportunity to knock a softball out of the park. Instead, he flailed.

Major Garrett: Would you ever vote again for Donald Trump?

Mike Pence: Look, I don’t think I’ll have to. I have to tell you, everywhere I go—

Garrett: That wasn’t the question, Mr. Vice President. Would you ever vote for Donald Trump again?

Pence: Yeah. Yeah, I know what your question is, but let me be very clear: I’m running for president because I don’t think anyone who ever puts himself over the Constitution should ever be president or should ever be president again.

Well, that’s one way to go. Another would be to say, “I know from personal experience that Donald Trump is the most dangerous man ever to sit in the Oval Office, and I will do everything I can to stop him.” To his (again, very small) credit, Pence did open the interview by using Trump’s name long enough to say that he was “wrong” on January 6. Trump, Pence said, “asked me to put him over the Constitution that day, but I chose the Constitution and I always will.” When asked if he would testify against Trump, Pence again whimpered: “I have no plans to testify, but people can be confident we’ll—we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes, and we’ll just tell the truth.”

This is not exactly breathtaking defiance. Nor should we be overly impressed by an American politician affirming that he would honor an oath to the Constitution he’s repeatedly taken in the past. But in these strange times, we take what we can get. Still, Pence was clearly uncomfortable with the question and did everything he could to leave Trump’s name out of the discussion, which is an odd thing to do when you’re heading a campaign against your own former running mate.

Likewise, consider Ron DeSantis’s grudging acceptance that Trump lost the 2020 election. “Of course he lost,” DeSantis said in an interview with NBC News today. “Joe Biden’s the president.” And Trump’s lies about the election? “Unsubstantiated,” the Florida governor said on Friday. DeSantis has been insistent that the 2024 election should be about Joe Biden, but he seems unwilling to deal with the reality that taking on Biden requires defeating Trump first. A New York Times report referred to the NBC comments as “Mr. DeSantis’s increasingly aggressive stance,” which I suppose is true if you think of the move from “nothing” to “something” as “increasingly aggressive.”

Why are Republicans so scared to mention Trump, even at this late date? There are three reasons, two of them grounded in sheer cowardice and the third derived from a hallucinatory primary strategy.

The first and most obvious problem for GOP candidates is that barking back at Trump infuriates the Republican base, many of whom live in districts and states that Republicans care about. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson are willing to go after Trump because they are both men with thick skin—but also because they have almost no chance of gaining the GOP nomination. George Will said it first, but it bears repeating: The modern GOP is the first American party that fears its own voters.

Few candidates want to cross Trump and then endure his vicious attacks, which is understandable but hardly an example of leadership. (Trump has already blasted “Liddle’ [sic] Mike Pence” on his social-media platform, Truth Social, accusing him of being an ungrateful loser who has “gone to the Dark Side.”) And although too many Americans are no longer shocked by it, Trump’s attacks create real problems of security when he zeroes in on his perceived enemies: Look at how much effort New York; Washington, D.C.; and, apparently, Atlanta have had to undertake just to indict or prepare to indict Trump.

Even on a less dire level, however, no one running for president—or trying to hold together what’s left of the Republican Party—needs the headache of a brainless brawl with Trump. From DeSantis and Pence on down, the GOP field avoids invoking Trump’s name, treating him (as I wrote in 2021) as if he were some sort of ancient god or mystical Balrog who will appear and unleash chaos at the mention of his name.

Finally, the GOP primary candidates seem to share a vanity-driven belief that each of them could inherit Trump’s voters once Trump is out of the race because of his legal troubles, or when some other act of God takes him off the board. Somewhere, there’s a strategist telling his client that but for Trump, voters would stampede toward, say, Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy. This is what the Bulwark writer Tim Miller has called “a fantasy primary,” the one being held inside the heads of “Republican elites who secretly loathe Trump and are hoping that voters will soon come to their senses” and pick someone else.

Now, it’s true that if Trump were physically incapacitated—and I do not wish any ill health on the former president—then, yes, Republicans would have to find someone else. Short of that, however, Trump is clearly going to run even if he is incarcerated. (No law or constitutional rule prevents such an attempt.) He will continue to attack American institutions, and he will go on making barely veiled threats of violence, as he has done repeatedly, even while under indictment.

Meanwhile, other Republicans are unable to say Trump’s name, press the case against him as unfit for office, or make any of his alleged criminal activity relevant to GOP voters. Back in March, I wrote that Pence “had his one moment of courage, and there will be no others.” Unfortunately, I was right. At this point, other Republicans will head into 2024 unable to mimic even Pence’s sole day of decency.

Related:

Mike Pence is warning us about Trump. Trump’s inevitability problem

Today’s News

Tou Thao, a former police officer convicted for his role in the killing of George Floyd, was sentenced to almost five years in prison by a state court. Ukraine claims that it has detained a Russian informant who it says was part of an apparent plot to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky via air strike. City officials in Juneau, Alaska, declared an emergency yesterday because of record glacial lake flooding that destroyed at least two buildings.   

Evening Read

Robert Adams / Fraenkel Gallery

The Weaponization of Loneliness

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.

There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The three attacks on intellectual freedom Here comes the second year of AI college. Why the populist right hates universities Texas is a look into the future of driving.

Culture Break

Illustration by Matt Chase

Read. In an age of distraction, here are seven books that will make you put down your phone.

Watch. I’m a Virgo (streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is a sweet, surrealist coming-of-age series that follows a 13-foot-tall Black man who is kept hidden by his family until he finally escapes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

When you work for a magazine, people send you stuff, such as announcements of presidential campaigns. This is how I know that Steve Laffey is running for president.

I note with local pride that Laffey is the former mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, a city not too far away from where I live in the Ocean State. (I have never met him; it’s not that small a state.) He served one term as mayor, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006, and lost. He almost ran for Rhode Island governor in 2010; instead he moved to Colorado, got into the governor’s race there in 2013, pulled out of that one, and then tried to get the GOP nomination in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District in 2014 (and lost).

I wasn’t paying much attention to local politics back then, so I can’t really judge whether Laffey was any good as a mayor. But he seemed a throwback to the old fiscally conservative and socially moderate tradition of New England Republicans, a breed now all but extinct in the GOP. According to ABC News, Laffey has almost no money and subatomic poll numbers—he has not yet placed on a national poll—and so he will be unlikely to qualify for the GOP debates. That’s too bad, because one of his slogans is: “​I did it for Cranston, I will do it for America,” which is kind of charming, and I would have loved to see Donald Trump even try to counter that by insulting the good people and city of Cranston.

—  Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

That the words working class are synonymous in the minds of many Americans with white working class is the result of a political myth. As the award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley explains in her new book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Black people are more likely to be working-class than white people are.

Kelley’s Black Folk opens our minds up to Black workers, narrating their complex lives over 200 years of American history. Kelley looks at the history of her own working-class ancestors, as well as the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who made up the world of Black labor. Their joys. Their skills. Their challenges. She also offers historical context for the racist ideas about Black workers that endure in our time, while highlighting the ways that Black labor organizing has always helped to fight back against bigotry.

Myths about race and class continue to dominate our political discourse. For a start, it is a myth that Americans without college degrees are, by definition, “working class.” Accumulated or inherited wealth is a more accurate indicator of class status than education (or salary), particularly amid an enormous racial wealth gap in the United States. Wealth levels of Black households whose members have a college degree are similar to those of white households whose members don’t have a high-school diploma. And those white high-school dropouts have higher homeownership rates than Black college graduates. Even if we were measuring working-class status by college-degree attainment, white Americans (50.2 percent) are far and away more likely than Black Americans (34.2 percent), Latino Americans (27.8 percent), and Native Americans (25.4 percent) to have a college degree, and therefore not be working class by this inadequate measure.

It is also a myth that “the white working class is synonymous with supporters of Donald Trump,” as Kelley points out in Black Folk. In fact, Trump’s base remains much more affluent than is popularly portrayed. “It’s not necessarily a question of [Trump voters] needing to be educated,” Kelley told me when we spoke recently. “It’s a set of choices that people are making about their place in the world, and what makes them feel verified and validated.”

All of these myths comprise our “national mythos,” which “leaves little room for Black workers,” writes Kelley, the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We discussed what lessons we can glean from their history, from their everyday lives, from their political organizing. Our conversation began with the Black folk we know best: our families.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ibram X. Kendi: Black Folk opens by chronicling the life story of your maternal grandfather, who was facing and fighting racism in the town of Canon, in northeast Georgia. What was striking for me was that my maternal grandfather, Alvin, is from Guyton, which is also in eastern Georgia, though closer to Savannah. He dealt with racism there as well, fled to New York City. Your maternal grandfather made his way to North Carolina. Such similarities. Why did you decide to start the book there?

Blair LM Kelley: It’s such a formative story for my family. It’s one my mother repeated many, many times. I think my mother really wanted me to understand the degree to which slavery had ended but the circumstances of subjugation had not. She wanted me to get how close that was to my lived experience, that it wasn’t this far-off, distant thing that was long gone.

Tying my family to this larger history, I know that’s a story so many people have of being forced to flee. I really wanted to begin with that because I knew how universal it was.

Kendi: You specifically wanted Black Folk to “capture the character of the lives of Black workers, seeing them not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered.” Why was capturing the character of their full lives so important?

Kelley: I have never really thought of myself as a labor historian. Labor history had such a focus on institutions and unions, and infighting between organizations. Those were interesting, and things you need to know. But they weren’t the ways that I knew my folks. My folks were workers, but their lives, their whole lives, affected the way that they thought about that work. And I hadn’t seen as much labor history that was focused on what the whole being was like. Not just a factory-floor version of history, but rather a church, a house, a mother-daughter relationship. Those kinds of things I wanted to see amplified, because I think they’re just as meaningful for workers’ lives—if not more so—than the atomized workspace.

[Read: Booker T. Washington in the Atlantic on labor unions and civil rights]

Kendi: You start by writing about a blacksmith who was born in slavery—and then move on to other jobs, like washerwomen, train-car porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. Why specifically those occupations? Are there any specific occupations today that Black working folk occupy that we could potentially see as archetypal, or similar to some of these historical jobs?

Kelley: I think that domestic workers are really still an incredible population to think about. Their organizing is really incredible, and something I want to keep thinking about in my future work. I’m very much interested in following postal workers now. I think especially during the COVID pandemic, we could see that there’s a real fight being waged around postal work that I think deserves continued attention. The pandemic, again, made us think about Black people in medical care, particularly certified nursing assistants. The ranks of these nurses are enormously filled by Black women, and they bore the brunt of the pandemic. The gig economy is also really interesting to me. Black people are overrepresented in that space as well.

Kendi: You write that when Black workers are mentioned at all, the very idea of work is dropped entirely. And instead they are described as “the poor,” and often implied to be unworthy and unproductive. This is an echo of the characterization of enslaved Black people as lazy and unmotivated. And you wrote this in the opening pages of the book to really set the stage for a larger argument. What was that larger argument?

Kelley: It’s that I think there is an incredible mislogic around the Black working class, one born in slavery. I put a quote from Thomas Jefferson about him observing Black people and writing in Notes on the State of Virginia that they sleep a lot. And I’m like, Sir, as you sit in your chair, and somebody fans you and brings you your food, who are you calling lazy? And so that stereotype and its afterlife in our contemporary thinking is a confounding one to me. It’s one I really wanted to confront and unpack and pull the thread of throughout the text. Because Black workers’ contributions to this country are enormous. So calling Black folk “lazy” or “the poor” misunderstands what we’ve done and how we think of ourselves.

Kendi: You also point out that there’s a misunderstanding that Black workers are unskilled. Specifically in writing about laundresses, you wrote about the immense skill required. Is the idea of these Black workers as unskilled connected to the idea of them as unmotivated and lazy—an extension of that?

Kelley: Yes. I was fascinated by the skilled-labor/unskilled-labor dynamic that scholars had used for understanding work. It really struck me during the pandemic. The United Farm Workers were showing videos of farmworkers bundling radishes or picking cauliflower, harvesting asparagus and moving with such speed that you could barely see how they did it. And they’re classed as unskilled workers. Still today, that’s how we would describe them. And so, for me, reading the accounts of picking cotton, or washing laundry, or working on a Pullman car—all of those things took knowledge and study and skill. I just wanted to blow up that scholarly assumption about what is skilled and what is unskilled.

Kendi: Many of those Black people who were called unskilled in the past—and even today—worked in service-related occupations. I mention that because there’s the racist idea that Black people are by nature servile, which undercuts the idea that they’re actually highly skilled in doing these jobs. Do you see that too?

Kelley: Yes. I think when you look at people like the Pullman porters, many of whom were highly educated—they were preferred if they had some education. Because being able to have conversations, to anticipate what people need—they really were the first form of a concierge on these train cars—it really necessitated tremendous knowledge and skill for what might look like just a job serving. It’s a reminder of the dexterity of mind that many people bring to things that we think of as service.

And the ways in which they could serve one another, and use their platform to envision better rights for all workers, it’s really incredible. So often we think of unions as selfish. That’s part of the negative narrative that we have of unions. That they’re taking fees from the workers, and they don’t do much and they don’t really help out. But when we look at a union like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, we see that they started the entire nation in expanding our concept of citizenship and civil rights.

Kendi: Indeed, A. Phillip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was the person behind the March on Washington in 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. These car porters strove to advance themselves. But you write about how when Black workers are able to start making more money, or owning land, or even start businesses, they typically avoided “outward indications of success.” Racists imagined them to be uppity or even forgetting their place. But what about Black elites? What did they think about the Black working class, then and now?

Kelley: If you look back at Black newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you’ll find them admonishing workers, “Don’t go out and spend your money on these particular kinds of things. Be very frugal. Don’t go to the tap rooms and buy all these fancy clothes to wear on Sundays.” So there are parallels with the current Black elite. That’s an old trope Black communities have been bouncing around for a really long time: that somehow you can save your way out of the circumstances that make working-class life much more difficult.

The space for pleasure, and the space for enjoyment and pride in how you look and what you have, and the ways in which working folk have spent money have always been criticized. “I don’t look like what my job is; I look like who I want to look like”—that kind of pride is traditionally a Black working-class thing. Although it looks very different today when wearing a Gucci belt or something.

[Read: Is organized labor making a comeback?]

Kendi: Members of the Black working class have not only carved out spaces for pleasure and enjoyment and pride. They have carved out spaces for politics, for organizing, for unions. You talk about how members of the Black working class are more likely to be union members today than any other racial group. Based on your research, why do you think that’s happening? Which is to ask, why do you think Black people are at the forefront of this boom of union organizing and activism in our time?

Kelley: I think Black workers have a different outlook on the narratives around unionizing, and what value unions might have. Black workers are already in a critical stance to say, “Well, no, let me evaluate this for myself. And no, actually I think a union would help!” Coming together is a way to aid us and lift us. It fits the narrative of the wider lives we have lived in our families and communities. Unions just resonate with how Black communities have fought over time, which is why we see Black folks forming unions from the very first moments of freedom, all the way till right now.

Kendi: You even described enslaved Black folks running away as engaging in nascent labor strikes.

Kelley: Absolutely. They understood what a difference their labor made. So often we forget that people who are subjugated have intellectual lives.

Kendi: Definitely. That brings me to two quotes from your book that I wanted you to reflect on. The first touches on what we were just talking about—how Minnie Savage, a child of exploited and constrained sharecroppers, knew the value of her crop-picking in Accomack County, Virginia. At 16 years old, she fled. You write, “Minne dreamed of living in a place where it didn’t feel like they were slaves anymore. A place where she could be paid fairly for her hard work. A place where she could safely join with others to demand fair treatment. She had to leave Accomack to ‘get freed from freedom.’”

Kelley: I love Minnie as a figure, and finding her interview was such a gift. She happened to be from the place where my grandfather was from. And it was so interesting to follow her as she made her way to Philadelphia. Just remember that, for so many, migration was this big dream of possibility and the vision of something new and something broader and something stronger. And chronicling her disappointment in what happened in the first decades after she migrates, and then also chronicling that she does end up with something much stronger, and something she’s really proud of—she was an amazing figure to write about.

Kendi: And finally: “The Trump-caused obsession with the white working class … has obscured the reality that the most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class in America is the Black working class.”

Kelley: I’m a scholar of Black people, and I love Black people. I think we learn so much when we shift our gaze, when we think differently, when we pay attention to other people and glean from their history. Black life has so much to teach all of us about what is possible.

Every Texan I know has what you might call “grid anxiety,” a low-humming preoccupation with electricity that emerged after brutal winter storms kneecapped the state’s isolated power grid in February 2021. That frigid disaster triggered highway pileups and runs on grocery stores; people inadvertently poisoned themselves with carbon monoxide by running grills and cars indoors to keep warm. My hometown of San Antonio, like so many places across the state, simply wasn’t equipped to deal with several days of freezing temperatures. Many factors contribute to a disaster of this magnitude, but the fundamental failure of the state’s energy infrastructure can’t be overemphasized.

  

Extreme cold is one end of the spectrum. Texas reached the other this summer, as record-breaking heat enveloped the South. Now my conversations with folks back home inevitably lead me to ask, “Is your grid up for this?” So far, the answer has been yes, thanks in part to a substantial expansion of renewable energy, particularly solar power, in the state. But energy is not straightforward: Additional solar capacity will get us only so far if heat waves happen more frequently, and it can be undercut by unfavorable weather or high temperatures that stretch into the night. Experts have said that Texas’s grid is not prepared for the extreme shifts in climate that are still to come. Add to this another complicating factor: Texans need to drive, and more of them are starting to do so in electric vehicles, which interact with the grid in complex ways. Texas is now the third-largest EV market in the country; registrations have at least doubled since the year of that winter storm to more than 200,000 today—all of them running on an electrical infrastructure that was never designed to power cars. It’s understandable, then, for Texans to ask if the grid is up for that too.

Even as EVs promise a better climate, many people assume that these cars will just suck up energy until there’s nothing left, like giant appliances running all day long, causing power plants to work overtime to compensate. And once their batteries are charged, they can struggle under extreme temperatures. Scott Case, the CEO and co-founder of Recurrent, a start-up that delivers reports on battery health for EV buyers, notes that EVs can lose about 30 percent of their range when temperatures go over 100 degrees. “There’s no battery technology that’s going to change physics,” he told me.

[Read: Tesla’s magic has been reduced to its chargers]

With this in mind, Texas is something of a bellwether for a future that many more of us will soon live in as our reliance on electric cars grows, all while temperatures skyrocket permanently upward. You can imagine the nightmare scenario: EVs become a drain on electric grids as the heat gets worse, contributing to widespread blackouts, and then their depleted batteries turn the cars into bricks on wheels. Such a dramatic future may not come to pass, but we will not be able to maintain the status quo: A more extreme climate, combined with the relative complexity of EVs, will require drivers to change their relationship to energy consumption in general, and car manufacturers to reconsider what they build and how.

The Texas-based electricity giant Vistra is optimistic about what’s next. Emily Stipe, the company’s senior manager for federal and state advocacy, is one of several energy officials seeking to assuage EV-related infrastructure fears as heat becomes more extreme. “We really do believe that the grid will be able to handle the deployment of electric vehicles,” Stipe said during a recent presentation by the nonprofit Zero Emission Transportation Association, or ZETA. But that only happens if multiple parties work together, including “not only the actual EV industry itself, but its supply chain, the electricity providers, and the consumers.”

Most evidence indicates that EVs won’t put as much strain on grids as people might think. ZETA estimates that in 2021, EVs used just 0.15 percent of total national energy generation. The growth in available energy is far outpacing new demand from EVs, the group says. Even as sales in Texas are steadily growing, “at this time, the loads from EVs are not significant enough to have an impact on the grid,” a spokesperson for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates 90 percent of the state’s electricity network, told me. The reported doubling of solar power since 2022 has also helped the state’s aging power plants keep the lights on—this despite considerable opposition to renewables in a place where oil and gas reign supreme. (A greener grid also helps EVs reach their maximum potential for reducing transportation emissions.)

EVs can also provide benefits many people don’t realize yet. Cars from Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, and others are being designed to return energy to the grid, a technology called bidirectional charging. Whereas the potential energy stored in a gasoline vehicle’s tank can be used only one way, these EVs can help power homes or sell electricity back into the grid. “When you look at what grid resilience is, it’s really the ability for the grid to prepare for and adapt to changing operating conditions,” Chanel Parson, the director of electrification at Southern California Edison, told me. Because EVs only actually drive 5 to 10 percent of the day, she said, “that leaves 21 to 23 hours of a day when a vehicle can discharge its battery to a home or even the grid.”

This does require “smart grid” upgrades that many utilities are working on right now—all sorts of things, including new transformers, extended power lines, and even better cybersecurity. But there’s tremendous potential for battery storage to help on days when solar and wind are weaker; California even staved off blackouts during a crushing heat wave last September thanks to giant batteries connected to the grid, Stipe told me. Often, these are repurposed former EV batteries. “We have seen firsthand the many benefits that energy storage provides, even just beyond emissions-reduction benefits,” she said.

[Read: The one thing holding back electric vehicles in America]

Even now, most EVs come with options for smart charging: the ability to manage charging times and levels via the car’s software or the charger’s app. Like a smart thermostat, this allows EV owners to schedule and manage charging for off-peak hours. In other words, you can plug in your EV after you get home from work in the evening but schedule it to charge overnight, when grids aren’t already overworked from heat and the whole family running electricity in the house. This can be done at public chargers too.

The current world leader in EVs has long played this game. Tesla offers solar tiles and home-energy-storage solutions such as its Powerwall. Now many “traditional” car companies are developing competing products. GM Energy, a new division of General Motors, is rolling out what it calls an “electric ecosystem” for homes and businesses, including solar power, charging, backup batteries, and bidirectional charging technology. “If you’re able to manage the energy, inflow, and outflow, which you could do as a consumer with all of these kinds of pieces, then you have an opportunity to be able to help mitigate some of the issues that come with inclement weather,” Darryll Harrison Jr., a GM spokesperson, told me. These features are expected to roll out with the retail launch of the new Chevrolet Silverado EV, which will begin production later this year.

The permanent-heat-wave era will change how EVs are built as well. Many automakers are coping with vehicles’ range reduction from extreme temperatures by adding new hardware features, such as heat pumps. Although these are generally seen primarily as a winter-range benefit, their ability to release warm air can greatly improve range in the summer too, Case said. The use of heat pumps, like so many other realities of owning an EV—including monitoring energy usage and figuring out the best way to charge—will require behavioral changes for drivers who have spent decades just paying for gas and driving away, he said: “Everybody grew up learning how to take care of a combustion-engine car from their parents or their grandparents.” In the nascent EV era, “everyone now is coming up with new rules.”

Maybe a bigger challenge will be to get drivers, homeowners, and even renters to start thinking differently about their energy use, period. Mindlessly consuming fuel or electricity isn’t a luxury we have anymore. “For many people, they just want their lights to come on when they flick the switch, and they don’t want to think about their electric plan anytime other than their renewal period every year,” Stipe said. “We really need to change that.”

In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today. It argued for “the widest diversity of views and expressions” and against purging work based on “the personal history or political affiliations of the author.” It urged publishers and librarians to resist government and private suppression, and to “give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought.” The manifesto took on not just official censorship, but the broader atmosphere of coercion and groupthink. It concluded: “We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

“The Freedom to Read” was covered in papers and on TV news. President Dwight Eisenhower, who that same month had urged the graduating class of Dartmouth College not to “join the book burners,”’ sent a letter of praise to the manifesto’s authors. In one of the darkest periods of American history, the manifesto gave librarians and publishers the courage of their principles. One librarian later wrote, “There developed a fighting profession, made up of dedicated people who were sure of their direction.”

This past June, the library and publishers’ associations reissued “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles. And yet many of those institutional signatories—including the “Big Five” publishing conglomerates—often violate its propositions, perhaps not even aware that they’re doing so. Few of them, if any, could produce as unapologetic a defense of intellectual freedom as the one made at a time when inquisitors were destroying careers and lives. It’s worth asking why the American literary world in 2023 is less able to uphold the principles of “The Freedom to Read” than its authors in 1953.

The attack on intellectual freedom today is coming from several directions. First—and likely the main concern of the signatories—is an official campaign by governors, state legislatures, local governments, and school boards to weed out books and ideas they don’t like. Most of the targets are politically on the left; most present facts or express views about race, gender, and sexuality that the censors consider dangerous, divisive, obscene, or simply wrong. The effort began in Texas as early as 2020, before public hysteria and political opportunism spread the campaign to Florida and other states, and to every level of education, removing from library shelves and class reading lists several thousand books by writers such as Toni Morrison and Malala Yousafzai.

Given that states and school districts have a responsibility to set public-school curricula, not all of this can be called government censorship. But laws and policies to prevent students from encountering controversial, unpopular, even offensive writers and ideas amount to a powerfully repressive campaign of book banning, some of it probably unconstitutional. The campaign stems from an American tradition of small-minded panic at rapid change and unorthodox thinking. You can draw a line from Tennessee’s 1925 Scopes trial to Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act. This threat to intellectual freedom is the easiest one for the progressive and enlightened people who predominate in the book world to oppose. No one at Penguin Random House or the National Book Foundation hesitates to stand up for Gender Queer and The Handmaid’s Tale.

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” The second threat to intellectual freedom comes from a different source—from inside the house. This threat is the subject of a new report that PEN America has just published, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” (Because I have written about censorship and language in the past, PEN asked me to read and respond to an earlier draft and gave me an advance copy of the final version.) The report is focused on the recent pattern of publishers and authors canceling their own books, sometimes after publication, under pressure organized online or by members, often younger ones, of their own staffs. PEN has tracked 31 cases of what might be called literary infanticide since 2016; half occurred in just the past two years. “None of these books were withdrawn based on any allegation of factual disinformation, nor glorification of violence, nor plagiarism,” the report notes. “Their content or author was simply deemed offensive.”

A few cases became big news. Hachette canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography after a staff walkout, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth was withdrawn after publication by Norton, both following accusations of sexual misconduct by the authors (Allen and Bailey denied the accusations). Publishers have canceled books following an author’s public remarks—for example, those of the cartoonist Scott Adams, the British journalist Julie Burchill, and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

In one particularly wild case, an author named Natasha Tynes, on the verge of publishing her first novel, a crime thriller, saw a Black employee of the Washington, D.C., Metro system eating on a train (a violation of the system’s rules). She tweeted a picture of the woman at the transit authority with a complaint, and immediately found herself transformed into a viral racist. Within hours her distributor, Rare Bird Books, had dropped the novel, tweeting that Tynes “did something truly horrible today.” The publisher, California Coldblood, after trying to wash its hands of the book, eventually went ahead with publication “due to contractual obligations,” but the novel was as good as dead. “How can you expect authors to be these perfect creatures who never commit any faults?” Tynes lamented to PEN. Most publishers now include a boilerplate morals clause in book contracts that legitimizes these cancellations—a loophole that contradicts tenets of “The Freedom to Read” that those publishers endorsed.

Many of the cases discussed in the report have nothing to do with an author’s offensive statements or bad behavior. Instead, they involve sins of phrasing, characterization, plot, subject matter, or authorial identity. Last year Picador dropped a schoolteacher’s prizewinning memoir when it was attacked for racially insensitive portrayals. A scholarly study of Black feminist culture was withdrawn by Wipf and Stock after critics pointed out that its author was white. Simon & Schuster preemptively killed a biography for children of Hitler because of Hitler. Four young-adult and children’s novels (which seem particularly vulnerable to attack) were pulled for supposedly offensive stories and descriptions. One of them, A Place for Wolves—a novel about two gay American boys set in Kosovo during its war with Serbia—was canceled by its author, Kosoko Jackson, himself a prosecutor of literary offenses via Twitter, after people on social media accused him of violating his own edict about identity placing strict limits on appropriate subject matter: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people,” he’d tweeted. “Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during horrific and life changing times, like the AIDS EPIDEMIC, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

At the heart of these literary autos-da-fé is identity—or, in a phrase the report uses several times, “marginalized identities.” The trip wires that can blow up a writer’s work—charges of “harmful” language, failures of “representation,” “appropriation,” or generally “problematic” content—are all strung along lines of identity. When Jeanine Cummins, a white writer, received a lot attention (and, reportedly, a seven-figure book deal) in 2020 for American Dirt, a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a drug gang, she was denounced for taking an opportunity that should have gone to a Latina author who would, some critics said, have written a better book. Her publisher, Flatiron/Macmillan, didn’t pull the novel—it was selling far too many copies—but it canceled Cummins’s tour, citing safety concerns, and issued an abject statement of self-criticism. The ordeal of American Dirt showed publishers that crossing lines of identity can be dangerous, prompting one former editor, interviewed anonymously by PEN, to ask: “Are we saying that not anyone can write any story? Do you have to have a certain identity? There’s a lot of fear around that.”

A skeptic might ask why a few dozen awkward decisions and minor controversies out of tens of thousands of books published every year should matter. The answer is that these incidents reveal an atmosphere of conformity and fear that undermines any claim book publishing has to being more than just a business. Most of the canceled books described in the report are victims of a pervasive orthodoxy. At its most rigid, this orthodoxy puts the claims of identity above everything else—literary quality, authorial independence, the freedom to read. Its reach can be seen in how many of the canceled books were already making obvious, if clumsy, efforts to abide by the values of equity and inclusion; and in Natasha Tynes’s attempt to defend herself from online attacks by pleading that she herself is “a minority writer.”

Eventually, orthodoxy makes the suppression of books unnecessary because it leads to self-censorship by editors and writers. One canceled author interviewed by PEN said, “It has shut me down, creatively. There is always a censor, perched on my shoulder, telling me I cannot write about this or that topic.” What writer can honestly say it isn’t true of them? Almost none of the editors interviewed for the PEN report were willing to be quoted by name. What are they afraid of, if not the fate of their authors?

Below the waterline lie all the books that aren’t contracted, or even written, because of the examples that become public. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the best-selling author Richard North Patterson wrote that his latest novel—about an interracial relationship set against battles over voting rights and white racism—was rejected by “roughly 20” New York publishers. “The seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters,” Patterson wrote. (Trial was published in June by a conservative Christian firm in Tennessee and currently ranks around No. 37,000 among all books on Amazon. Several books in the PEN report, canceled by major publishers, were grabbed up by small houses with far less reach.)

PEN is a free-speech organization. Having already issued a lengthy report and numerous statements condemning book banning by state and local governments, it seems to have realized that it could not ignore a pattern of suppression closer to home, by organizations that publish PEN members and sponsor its fundraising galas.

In May, PEN landed in the middle of its own free-speech controversy when two Ukrainian soldier-writers announced that they would withdraw from the organization’s World Voices Festival if two Russian writers were also included on another panel. Rather than cancel the Ukrainians, who had already arrived in the United States, and send them back home to the war, PEN asked the Russian writers and their panel’s moderator, Masha Gessen, a PEN board member, to speak under a different banner, that of PEN America. The Russians and Gessen instead decided to cancel their own event, and Gessen resigned from the board in protest for what was seen as PEN caving in to the Ukrainians’ demands. (One of the Russian writers later said that she did not want to participate if the Ukrainians didn’t want her there.) A month later, PEN declared it “regrettable” and “wrongheaded” when the writer Elizabeth Gilbert suspended publication of her next novel because Ukrainian readers were upset that it was set in Soviet Russia. All of this merely shows that it’s easier to hold a principled position on free speech when you’re not the one facing unpleasant consequences.

PEN spent months researching and internally debating the new report, anticipating controversy. An early draft was hampered by reflexive hedges and tactical critiques, and a few of them remain in the published report: Accusations of literary harm “risk playing into the hands of book banners” on the right who use the same rhetoric; the publisher of American Dirt might have avoided trouble if it had marketed the novel with more sensitivity.

The report is an important, even courageous, document in our moment. PEN is offering guidance and backbone for a book trade that appears to have lost its nerve and forgotten its mission in the face of ceaseless outrage. Among its recommendations, the report urges that “publishing houses should rarely, if ever, withdraw books from circulation.” It calls for greater transparency and author involvement in any decisions about cancellations. Goodreads, the online review site, where mobs sometimes beat books to death before they’re even finished, let alone published and read, is asked to “encourage authentic reviews” and prevent “review-bombing.”

These technical fixes would greatly improve policies and procedures in the publishing industry, but they can’t solve the wider problem—a climate of intolerance and cowardice that stifles the book world. In the conclusion to its report, PEN calls for “a broader tonal shift in literary discourse,” which is necessary but probably beyond the power of any report. Essentially, PEN is saying to the remaining gatekeepers, “Remember your purpose,” and to the new gate-crashers, “Don’t use speech to limit speech.” For inspiration it reprints “The Freedom to Read” in full and urges workers in the book world to take it to heart. Ayad Akhtar, the president of PEN America, told me that he hopes publishers will include the 70-year-old manifesto along with DEI training for new hires. PEN wants its report to have an effect similar to that of the earlier document—to make publishing once more “a fighting profession.”

And yet something holds the report back from using the full-throated language of “The Freedom to Read.” I think the difficulty lies in an earlier report that PEN published last year.

In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.

The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Is there a contradiction between the two?

PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s executive director, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published. In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.

Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Last year, a federal judge blocked a bid by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in America, to buy Simon & Schuster, the third largest (a takeover would have practically made the conglomerate a sovereign country). This year, book sales are down across the industry, bringing waves of layoffs; last month, senior editors at Penguin Random House were given the option of a buyout under the shadow of termination, and some of the most illustrious gatekeepers in publishing headed for the door. These events bring me to the third and most serious attack on the written word.

This one is more insidious and pervasive and therefore harder to see clearly, let alone oppose, than book bans and cancellations. It’s the air every writer and reader breathes: the consolidation of publishing into a near-monopoly business; the correspondent shrinking of heterodoxy and risk taking; the fragile economic situation of employees; the withering away of bookstores and book reviews; the growing illiteracy of the public; the decline of English instruction in schools, regardless of political pressures; the data crunching that turns ideas into machine-made products and media into highly sensitive barometers of popularity (with artificial intelligence coming soon to replace the last traces of human originality). All of these trends amount to an assault on the free intellect perpetrated not by Moms for Liberty or YA Twitter, but by Mark Zuckerberg, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon. In a sense, this third attack underlies the other two, because strong emotions and extreme language are programmed into the brains of book banners of every type by algorithms that profit a handful of technology and media giants.

Literature and journalism have never been remunerative fields. But compared with three decades ago, the chances of a serious, sustained career today are far slimmer. I can’t help thinking that these circumstances have something to do with the willingness of publishers to be frightened by a few hundred tweets. Perhaps years of consolidation and precarity have so weakened their conviction in the mission of book publishing that a little outrage online and in house is sufficient to erase it. If the editor’s function is to match the identity of writer and subject matter, then gather data to measure the success of the product, perhaps gatekeepers have finally outlived their usefulness.

The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.

There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How we learned to be lonely]

In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published an advisory, warning that a growing “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” threatens Americans’ personal health and also the health of our democracy. Murthy reported that, even before COVID, about half of all American adults were experiencing substantial levels of loneliness. Over the past two decades, Americans have spent significantly more time alone, engaging less with family, friends, and people outside the home. By 2018, just 16 percent of Americans said they felt very attached to their local community.

An “epidemic of loneliness” may sound abstract at a time when our democracy faces concrete and imminent threats, but the surgeon general’s report helps explain how we became so vulnerable. In the past, surgeons general have at crucial moments sounded the alarm about major crises and drawn our attention to underappreciated threats, including smoking, HIV/AIDS, and obesity. This is one of those moments.

The rate of young adults who report suffering from loneliness went up every single year from 1976 to 2019. From 2003 to 2020, the average time that young people spent in person with friends declined by nearly 70 percent. Then the pandemic turbocharged our isolation.

According to the surgeon general, when people are disconnected from friends, family, and communities, their lifetime risk of heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke skyrockets. Shockingly, prolonged loneliness is as bad, or worse, for our health as being obese or smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia. It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarization and animosity. Unless we address this crisis, Murthy warned, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”

In 1996, I published It Takes a Village. As first lady, I was worried that American life had become frantic and fragmented for many people, especially stressed-out parents. Social, economic, and technological trends seemed to be pulling us apart rather than lifting us up. We were spending more time in our cars and in front of the television and less time engaging in our communities. Even back then, before smartphones and social media, it was evident that Americans were becoming more isolated, lonely, and unmoored from traditional sources of meaning and support—and that our kids were suffering because of this. I also was concerned about the rise of right-wing politicians like Newt Gingrich and media personalities like Rush Limbaugh who were sowing division and alienation.

Nearly 30 years later, it’s clear that the problems I diagnosed in the 1990s ran deeper than I realized, and were more dire than I could have imagined. But the prescriptions in It Takes a Village—putting families first, investing in community infrastructure, protecting kids from out-of-control technology, and recommitting to the core American values of mutual responsibility and empathy—have only grown more urgent and necessary.

The surgeon general’s warning echoes the findings of other researchers who have studied these trends for decades. In his influential 2000 book, Bowling Alone, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam showed that Americans’ social ties and support networks collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. Many of the activities and relationships that had defined and sustained previous generations, such as attending religious services and joining unions, clubs, and civic organizations—even participating in local bowling leagues—were disappearing. Putnam’s more recent work shows that these trends have only gotten worse in the early decades of the 21st century, and that they go hand in hand with intensifying political polarization, economic inequality, loss of trust in government, and a shift in the national attitude from “we’re all in this together” to “you’re on your own.”

Murthy cites the work of another Harvard researcher, Raj Chetty, who shows how the decline of social connections between people of different classes and backgrounds—the kinds of relationships that used to be formed in VFW halls, church basements, and PTA meetings—has significantly reduced economic mobility in America. The data show that diverse, robust social networks make the American dream possible. Without them, it fades.

All of this aligns with the findings of the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. They attribute soaring rates of what they call “deaths of despair”—including suicides and deaths from alcohol and drug overdoses—to a toxic mix of economic stagnation, declining social ties, rising alienation, and families and communities coming apart.

The surgeon general points, as well, to the crucial role of technology. He highlights data showing that Americans who use social media for more than two hours a day are twice as likely to experience loneliness and feelings of social isolation as people who used social media for less than 30 minutes a day. As we spend more time online, we spend less time interacting with one another in person or engaging with our local communities. The more we live in social-media echo chambers, the less we trust one another, and the more we struggle to find common ground with or feel empathy for people who have different perspectives and experiences.

Murthy followed his report on loneliness with a second advisory just 20 days later, warning that heavy social-media use among teenagers is driving a dangerous increase in depression and other mental-health challenges. From 2001 to 2021, the suicide rate among people in their early 20s surged by more than 60 percent. For 10-to-14-year-olds, it tripled. These are numbers that should shake us to our core.

My three grandchildren are too young to experience the worst of this. Still, I can’t help but think about where they and their friends and classmates will be soon, exposed hour after hour to whatever content some hidden algorithm decides to promote. I worry about American children’s self-esteem, their mental health, their sense of perspective and reality.

The way Americans—and young people in particular—interact with technology today, the way our phones and social-media networks inject bullying, abuse, misinformation, outrage, and anger directly into our brains, is not something any of us could have foreseen just a few short decades ago. When I wrote It Takes a Village, I was concerned about the effects on young people of violence on TV. Now, in the age of social media, those worries almost seem quaint.

What does all of this loneliness and disconnection mean for our democracy?

Murthy carefully connects the dots between increasing social isolation and declining civic engagement. “When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone,” he wrote in The New York Times.

[Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dan Schwerin: A state of emergency for democracy]

It’s not just the surgeon general who recognizes that social isolation saps the lifeblood of democracy. So do the ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit.

There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers. But modern technology has taken the danger to another level. This was Steve Bannon’s key insight.

Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males,” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

Like many others, I was too slow to see the impact this strategy could have. Now the surgeon general is telling us that social disconnection is not just a problem at the margins—not just the usual “angry young men”—but is in fact an epidemic sweeping the country.

I have seen firsthand how dangerous lies can fuel violence and undermine our democratic process. During the 2016 campaign, a shocking number of people became convinced that I am a murderer, a terrorist sympathizer, and the evil mastermind behind a child-sex-abuse ring. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk-show host, posted a video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.”

This was not the first time that I was the subject of wild conspiracy theories or partisan rage that veered into mania. In the 1990s, supermarket tabloids used to splash headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby” across their front pages. I was even burned in effigy by a crowd in Kentucky furious that I had proposed taxing cigarettes to help fund universal health care for all Americans. The president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters chanted, “Burn, baby, burn” as he poured gasoline on a scarecrow in a dress labeled I’M HILLARY. By 2016, I fully expected to play a starring role in the fever dreams of extremists at the margins of American politics.

But something had changed. Social media gave conspiracy theories far wider reach than ever before. Fox News and other right-wing media outlets gave outlandish lies “credibility.” And before Trump, we’d never had a presidential candidate—and then an actual president—who used the biggest bully pulpit in the world to be an actual bully and traffic in this kind of trash. The results were tragic but predictable. In early December 2016, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina armed with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle shot up a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., because he had read online that it was the headquarters of my supposed child-sex ring. Thankfully, no one was harmed. But the pizzeria attack foreshadowed the violence to come: QAnon followers and militia members storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021; mass shooters leaving behind manifestos riddled with misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and other conspiracy theories promoted in far-right echo chambers.

As we look ahead to 2024, the threat to our democracy is not just from more of this kind of violence—although I fear that is coming as well. Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief after last year’s midterms because prominent election deniers and conspiracy theorists were defeated, including Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. But these statewide victories obscured more troubling developments at the local level.

Consider Peggy Judd, a middle-aged white woman from Cochise County, Arizona, who participated in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and reportedly promotes Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and QAnon conspiracy theories. Judd is not just some Facebook gadfly. She is an elected member of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors. And in 2022, she refused to certify the results of the midterm elections until she was finally compelled to do so by a judge.

A recent study from the organization Informing Democracy identified more than 200 local officials across six battleground states who, like Judd, have taken antidemocratic actions. Many of them are in a position to administer or influence the 2024 elections. They’re county clerks and municipal election commissioners, state legislators and members of canvassing boards. They’re people you’ve probably never heard of who play vital roles in making our electoral system work.

A hallmark of American democracy is that elections have been largely run by local, usually nonpartisan volunteers and officials. Communities generally trusted these election administrators because they knew them—they saw them in the supermarket, at restaurants, at their kids’ schools. This patchwork system has always been vulnerable to localized corruption and racial discrimination, but most folks who raised their hands to help out did so with good intentions and good results.

Not anymore. As the trust and social ties that used to bind communities together have frayed, apathy, isolation, and polarization have undercut the old “we’re all in this together” ethos. Instead of nonpartisan volunteers and civic organizations like the League of Women Voters, we have MAGA election deniers and QAnon enthusiasts. There’s now a widespread shortage of poll workers because so many have faced harassment and abuse, just for doing their jobs and helping people vote.

In Fulton County, Georgia, the election worker Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who helped out in 2020 as a temp, faced racist death threats after Trump falsely accused them of orchestrating massive fraud. “I just felt bad for my mom,” Moss later told the January 6 congressional committee, “and I felt horrible for picking this job and being the one that always wants to help and always [be] there, never missing not one election.”

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

American democracy needs people like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman to keep raising their hands and offering to help. This country was built by men and women who believed in service, community, and working together for the greater good—pioneers who stuck together in wagon trains, farmers who pitched in on barn raisings and quilting bees, immigrants who joined volunteer fire departments, enslaved people who risked their lives to serve on the Underground Railroad and help others escape to freedom. Murthy and Putnam might call these ties social capital. In the 1830s, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and wrote about our “habits of the heart.” However we describe it, the sense that “we’re all in it together” made our democratic experiment possible—and it may be the only thing that can save us still.

Without a doubt, winning elections at every level is essential. We need to defeat the demagogues and election deniers so convincingly that there’s no room for dirty tricks. And it’s heartening that organizations like Run for Something are mobilizing candidates for school boards, county clerkships, and state legislatures across the country. We also need to strengthen voting rights and fight back against misinformation. But ultimately, winning the next election is never going to be enough. We must work together to restitch our unraveling social fabric, and to rebuild Americans’ trust in one another, our democracy, and our shared future.

Although there is an important debate to be had about how much economic conditions contribute to loneliness and alienation, the significant investments being made under President Joe Biden can lift both incomes and aspirations. The historic legislation enacted by Biden and the Democrats in Congress will modernize infrastructure, bring supply chains home, and boost manufacturing in key industries such as semiconductors and electric vehicles. These investments may help stem the outflow of workers and young people forced to leave their communities to seek opportunity far from home, leaving behind friends, families, and emotional and spiritual support systems. Too often, when Americans face boarded-up storefronts, empty pews, and crumbling schools, it’s despair, loneliness, and resentment that fill the void. Bringing opportunity back to these hard-hit places and enabling more Americans to stay and raise families where their roots are won’t reverse the toxic impacts of social media, disrupt the right-wing media machine, or end our political polarization, but it’s a step in the right direction. We can build on that by raising taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations to buttress our social safety net and invest in schools and communities.

In his advisory, Murthy offers other recommendations for rebuilding social connection and cohesion. They include pro-family policies such as paid leave, and investments in public transit and community infrastructure that help people connect with one another in real life, not just online. He has also called for stronger and more sophisticated oversight and regulation of tech companies. In particular, there is an urgent need for more protections for kids on social media. And Murthy rightly argues that we can all do more in our own lives to nurture relationships with friends, family members, and neighbors, and seek out opportunities to serve and support others.

I offered similar prescriptions in It Takes a Village, arguing that we need to work together to help families raise healthy, successful children. Some of the work I envisioned would happen at home, such as families turning off screens and spending more time together. Much of it would be in communities, with local businesses, schools, congregations, and unions doing more to bring us together and help parents who often feel alone and overburdened. I thought government could help support that community engagement. For example, I was a big supporter of a Clinton-administration program that gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children could make friends and find mentors from different backgrounds. I was convinced that we had to come together as a national village and decide that helping all our kids live up to their God-given potential is more important than profits or partisanship.

These basic principles still ring true, and the evidence continues to show that this approach works. The children of those families that we helped move to better neighborhoods in the 1990s have grown up to attend college at higher rates, earn higher incomes, and have more stable families of their own than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received.

In recent years, I’ve often thought back to It Takes a Village. The pandemic should have been a case study in how Americans come together in the face of a common challenge. And at the beginning, there was a sense of solidarity and shared sacrifice. People realized that if their neighbor got sick, it could harm them too, and that the virus was striking everyone. The entire village was at risk. We really were all in it together. Tragically, this spirit quickly faded. President Trump and other right-wing leaders politicized the pandemic and turned public health into a wedge issue—a staggeringly shortsighted and dangerous move with predictably deadly results. And when data first emerged showing that COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting Black and Latino communities, support for safety precautions and shared sacrifice dropped among white people and conservatives. Instead of a story of our common humanity, the pandemic became a story of our fractured society and poisoned politics.

I haven’t given up, though. I still believe in the wisdom and power of the American village. I’m inspired by the moms and dads showing up at school-board meetings and getting involved in local politics for the first time because they refuse to let extremists ban books from the neighborhood library. I love reading about teenagers turning to old-school flip phones so they’re no longer at the mercy of giant tech firms and hidden algorithms. I’m encouraged by the growing number of companies giving employees time off to vote and recognizing that they have responsibilities not just to shareholders but also to workers, customers, communities, and the planet. And I take heart from the workers bravely organizing corporate warehouses and coffee shops, or walking a picket line, breathing new life into the labor movement and insisting that even in our fractured age, we are still stronger together.

If you dig deep enough, through all the mud of politics and polarization, eventually you hit something hard and true: a foundation of values and aspirations that bind us together as Americans. That’s something to build on. If we can break out of our toxic “us versus them” dichotomies, if we can shrink our notion of “the other” and expand the “we” in “we the people,” perhaps we can discover that we have more in common than we think.
Though we are divided in so many ways, though we are lonelier and more isolated than ever, it remains true that none of us can raise a family, build a business, strengthen a community, or heal a nation alone. We have to do it together. It still takes a village.