This week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments have already quit or left the state. The estimated  tens of thousands of young people in Texas who identify as trans—roughly 1 percent of the state’s population of kids between ages 13 and 17, according to one count—and their families, must grapple with a new political reality.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to one trans girl who found herself caught in the middle of these debates in Texas. She says she’s not an activist. She doesn’t protest for her right to medical care or mention her identity on her Instagram bio. She’s not “super-pro Democrat,” she says. She describes herself as not a “cheerleader or anything,” just a “normal, semi-popular girl.” She’s grown up with supportive parents, in an accepting community. But just as she was facing puberty, trans medical care became something politicians argue over. She could handle middle-school bullies. It was knowing the Texas government was against her that made her worry that she would be taken away from her parents, and question whether she could stay in the state.

Her mother and father faced an agonizing decision about what to do. They loved living in Austin. But their family was not safe. And they started to see signs in their daily life—in school, in the dentist’s office, at the hospital—that their family was in danger. They ultimately decided to leave, becoming a new kind of domestic political refugee.

“I started realizing that not only it was the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m, like, fixated on your posters. I’m just, like—I really want to start the interview, but I’m just trying to guess what each of the posters are. Who set up your room when you moved?

Teenager: Me.

Rosin: You did? Did you have—are these movie posters from your old room?

Teenager: Yeah, I brought most of my stuff I’ve seen.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And I’m talking to a teenager from Texas. Or she used to be from Texas. She left the state earlier this year and moved to a more suburban-y place in California.

Teenager: I was new. I got here after winter break, so I was like the only new kid in the middle of the year.

Rosin: What’s the first thing you noticed about it? Because you think of yourself as a city kid.

Teenager: The first thing I noticed was I saw the same cars all the time. I’ll say that.

Rosin: What do you mean? Your dad said you were into cars, and I was like, “Really? What do you mean?” What’s your favorite car, by the way?

Teenager: Subaru WRX STI, 2004.

Rosin: Damn, he was not kidding.

Teenager: And I work on cars too. You should see my shelves. I have an alternator, an oil cover, and a muffler, and a bunch of tools up on my shelf.

Rosin: Okay, so, before we go back to what happened and how you landed here: Your parents said that you wanted to talk, or were willing to talk, because we asked them about that. I was wondering, did you have a reason? Why did you want to talk to us?

Teenager: Um, well, I wasn’t 100 percent sure what we were gonna really be talking about, but if it is what I think it is, it’s just about me and everything in Texas.

Rosin: “Everything in Texas”

How one state senator wrote a letter to the attorney general one day asking whether what he called “sex-change procedures” for children equaled child abuse.

And then suddenly all the grown-ups—senators, judges, teachers, parents, reporters—were talking about things like puberty blockers and gender-reassignment surgeries and who was doing the better job “protecting children.”

And now this fact about herself, that she mostly talked about with her parents, her doctor, maybe one or two people at school, had now become a political issue.

She still cannot fathom why anyone would be yelling about this in the statehouse or on the streets or wherever.

Teenager: I’m not a part of the trans community; I am trans. That’s it. I don’t have flags up in my room; I don’t have it in my Instagram bio. I’m not a crazy super-pro-Democrat. I mean of course I’m against the people who are making my life like this, but I’m not an advocate or an activist; that’s why I want to do this anonymously.

I don’t go to protests; I don’t. I’m not very involved in the trans community, and not that I have a problem with that, but that’s just not who I am.

Rosin: Hmm. So who are you then? That’s really, really, really important, what you just said, because I think, if you’re talking about this, you’re affected by politics. People might just make those assumptions, but like, that’s just not you.

Teenager: I’m just—I’m not, like, “Oh, I’m a cheerleader,” or anything, but I’m a normal, semi-popular girl.

Rosin: Mhmm. And what do you most remember about living in Austin?

Teenager: My best day in Austin probably was summer of fifth grade, and everyone in the whole neighborhood got together, and we had water-balloon fights every day all summer.

Rosin: That sounds amazing. And are you good at water-balloon fights?

Teenager: I would like to say. Mostly, I remember being good, everyone being nice and happy. And when I actually, like, formally “came out” or whatever, I was probably 11. But everyone knew by the time I was, like, in second grade.

Rosin: Because had you said things?

Teenager: Kinda like how I dressed and how I acted. I didn’t act weird, but I just wasn’t a boy. It was never something that set me apart when I was younger. I was just who I was and everyone was okay with it. Then once everyone got older and got into middle school, they developed their opinions about me and people like me. Most of Austin was nice. But of course if you’re in the middle of Texas, people are gonna let you know what they think about you.

Rosin: Mhm. What’s the first time you remember having that thought?

Teenager: Probably COVID year, in sixth grade, when everyone was online. I was probably searching for something for class, and then the news things come up, and then, you know, I click on it, and I kind of went down this rabbit hole.

Rosin: And what did you understand? Or what words jumped out at you?

Teenager: Um, “unhealthy,” I think, jumped out, and um, “unhealthy” and “unnatural.”

Rosin: Mmm, those are hard words to read, unhealthy and unnatural. What was the thought in your head after you read those?

Teenager: I laughed. I thought—oh, I didn’t laugh, but I thought it was funny. Because, at first I thought, like, Oh, it’s a hick; it’s a redneck; it’s a … I don’t care, ’cause it’s not like I’m ever gonna be in contact with these people. So it didn’t affect me. I was fine. I honestly didn’t mind it. I was like, Okay. But then on and on, I realized, like, Oh, it’s not just random Texas guys and their trailers. It’s kids, and it’s everyone. A lot of people.

Rosin: How did you come to realize that?

Teenager: Probably seventh grade. And I got to be with, instead of with fifth graders, with seventh graders. Then I realized a lot of these kids think the same as what I thought was a couple of old rednecks. But I realized that a lot of people in my life agreed with what those people thought.

Rosin: And what was your main feeling? Were you scared? Were you sad? What do you remember of how you were actually feeling during that period?

Teenager: I was annoyed. I didn’t want anything to do with them either.

Rosin: Mmhmm. So at that point, it’s still just annoying?

Teenager: I thought that, eventually, they would move on. They did not. And so I became less annoyed and more angry, but never really sad. And then I started realizing that not only was it the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.

Mark Davis: That is today’s slate, so let’s go right to the phones. Say hi to Governor Abbott. Good morning, sir. How are you doing?

Rosin: In July 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke to Mark Davis, a local conservative talk-show host.

Davis asked him about a proposal to outlaw medical treatments for transgender youth.

Which, heads up, Davis invokes a false notion about surgery for minors that is common in anti-trans circles, and he does it in pretty crude language.

Abbott: I’ll be candid with you. I’ll tell you what everybody knows, and that is: The chances of that passing during the session in the House of Representatives was nil.

Davis: Why? In a conservative state with Republicans in charge, a law that states, “We’re not going to let you carve up your tenth grader ’cause he thinks he’s a girl,” how in God’s name does that not pass in Texas?

Abbott: I can’t answer that. However, what I can tell you is: I have another way of achieving the exact same thing.

Rosin: Pretty soon, it became clear what his way was.

John Krinjak, Fox 7 News: In a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Governor Greg Abbott claiming so-called sex-change procedures constitute child abuse and directing the agency to investigate any reported instances.

In the letter, Governor Abbott calls on teachers, doctors, and nurses to report if they think these treatments are happening.

Rosin: This was the moment that these ideas, that this teenager was “unhealthy” and “unnatural,” moved from somewhere out there in Texas to the statehouse and then landed in her own house—more specifically, her mother’s bedroom.

Mom: I did not sleep at all that night.

Rosin: Because, theoretically at least, Child Protective Services could remove a child from their home. That’s her mom by the way. We’re keeping the family’s identities private to try to protect them and their children from harassment.

In their Slack group, the parents of trans kids started to try to manage their panic by trading information. Could they trust their teachers? Did they need to prepare an emergency medical file? Should they hire a lawyer?

Mom: Children could be taken from the home or school or anywhere at any time and put in foster care during the investigation. So that’s when the real fear began.

Rosin: Though maybe it would be more accurate to say: That’s when the fear became much harder to manage. The fear had always been there, just in a different way. The kind of fear you have as a parent when your child isn’t like everyone else and you have to actively work to convince yourself that it’s okay; they’ll be safe, if the world will just agree to be nice about it.

Mom: The first day that it was very marked was a school or a classroom play. And she auditioned only for the female parts, but at that time wasn’t socially identifying as female, and it was perfectly fine. She got the most glamorous female part, got the most glamorous dress, costume, makeup for it, and was the first time I think we really, like, She really likes that costume, and—

Rosin: Can you describe the costume? I’m curious. And what year was this, by the way?

Mom: Third grade, so 8 years old, and she was Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

So a pink tulle dress with a big, huge skirt and high heels. And she had long hair at that time.

Dad: Both of our kids had sort of long hair, and when we would go on road trips, when we’d go to restaurants, 75 percent of the time or more, the servers would think they were both girls.

Mom: That didn’t happen in Austin, but as soon as we left, whenever we’d leave Austin, it’d be like, “And for the little ladies?” And they’d be fine with it.

Rosin: [Laughs.] And just so I don’t exaggerate or say it wrong, was it really this smooth? Like there was nothing?

Mom: Totally. Before the transition: the only “boy,” invited to all the girls’ slumber parties, friends who were boys, no friction in the elementary school.

Rosin: So when is the first moment you remember that ease not being there anymore?

Mom: At age 12, when I think the early signs of puberty began, she started to show more distress and came to me and said, “I don’t want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.” And was from that moment on, and never any wavering, that she has been a girl.

Dad: Never a moment.

Mom: Change to a female name, female pronouns, everything.

Rosin: How did you think it was gonna unfold? Like, how did you—what did you think the next, like, the middle-school, high-school years were gonna be like?

Mom: She was very distressed by even the early signs of male development. So we spent a lot of time in the, What is this? Did so much research, contacted experts who were in these New York Times articles from both sides, had full consultations with them, pros and cons; got into the local endocrinology clinic, had very, very long conversations with them.

I definitely had the thoughts of, like, Can a 12-year-old make this decision? We wouldn’t let our child get a tattoo. Why would we let them do this? So I definitely went through all of that and all the things of, What are these interventions? I am gonna read all of the real primary research on what is, what do these interventions do to brain development, heart development. I definitely was open to, like, if there’s a problem with this stuff, I want to know.

Rosin: It sounds like you guys are in the sort of parental tight space. You're like, What’s this gonna mean for my kid? What’s this gonna mean for us as a family? But you didn’t see any bigger trouble on the horizon. You weren’t thinking about that.

Mom: The Texas of it all. No. [Exasperated laughs.]

Rosin: They started “going to the endo,” as the teenager called it. Every three months, the nurse would inject a puberty blocker into her thigh. She asked her mom to video because it was a big needle and she wanted proof for her future self and everyone else of how tough she was.

At some point during her treatments, the governor’s directive went into effect, which meant that doctors and nurses were required to report any efforts to enable a child’s gender transition to Child Protective Services. It was unclear whether the governor had the authority to issue this directive, but he did.

The clinic told the family that, for the moment at least, they would keep seeing patients, implying they would not turn anyone in.

Rosin: When you said you were up all night, what were the thoughts in your head?

Mom: Yeah. The thoughts were, Can I send my child to school? Because I am sending my child into a state-run agency where all of the staff have now been instructed to report us to Child Protective Services, so does my child go to school? Or not? And decided the next morning that we had to let our daughter know if she were called to the office and asked any questions about her gender, to not answer them and to call us, to not give them any information, because they said they could take the child without informing the parents or talking to the parents first.

Rosin: There were already news reports of an eighth grader pulled out of a classroom without his parents present, of an investigator who visited a kid at home and asked, “Who’s the better cook, your mom or your dad? Do you know where your privates are? Has anyone touched them?”

Mom: We had to put together a whole docket of all the paperwork saying, trying to prove that it wouldn’t be abuse, so that if she were taken into foster care, we could get her back as soon as possible.

Rosin: Was it really like one day it was fine, the next day you hear about a directive on social media? Like, was that how it happened in your life?

Mom: Yes.

Rosin: It just came out of the—like, you’re living your life, driving your kids, doing whatever you’re doing, and then just one day this lands on you?

Mom: Yeah. And I’ll give two examples. We had an endocrinology appointment not long after the letter, and our daughter was afraid I was going to be arrested on sight. And at the dentist where a new hygienist pulled me aside and said, “Y’all aren’t safe here. We had a staff meeting this morning, and most of the staff said they didn’t think children should be allowed to be transgender, so you should find another practice.”

Teenager: At school, um, during standardized tests, they have to use my legal name

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: In the doctor’s office, they have to do the same protocols as they do with any other boy. Any, like, government or official office refers to me as someone that I’m not.

Rosin: And did that ever happen to you? Like did you ever have an encounter?

Teenager: All the time.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: It’s not just a political situation; it’s, like, making my life a crime, right? My parents could be sent to CPS, and I could go to foster care. So that was probably the moment where it started to make me more sad than angry.

Rosin: In May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the governor couldn’t compel DFPS to investigate. Civil-rights groups also sued the state, which created a legal standstill.

The teenager kept getting her injections.

As summer turned to fall, there was something to grab on to. Governor Abbott, who had opened the investigations, was up for reelection against Democrat Beto O’Rourke, and the race was at least a race.

The night of the election, some neighbors had planned a block party. The kids made Beto signs; Austin’s “gentle weirdos,” as her parents called them, gathered to do their thing: play vinyls, drum, have some beers.

The results started coming in.

Teenager: I remember that one night when my dad brought everyone and everyone from the street was watching the election and then the bad guy that we didn’t want to win won, and then I was around everyone else. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody talked about it; it was just like a Saturday-night thing. Like it was a party.

It didn’t affect anyone else, other than me. With this guy getting elected, for everyone else it was just like, they were into politics, so they wanted to watch it. And they were like, “Uh, he didn’t win.” And then, you know, said whatever they thought about it, but I was like, “Why is everyone …?” I didn’t say anything. I wanted to go home, because I didn’t feel like that’s something that should be a party.

Rosin: Yeah, I totally get that. For you, some tragedy happened, and everyone’s, like, cleaning up the dishes.

Teenager: It reminded me of the Hunger Games books, where they all go to watch this terrible thing happen. Which I didn’t understand.

I think that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Probably.

Rosin: What was the straw? The election?

Teenager: Yeah. I only went to school for a couple days until I went to the hospital, so I, you know, obviously wasn’t in a safe place geographically and then also mentally. So those two combined things made me make some really bad decisions and made me close to making another really bad decision.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: So I went to the hospital for a couple weeks and then—

Rosin: Did you take yourself? Did you ask to go to the hospital?

Teenager: I knew that I had to.

When I was, like, getting set up for the hospital, my dad was asking me, like, “What’s going on?” And I told him, “It’s ’cause of Texas,” and he was like, “Okay.”

Dad: When a minor says that they don’t feel safe or that they might hurt themselves, it triggers an involuntary commitment process. And so they took her in an ambulance. I drove behind because, you know, I couldn’t drive her there. So this was really the first moment of, like, We are losing control of our child. Now this process that we’ve been afraid of for most of the year is now under way. The wheels are turning, and we don’t really know what is going to happen now.

Mom: At the intake, the intake person said she didn’t think kids should be given the right to choose this, as we’re there taking her in.

Dad: She had understood before I did that we have to leave.

Mom: I’ve been up thinking about what we can do, and I said, “One option is we can move to a different state where you’d be safe and legal.” And she lit up and said, “That would make me very happy.”

Rosin: So they made this maybe extreme arrangement. She would leave right away. The rest of the family still had a life in Texas—work, school—so in the meantime, the parents would split their time between California and Austin, and the whole family would reunite over the summer

Rosin: When they called you and said, “We’re moving,” what was your reaction?

Teenager: I was excited. Obviously, I don’t want to move from where I’ve lived, but it’s gonna be better.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: Yeah, I was happy.

Rosin: Uh-huh. And what about the rest of your family? How did the conversations go in the house about moving?

Teenager: My brother doesn’t, my dad doesn’t, and my mom don’t. They don’t want to move, but I do. And if it were up to me, I would probably go and live with my grandparents and let them stay here in Texas, because I don’t want to do that to them. But at the same time, I’m not—I didn’t want the fact that I happen to live in a place that is in America, the country that is the home of the free, like, if I’m just a couple thousand miles away from, you know, not having to feel like this.

Rosin: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Teenager: I’m not gonna put up with everything.

Rosin: How is your California school, by the way? I was curious about it.

Teenager: I think at my new school, though, the politics of this area is better. My peers are a lot worse than in Texas, because they don’t understand truly how what they say can affect other people. So they’ll say a lot more hurtful stuff and a lot more often, but it doesn’t really affect me as long as I know that the politics—like, here, I’m safe.

I don’t have to hide.

Rosin: Best-case scenario for the summer and the next year, worst-case scenario?

Teenager: Best-case scenario: My family gets adjusted, and everyone has a good time. Worst-case scenario: They don’t like it here, and everyone’s miserable, except for me.

Rosin: By summer, her whole family joined her in California. It wasn’t easy for them to move, but they could pull it off—a lot of families in Texas couldn’t.

In May, all the doctors at the Texas clinic where the teenager had gotten her shots left after the attorney general announced he would investigate the clinic.

In June, the governor signed a new bill, which was a version of the original bill he’d been trying to pass all those years.

It points at doctors, criminalizing puberty blockers and hormones and any surgeries for minors—basically any medical interventions to enable a minor’s transition.

This law goes into effect in September.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Ethan Brooks and edited by our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid. It was mixed by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress.

If you or a loved one is having thoughts of suicide, please call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. Or text talk—T-A-L-K—to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

Birmingham Children's Hospital carried out a review after the arrest of a nurse accused of poisoning.

In October of last year, Donald Trump filed a defamation suit accusing CNN of calling him a lot of bad names, the first on the lengthy list being “like a cult leader.” One could assume that Trump would be flattered by that, because cult leaders are usually depicted in pop culture as charismatic masters with near-divine power over the lives of their followers. Jimmy Breslin once called then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani a “small man in search of a balcony.” If so, then Trump is a large man in search of a compound.

He stands in front of massive crowds festooned with insignia proclaiming their allegiance, chanting his name and accompanying him on the familiar refrains: “Lock her/him up!” “Build the wall!” They will countenance no criticism of their idol and accept his version of events without question. The same, of course, can be said about Taylor Swift, although no mob of Swifties has sacked the Capitol. Because she hasn’t asked them to. Yet.

Those who call Trumpism a cult can point to his popularity with Republican voters increasing with each of his four criminal indictments. A CBS poll in late August revealed that the most trusted source of information among those voters—more than conservative media, family members, or clergy—is that famed straight shooter Donald J. Trump.

[Peter Wehner: The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers]

At this point, as the nation faces a series of trials both literal and metaphorical, what label to apply to his movement doesn’t matter. The important question isn’t whether or not Trumpism is a cult. It’s whether the study of cults provides us with any path out of here.

Trump’s suit against CNN was thrown out of court, but Diane Benscoter, the cult expert and former cult member (a “Moonie” of the Unification Church) who compared Trump to a cult leader on CNN, still believes what she said. She’s been working with two incarcerated January 6 participants at the request of their lawyers, not so much to persuade them to recant as to help them with their behavior and attitude while in court—for example, no shouted accusations about the “deep state.” The work is difficult and slow, she told me, even more difficult than her recent efforts to “deprogram” India Oxenberg, one of the high-profile women caught up in NXIVM, the sex cult masquerading as a self-improvement course.   

It’s so difficult, in fact, that she sees greater hope in attacking the demand side of cultism, calling for government programs that would treat disinformation and indoctrination as a kind of public-health emergency—a Sanitary Commission of the Mind. If enough people can be taught how indoctrination works, she thinks, they will be able to see it coming for them before it’s too late. Set aside the legal and ethical questions about assigning the government that sort of expansive role; what if it’s already too late? Educating people so they won’t join a political cult, in 2023, is like closing the barn door after the horse has attacked the West Portico of the Capitol with bear spray.

Steven Hassan, another former cult member (also a Moonie), published his book The Cult of Trump in 2019, long before the attack on the Capitol, even before Trump persuaded thousands of his followers to gather indoors unmasked during the worst airborne pandemic in a century. Hassan told me that the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his “BITE” model of cult mind control—behavior, information, thought, and emotional control. Like all cult leaders, he argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions—not just fear but also joy.

His rallies, as so many have reported, are ecstatic events; people cheer and laugh as their various enemies are condemned and insulted. Hassan will be the first to tell you that being part of a cult means you’re empowered, special, one of the elect, close to the person who has all the answers/will lead us to paradise/will “make America great again.” That, in fact, may be the greatest disincentive to turn away from Trump: Nothing is more fun than knowing that you and your friends are the ones who are right about everything.

In the four years since the publication of The Cult of Trump, Hassan believes, the movement has gained strength through de facto alliances with other “authoritarian cults” such as QAnon, as well as with groups like the Council for National Policy, a secretive networking organization of powerful conservatives, and the New Apostolic Reformation, a theological movement calling for Christian dominion over politics. The danger is metastasizing, Hassan said, thanks primarily to digital and social media, which take the place of sermons and indoctrination sessions. “We’re on our phones 10 hours a day. People are up all night getting fed YouTube videos,” he said. “You don’t need a compound anymore.”

As cults became more prominent in the 1970s, self-styled “deprogrammers,” paid by desperate family members, would sometimes abduct cult members and keep them isolated and disoriented until they gave up their beliefs. That tended to backfire: What better proof that everyone outside the cult is a dangerous enemy, to a cult member indoctrinated in that belief, than being snatched up and locked in a hotel room? Whether or not the strategy ever worked, it was clearly unethical and even criminal; some deprogrammers served time for kidnapping.

Today it’s clearly not an option: It would take half the country kidnapping the other half of the country, and then who would feed the pets?

On cable TV, liberal pundits offer up regular factual rebuttals to Trump’s claims, as if his followers could be lectured into seeing the truth. But at this point, Trump’s supporters have been with him for up to eight years, through countless scandals, two impeachments, and now four indictments. What facts could anyone possibly conjure that they haven’t heard and dismissed before? Besides, to admit they’re wrong about any one thing would imply that they’ve been wrong the whole time. As anyone who’s been taken in a game of three-card monte and then played again to win their money back will know, the hardest thing in the world to admit is that you’ve been conned.

Instead, Hassan advocates “respectful, curious questioning.” He advised that friends and relatives of those deep in MAGA try reconnecting with them, approaching them without judgment, to remind them of the relationship you had before they turned. Then, through gentle inquisition, ask them to see things from others’ perspectives, to think about occasions when they’ve seen people intentionally misled by others, to ask themselves what it would be like if that happened to them. Eventually—as Hassan said he did, when he was forced by such questions to examine his allegiance to Reverend Sun Myung Moon—they will free themselves from the spell.

Maybe. Diane Benscoter tried just such an approach in a conversation with a right-wing conspiracy theorist named Michelle Queen, on tape for an NPR story in 2021. First, she found common ground by agreeing that harming children is bad. But then:

Diane Benscoter: Some of the things that are being spread about, you know, babies being eaten and things—I don’t think those things are true personally.

Michelle Queen: Um, I do.

At least, as the NPR correspondent Tovia Smith noted, they agreed to keep talking.

To Daniella Mestyanek Young, every group of people has a little cult in it, and every person has a bit of a cult follower within. At 36, and with a master’s in group psychology from Harvard’s Extension School, she’s acquired a following via her series of TikTok videos in which—while furiously knitting—she shares insights from her own history. She was born into the Children of God, which many ex-members describe as a sex cult, and then escaped it to join the U.S. Army, only to find that the Army was kind of a cult too. In her view, all organizations are situated somewhere on the “cultiness spectrum,” and some celebrated groups, such as the military and Alcoholics Anonymous, are much further toward the dark end than you’d like to believe.

In her TikToks, she includes various lists and rules of cults in an ever-present text box above her head, one of which reads:

The first rule of cults is:

you’re never in a cult

The second rule of cults is:

the cult will forgive any sin,

except the sin of leaving

The third rule of cults is:

even if he did it,

that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.

Like the other cult experts I spoke with, Young doesn’t believe that anybody can be argued out of Trumpism (or any other firmly held belief). People can save only themselves, as she did. But she argues that such self-rescues are happening all around us.

“Twenty years ago,” she told me, “when I walked away from a cult, it was much rarer to meet Americans like me, who are completely estranged from their families because they wouldn’t follow one leader, one guru, one specific ideology. And now it’s very common. The way that cults die without a final, Jonestown-like conflagration is when they can’t recruit the next generation, and we are seeing this in the alt-right. We’re going to see young children of MAGA Republicans voting for the left.”

She said that she hears from young people on TikTok all the time who say “they’re not going to vote for the people who made them do live-shooter drills in schools and at the same time loosened the gun laws.” There’s a trend on TikTok of young people posting what are called “deconstructing” songs; they’re usually about someone walking away from conservative Christianity. They say things, Young told me, like, “Screw you. You told me all my friends are going to hell. I’m going to hell with them.”

It’s possible as well, she thinks, that many formerly avid followers of Trump are themselves just quiet quitting, in a way. They stop posting Facebook memes, put away the MAGA hat, get back into cooking or sports or whatever it was that interested them before Trump. As said, it’s tough to admit you’ve been conned, so they don’t publicly denounce their former beliefs—unless, of course, they’re trying to get a lighter sentence. Consider the ragged smattering of followers who’ve appeared at Trump’s various arraignments, the desultory showings at his recent rallies, the smaller and sadder group of loyalists who attend him at Mar-a-Lago.

[Adam Serwer: They are still with him]

But Young believes that the only thing that will truly end Trumpism is what ends everything, eventually: the icy hand of death. Not necessarily the departure of Trump himself; she (like Hassan and Benscoter) believes that if and when he leaves the scene, via jail or one too many Big Macs, various pretenders will rise up to claim his mantle and authority, just as the Unification Church splintered into various factions after the death of Reverend Moon. No, what she means is that the members of the cult itself will die out, and there will be no one, eventually, to replace them.

In 2020, more than half of Americans over the age of 65 voted for Trump—it was, in fact, the only demographic group he won outright—while 62 percent of voters aged 18–29 went for Joe Biden. Right now, older voters dominate the electorate, but the passage of time, unlike the counting of electoral votes, can’t be stopped by force. Trump will someday be gone, and his following will fade and diminish, just like the millennial cults that used to regularly proclaim the impending end of the world. The world never ends, but political movements do.

We may not be prepared for whatever takes Trumpism’s place, but at least we will no longer be shocked.

Thousands of passengers are unable to return home in the aftermath of the air traffic control fault.

The next generation of carnival performers took to the streets of west London for the children's day parade

The last two occupants of a cable car dangling over a ravine in northern Pakistan are rescued after nightfall.

Last week, I posed a question to my wife that could have been about any number of our friends: “Do you think Bandit and Chilli will have another baby?” She pondered this, then shook her head. “Probably not. They threw their crib out, remember?”

Of course. My wife was referencing not a listing she’d seen on Facebook Marketplace but “Bedroom,” an episode from the third season of the Australian children’s show Bluey that she and I have each seen at least a dozen times. Our familiarity with Bluey is richer than with possibly any other show on the air, given that we both watch it over and over again with our 2-year-old daughter. But it wasn’t our shared knowledge that surprised me—it was that we were talking about a pair of cartoon dogs like they were people we knew.

When you have a young child, you passively end up watching a lot of children’s television, and my screen-addicted self can’t help but pay some attention to how it delivers gentle life lessons or energetic emotional rushes. But even before my daughter was born, Bluey was frequently invoked by parent friends as the kids’ show that was a cut above. Over three seasons, it’s received lavish praise for the thoughtful, funny adventures about the Heelers, a family of anthropomorphic Australian dogs: dad Bandit, mom Chilli, and their daughters Bluey (age 6) and Bingo (4). Its many episodes have confirmed the impressive depth of the show’s storytelling, rewarding my deep scrutiny in a way that a children’s show really doesn’t need to do for adults.

Most episodes (each running about seven minutes) focus on a game Bluey is playing, usually with her family or some of her school friends, who live in a city resembling Brisbane that’s populated by bipedal talking dogs of every imaginable breed. The show celebrates imaginative play and Bluey’s boundless energy, as her parents do their best to keep up with her fanciful improvisations (particularly Bandit, who puts most parents to shame with his endless ability to roll with it). But the games aren’t everything—the characters are richly drawn enough that I’ve started to think of the parents as going through the same travails as I.

One episode of the third (and latest) season, “Sheepdog,” sees an obviously overworked Chilli, after preparing dinner, making a request of Bandit that any fellow parent might recognize. “I need 20 minutes where no one comes near me,” she says sternly, something he acknowledges without hesitation. The request baffles Bluey, who spends the rest of the episode trying to ask her mother what she did wrong. The lesson, of course, is that nothing is wrong—sometimes grown-ups just need 20 minutes. But that’s a far more subtle premise to build an episode around than most kids’ TV would dare try. As helpful as they can be, shows like Daniel Tiger don’t endeavor to explain the ephemeral spikes of weariness that parents feel on a day-to-day basis.

[Read: The TV shows that helped my dying son communicate]

That’s the audacity of Bluey, which is largely written by its creator, Joe Brumm: It trusts that its young audience will be able to understand stories that are about the foibles and insecurities of parents too. A Season 2 episode titled “Grandad” is about Bluey and Bingo running around the Australian bush with their cantankerous grandpa, but it’s also about Chilli’s anxiety over her father’s advancing age, and his stubbornness about not wanting to slow down. The magnificent “Sticky Gecko” is a Buster Keaton–esque cacophony of minor slapstick, as Chilli struggles to get her kids out the door for a playdate. But it also has an offhand moment that never fails to catch me off guard, as Chilli recalls that, when Bluey was born, the mother of the children they’re about to visit made her five lasagnas. “It meant so much to me!” she exclaims, expressing the profound sweetness of being unexpectedly cared for by a close friend, a feeling I’ve cherished as a new parent.

The emotional specificity is just as crucial as the precision of the physical humor, and the density of the world building. Bluey is the kind of lively show a toddler anywhere on Earth can understand, but it’s also a particular representation of contemporary parenting. It’s told from a child’s-eye view, whereby flashes of surreal magic can infiltrate Bluey’s reality, but it also takes care to always, very realistically, depict the back seat of any family vehicle as being completely littered with junk.

The latest episodes, which came out in the U.S. last month, emphasized how much the show has also succeeded at constructing a universe beyond the Heeler family, playing with different storytelling conventions and highlighting characters about the wider ensemble. The episode “Stories” focuses on Bluey’s classmates at school and their frustrations with a craft project; “Onesies,” featuring a guest-star appearance from Rose Byrne, introduces Chilli’s sister Brandy, and obliquely but powerfully delves into her alienation from the family because of her inability to have children.

These kinds of narrative swerves shouldn’t necessarily fit into the formula of a seven-minute kids’ show, where the primary imperative is always to hold a child’s attention (no easy feat). That Bluey does it without ever feeling pretentious or heavy-handed is nothing short of astounding. A new bunch of episodes has already aired in Australia, and though my toddler is plenty satisfied with the 140 or so that are available to us, I can’t wait for more—not just for variety’s sake but to see where one of television’s most unexpectedly ambitious shows will head next.

Illustrations by Ricardo Tomás

Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.

My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.

We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?

Over the past few years, different social observers have offered different stories to explain the rise of hatred, anxiety, and despair.

The technology story: Social media is driving us all crazy.

The sociology story: We’ve stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.

The demography story: America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.

The economy story: High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.

I agree, to an extent, with all of these stories, but I don’t think any of them is the deepest one. Sure, social media has bad effects, but it is everywhere around the globe—and the mental-health crisis is not. Also, the rise of despair and hatred has engulfed a lot of people who are not on social media. Economic inequality is real, but it doesn’t fully explain this level of social and emotional breakdown. The sociologists are right that we’re more isolated, but why? What values lead us to choose lifestyles that make us lonely and miserable?

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.

[Read: American shoppers are a nightmare]

Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things. First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control? Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively? And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.

For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). “Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.”

If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. In 1788, Noah Webster wrote, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities ; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” The progressive philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality “every moment of the day, five days a week.” Hollis Frissell, the president of the Hampton Institute, an early school for African Americans, declared, “Character is the main object of education.” As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers’ unions, stated that “an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values continues to be a top priority for education.”

The moral-education programs that stippled the cultural landscape during this long stretch of history came from all points on the political and religious spectrums. School textbooks such as McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers not only taught students how to read and write; they taught etiquette, and featured stories designed to illustrate right and wrong behavior. In the 1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine for Black children, The Brownies’ Book, had a regular column called “The Judge,” which provided guidance to young readers on morals and manners. There were thriving school organizations with morally earnest names that sound quaint today—the Courtesy Club, the Thrift Club, the Knighthood of Youth.

Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; the settlement-house movement, which brought rich and poor together to serve the marginalized; Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which extended our moral concerns to include proper care for the natural world; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations, which, in addition to enhancing worker protections and paychecks, held up certain standards of working-class respectability. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved—those things tend to.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Make yourself happy—be kind]

An educational approach with German roots that was adopted by Scandinavian societies in the mid-to-late 19th century had a wide influence on America. It was called Bildung, roughly meaning “spiritual formation.” As conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Bildung approach gave professors complete freedom to put moral development at the center of a university’s mission. In schools across Scandinavia, students studied literature and folk cultures to identify their own emotions, wounds, and weaknesses, in order to become the complex human beings that modern society required. Schools in the Bildung tradition also aimed to clarify the individual’s responsibilities to the wider world—family, friends, nation, humanity. Start with the soul and move outward.

The Bildung movement helped inspire the Great Books programs that popped up at places like Columbia and the University of Chicago. They were based on the conviction that reading the major works of world literature and thinking about them deeply would provide the keys to living a richer life. Meanwhile, discipline in the small proprieties of daily existence—dressing formally, even just to go shopping or to a ball game—was considered evidence of uprightness: proof that you were a person who could be counted on when the large challenges came.

Much of American moral education drew on an ethos expressed by the headmaster of the Stowe School, in England, who wrote in 1930 that the purpose of his institution was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” America’s National Institute for Moral Instruction was founded in 1911 and published a “Children’s Morality Code,” with 10 rules for right living. At the turn of the 20th century, Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution, was an example of an intentionally thick moral community. When a young Frances Perkins was a student there, her Latin teacher detected a certain laziness in her. She forced Perkins to spend hours conjugating Latin verbs, to cultivate self-discipline. Perkins grew to appreciate this: “For the first time I became conscious of character.” The school also called upon women to follow morally ambitious paths. “Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go,” the school’s founder implored. Holyoke launched women into lives of service in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s), was galvanized there.

[Read: Students’ broken moral compasses]

These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures. But we learn most virtues the way we learn crafts, through the repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture—a community of common values, whose members aspire to earn one another’s respect.

Ricardo Tomás

The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste: An objective moral order exists, and human beings are creatures who habitually sin against that order. This recognition was central, for example, to the way the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s thought about character formation. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice,” Martin Luther King Jr. believed. Elsewhere, he wrote, “The force of sinfulness is so stubborn a characteristic of human nature that it can only be restrained when the social unit is armed with both moral and physical might.”

At their best, the civil-rights marchers in this prophetic tradition understood that they could become corrupted even while serving a noble cause. They could become self-righteous because their cause was just, hardened by hatred of their opponents, prideful as they asserted power. King’s strategy of nonviolence was an effort simultaneously to expose the sins of their oppressors and to restrain the sinful tendencies inherent in themselves. “What gave such widely compelling force to King’s leadership and oratory,” the historian George Marsden argues, “was his bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe.”

A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn’t produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn’t succeed in making people angels—it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.

Furthermore, we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many thou shall nots and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism. Yet a wise accounting should acknowledge that emphasizing moral formation meant focusing on an important question—what is life for?—and teaching people how to bear up under inevitable difficulties. A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard. In some ways, the old approach to moral formation was, at least theoretically, egalitarian: If your status in the community was based on character and reputation, then a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker. This ethos came down hard on self-centeredness and narcissistic display. It offered practical guidance on how to be a good neighbor, a good friend.

And then it mostly went away.

The crucial pivot happened just after World War II, as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century. One group, personified by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued that recent events had exposed the prevalence of human depravity and the dangers, in particular, of tribalism, nationalism, and collective pride. This group wanted to double down on moral formation, with a greater emphasis on humility.

Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority. The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.

A cluster of phenomenally successful books appeared in the decade after World War II, making the case that, as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman wrote in Peace of Mind (1946), “thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses.” People can trust the goodness inside. His book topped the New York Times best-seller list for 58 weeks. Dr. Spock’s first child-rearing manual was published the same year. That was followed by books like The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). According to this ethos, morality is not something that we develop in communities. It’s nurtured by connecting with our authentic self and finding our true inner voice. If people are naturally good, we don’t need moral formation; we just need to let people get in touch with themselves. Organization after organization got out of the moral-formation business and into the self-awareness business. By the mid‑1970s, for example, the Girl Scouts’ founding ethos of service to others had shifted: “How can you get more in touch with you? What are you thinking? What are you feeling?” one Girl Scout handbook asked.

Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America : “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.” The postwar period saw similar change at the college level, Anthony Kronman, a former dean of Yale Law School, has noted. The “research ideal” supplanted the earlier humanistic ideal of cultivating the whole student. As academics grew more specialized, Kronman has argued, the big questions—What is the meaning of life? How do you live a good life?—lost all purchase. Such questions became unprofessional for an academic to even ask.

[Read: The benefits of character education]

In sphere after sphere, people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant. Psychology’s purview grew, especially in family and educational matters, its vocabulary framing “virtually all public discussion” of the moral life of children, James Davison Hunter, a prominent American scholar on character education, noted in 2000. “For decades now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been muted or nonexistent.” Psychology is a wonderful profession, but its goal is mental health, not moral growth.

From the start, some worried about this privatizing of morality. “If what is good, what is right, what is true is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ ” Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1955 collection, Essays in the Public Philosophy, “then we are outside the traditions of civility.” His book was hooted down by establishment figures such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the de-moralization of American culture was under way.

Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the interviewees had not given the subject of morality much thought. “I’ve never had to make a decision about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one young adult told the researchers. “My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” many teenagers said.

The moral instincts that Smith observed in his sample fell into the pattern that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: Whatever feels good to me is moral. “I would probably do what would make me happy” in any given situation, one of the interviewees declared. “Because it’s me in the long run.” As another put it, “If you’re okay with it morally, as long as you’re not getting caught, then it’s not really against your morals, is it?” Smith and his colleagues emphasized that the interviewees were not bad people but, because they were living “in morally very thin or spotty worlds,” they had never been given a moral vocabulary or learned moral skills.

Most of us who noticed the process of de-moralization as it was occurring thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result: You do you and I’ll do me. That’s not what happened.

“Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy,” the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind. When you are raised in a culture without ethical structure, you become internally fragile. You have no moral compass to give you direction, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” the psychiatrist (and Holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl wrote, interpreting a famous Nietzsche saying. Those without a why fall apart when the storms hit. They begin to suffer from that feeling of moral emptiness that Émile Durkheim called “anomie.”

Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much. A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call “vulnerable narcissists.” We all know grandiose narcissists—people who revere themselves as the center of the universe. Vulnerable narcissists are the more common figures in our day—people who are also addicted to thinking about themselves, but who often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.

“The breakdown of an enduring moral framework will always produce disconnection, alienation, and an estrangement from those around you,” Luke Bretherton, a theologian at Duke Divinity School, told me. The result is the kind of sadness I see in the people around me. Young adults I know are spiraling, leaving school, moving from one mental-health facility to another. After a talk I gave in Oklahoma, a woman asked me, “What do you do when you no longer want to be alive?” The very next night I had dinner with a woman who told me that her brother had died by suicide three months before. I mentioned these events to a group of friends on a Zoom call, and nearly half of them said they’d had a brush with suicide in their family. Statistics paint the broader picture: Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, according to the CDC.

Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection—of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them.

Lonely eras are not just sad eras; they are violent ones. In 19th-century America, when a lot of lonely young men were crossing the western frontier, one of the things they tended to do was shoot one another. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. People grow more callous, defensive, distrustful, and hostile. The pandemic made it worse, but antisocial behavior is still high even though the lockdowns are over. And now we are caught in a cycle, ill treatment leading to humiliation and humiliation leading to more meanness. Social life becomes more barbaric, online and off.

If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.

[David Brooks: America is having a moral convulsion]

According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren’t lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.

The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.

Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.

Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.

This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.

The politics of recognition doesn’t give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.

If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level—only 8 percent did the same in 1990.

[Read: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life]

America’s Founding Fathers studied the history of democracies going back to ancient Greece. They drew the lesson that democracies can be quite fragile. When private virtue fails, the constitutional order crumbles. After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.

Even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness—his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.

In the summer of 2020, the series Ted Lasso premiered. When Lasso describes his goals as a soccer coach, he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but he says, “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”

That is a two-sentence description of moral formation. Ted Lasso is about an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely. Amid lockdowns and political rancor, it became a cultural touchstone, and the most watched show on Apple TV+.

Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people, as part of their elemental nature, yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning. People still want to build a society in which it is easier to be good. So the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?

A few necessities come immediately to mind.

A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.

The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.

Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.

I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.

Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.

There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)

Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.

These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.

Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.

In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.

Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.

Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.

Politics as a moral enterprise. An ancient brand of amoralism now haunts the world. Authoritarian-style leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping embody a kind of amoral realism. They evince a mindset that assumes that the world is a vicious, dog-eat-dog sort of place. Life is a competition to grab what you can. Force is what matters. Morality is a luxury we cannot afford, or merely a sham that elites use to mask their own lust for power. It’s fine to elect people who lie, who are corrupt, as long as they are ruthless bastards for our side. The ends justify the means.

Those of us who oppose these authoritarians stand, by contrast, for a philosophy of moral realism. Yes, of course people are selfish and life can be harsh. But over the centuries, civilizations have established rules and codes to nurture cooperation, to build trust and sweeten our condition. These include personal moral codes so we know how to treat one another well, ethical codes to help prevent corruption on the job and in public life, and the rules of the liberal world order so that nations can live in peace, secure within their borders.

Moral realists are fighting to defend and modernize these rules and standards—these sinews of civilization. Moral realism is built on certain core principles. Character is destiny. We can either elect people who try to embody the highest standards of honesty, kindness, and integrity, or elect people who shred those standards. Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become. We can structure our tax code to encourage people to be enterprising and to save more, or we can structure the code to encourage people to be conniving and profligate. Democracy is the system that best enhances human dignity. Democratic regimes entrust power to the people, and try to form people so they will be responsible with that trust. Authoritarian regimes seek to create a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.

This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “How America Got Mean.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Children displaced by the February disaster told Al Jazeera about the toys they brought with them.