Jared Genser in many ways fits a certain Washington, D.C., type. He wears navy suits and keeps his hair cut short. He graduated from a top law school, joined a large firm, and made partner at 40. Eventually, he became disenchanted with big law and started his own boutique practice with offices off—where else—Dupont Circle. What distinguishes Genser from the city’s other 50-something lawyers is his unusual clientele: He represents high-value political prisoners. If you’re married to a troublesome opposition leader in a place where the rule of law is thin on the ground, one night the secret police might kick in your door, slip a hood over your spouse, and vanish into the dark. That’s when you call Genser.

Earlier this year, Genser helped obtain the release of two men who had run for president against Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s on-again, off-again strongman, and found themselves imprisoned for their trouble. He still remembers the early-morning call letting him know that his clients were airborne and headed for Dulles International Airport. But not every case ends in a euphoric release. Genser has represented the three most recent imprisoned winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, including the Chinese prodemocracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who died in custody at the age of 61, and Ales Bialiatski, who was just sentenced to 10 years in a grim penal colony in Belarus, where inmates receive beatings between long shifts of hard labor.

Genser’s clients face the full technological powers of the Leviathan. By the time they’ve been arrested, in many cases after a mass protest, they may have been spied on for months, if not years, by plainclothes police and networks of cameras. Their personal messages, website clicks, and purchases could already be in the hands of the state. Post-arrest, they may be tortured by agents looking to extract the sort of secrets that a prisoner stores only in the inner sanctum of their mind: future plans, the names of people who send them money, any informants they might have in government. Genser's clients have even been subject to electrocution, and recently, he has begun to worry that dictators will soon have access to another tool of interrogation: mind-reading devices that no human being can resist.

In theory, nothing about the brain’s squishy wetware prevents its internal states from being observed. “If you could measure every single neuron in the brain in real time, you could potentially decode everything that was percolating around in there,” Jack Gallant, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley, told me. That includes “all of your perceptions, all of your intentions, all of your motor actions, and also a bunch of stuff you’re not even consciously aware of,” he said.

Scientists have no way of measuring the individual activity of every neuron in the brain, or even a sizable fraction of them, so mind reading of the sort that Gallant described would be impossible. But there are cruder ways to get at neural data: A person could be slid into an MRI machine, for example, and have their brain’s activity imaged by a head-permeating magnetic field. Configured in a certain way, an MRI can detect minute, local shifts in oxygenated blood flow inside the skull. Because neurons that have just fired tend to need more oxygen, these shifts are a decent proxy for the brain’s activity. They give a blurry afterimage of thought.

In 2011, Gallant published a set of experiments that pushed mind-reading technology into a new era. He asked volunteers to watch hours of video clips while their head was stuck in an MRI, and then trained a neural network on a dataset that linked every moment of each video to the brain activity recorded by the machine. Afterward, he asked the volunteers to watch new videos. When Gallant’s team fed the resulting data into the AI, it was able to generate very rudimentary reconstructions of some of the new imagery.

Genser worries that the same approach—using learning algorithms to correlate neuronal activity with mental states—could be scaled up in power and eventually deployed in wearable, mind-reading caps. He imagines secret police plopping one onto a client’s head. They could then ask questions, he said, while watching a real-time feed of whatever pictures or words popped unbidden into a prisoner’s mind. “This will transform interrogations around the world,” he told me.

Genser first became concerned about this risk in 2017, when he met Rafael Yuste, a Spanish American neurobiology professor at Columbia University. Yuste, now 60, helped create the project that became President Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, and has since become a prominent scientific voice arguing that advances in AI and neuroscience may require a new legal regime. He told me that he thinks of it as his second career. Shortly after he met Genser, he invited him to be a co-founder of the NeuroRights Foundation. Among its goals: a globally enshrined right to mental privacy and free will that would forbid anyone from ever using brain-imaging technology to force open a rear window onto your theater of consciousness.

I asked Gallant about the urgency of this campaign. He is well positioned to know how soon this technology could really be upon us: In addition to his pioneering image-reconstruction work, he has mentored several of the field’s younger practitioners. (His former student, Alexander Huth, runs a lab at the University of Texas at Austin that recently managed to reconstruct the rough gist of a text narrative that had been read aloud to a person in an MRI machine.) Gallant told me that the deep-learning revolution of the past 10 years has yielded greater success in decoding brain activity. The reconstructed imagery from his 2011 mind-reading study wasn’t very precise. “If you look at the pictures, it’s not random; there’s something there,” he said. More recent work, like that from a team led by Yu Takagi at Osaka University, in Japan, produced more-accurate reconstructions of mental imagery. Scientists are getting better at reading minds.

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That’s not to say that the world’s tyrants will soon be buying mind-reading kits off the shelf. The mental reconstructions that are possible right now are a far cry from the where-is-the-rebel-base scenario that Genser fears. Even if methods like the ones described above could be used in interrogations, there would be practical challenges. Takagi’s and Huth’s experiments required research subjects to spend many motionless hours inside an MRI machine to generate training data for AI models. That alone could pose problems for, say, a dictator who hoped to peer inside the head of his prisoners. If someone wanted to resist, Gallant told me, “all they would have to do is wiggle their head a little to mess up the signals.”

Companies are developing portable helmets that use small, pulsed lasers to monitor changes in the brain’s blood flow. In 2021, a start-up called Kernel debuted a model that cost just $50,000. But the spatial resolution of the brain data they capture is lower than the data you get from an MRI machine. According to Gallant, the helmets are able to gather sufficient data to tell whether a person is sleeping, or whether they’re paying attention, but not to perform image or narrative reconstruction. Overall, he told me, he shares Yuste’s belief that this technology will eventually pose new ethical concerns, but he made clear that, in his view, mind-reading caps are a long way off.

In the meantime, Genser and Yuste are working on other threats to mental privacy that aren’t quite as lurid. In recent years, the consumer market for devices that collect brain data has been growing fast; even Apple has applied for a patent on a new earbud outfitted with electrodes that could, in theory, detect brain activity. Medical devices that use this technology are of course highly regulated, but products that you can buy with a few taps on Instagram may not be.

The NeuroRights Foundation recently reviewed the user agreements of 17 neurotech companies for a report that it plans to release in September. The agreements cover headsets that record electrical activity generated by the brain to monitor sleep patterns, mental concentration, or even meditative calm. “Every one of them takes possession of all the brain data of the user,” Yuste said. To be clear, this sort of brain data could not be used to read someone’s inner thoughts; at best, it provides something more like an impressionistic image of their mental state. Marcello Ienca, a philosopher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, told me that even these data deserve special protections.

“In the digital world, we have been trading privacy for services almost nonstop for the last 20 years,” he said. But however mesmerized we might be by the dopamine slot machines that are our social-media feeds, our online activity is still voluntary. We can decide whether to post a given thought on Instagram, or to keep it in our minds, where it’s not accessible to the outside world, Ienca said. When it comes to brain data, we may not even know what we are sharing, and companies may be in no rush to tell us. Nor would we know where our data might end up: Yuste told me that almost all of the user agreements reviewed for the NeuroRights Foundation’s forthcoming report allowed the company to send data to third parties.

In some workplaces, sharing brain data may become a condition of employment. Chinese companies are reportedly using neuromonitoring technology to record the brain activity of high-speed-train conductors and people who execute important functions in nuclear plants, Ienca said. These devices may be recording only concentration levels and emotional states. But nothing prevents those companies—or the Chinese military, which is reportedly also monitoring cognitive focus in troops—from banking as much brain data as they can for later analysis. “If this isn’t a human-rights issue,” Yuste said, “what is a human-rights issue?”

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, a medical-ethics professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, isn’t quite sure that it’s a human-rights issue, or at least not a novel one. When I spoke with her, she pointed out that we already have a right to privacy under international law. Under Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—a treaty that has been ratified by 173 countries, including the United States—“no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy.” (Of course, dictators have routinely flouted the very treaties their countries have signed.) Many countries have also passed domestic laws that forbid various invasions of privacy. These existing treaties and laws could cover cases where a person’s mental states are read without their consent, Blumenthal-Barby said.

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Genser and Yuste disagree, and argue that without more-explicit guarantees, current human-rights law may not protect mental privacy. But Blumenthal-Barby said that such guarantees, if enacted, could be overly expansive. “We have to be able to draw a line,” she told me. “We read off people’s mental states by their behavior all the time without their consent,” by looking at facial cues or gestures or body language, and “we don’t want to include those cases.” In place of a catch-all mental-privacy right, she said that she’d be a lot more comfortable seeing laws that address specific technologies—consumer headsets, for instance—that could be used to retrieve brain data without consent.

Yuste and Genser are still focused on getting the word out about their efforts—they recently collaborated on a documentary about neurotechnology with Werner Herzog—but they have also achieved genuine legislative victories. Yuste was instrumental in the drafting of a law passed by Chile’s national legislature near the end of 2021, which enshrined several neuro rights. (Memories of Augusto Pinochet’s purges and mass internments are still fresh in Chile’s national psyche, he told me.) The NeuroRights Foundation is now working with Brazil to draft a constitutional amendment modeled on Chile’s law. Yuste said they’re also in talks with Colorado’s governor about the first such legislation at the state level in the United States.

Genser told me that it takes at least a decade to stand up a new international rights treaty, but that changes in how current treaties are interpreted could be achieved on a much shorter timeline. If Gallant is right that we won’t see anything close to a mind-reading helmet for a while, the NeuroRights Foundation may not need to rush. That’s not to say that the group’s work isn’t useful, if only to name the risks, but it’s operating in a competitive space. A great many people are currently scanning the horizon for threats from emerging technologies, especially those powered by AI. Policy makers are doing their level best to address the most pressing threats. The line between foresight and alarmism can sometimes seem blurry, like the readout from an MRI.

It’s always election season in America. Dozens of local contests are taking place across the country this month, from Montgomery, Alabama to the Mariana Ranchos County Water District in California. On August 8 alone, Custer County, Colorado held a recall election for a county commissioner; Ohio asked residents to consider a major ballot measure; and voters in Oklahoma weighed in on several ballot measures.

America has roughly 90,000 local governing bodies, and states do not—at least publicly—track all of the elections taking place on their watch, making an exhaustive accounting nearly impossible. In many cases, contests come and go without any local media coverage, either. I came across a notice for an August 29 election in Marin County, California. When I called the Registrar of Voters for more information, the county assistant had to search a few moments before he could tell me that the town of Tiburon (population 9,000) was selecting a short-term council member.

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Americans are used to pundits and civic leaders shaming them for low-turnout elections, as if they had failed a test of civic character. Voters are apathetic, parties don’t bother with the hard work of mobilization, and candidates are boring—or so the story goes. But this argument gets the problem exactly backwards. In America, voters don’t do too little; the system demands too much. We have too many elections, for too many offices, on too many days. We have turned the role of citizen into a full-time, unpaid job. Disinterest is the predictable, even rational response.

“One of the unique aspects of the electoral process in the United States is the sheer number of decisions American voters are asked to make when they go to the polls,” three political scientists argued at the turn of the millennium. “In any single election, American voters face much higher information costs than the citizens of almost any other democracy in the world.”

These information costs are immense. Americans are asked to fill numerous and obscure executive, legislative, and judicial positions, and to decide arcane matters of policy, not just on the first Tuesday in November but throughout the year.

How are we expected to know how the roles of our mayors and city councils are distinct from the roles of county executives, county council members, treasurers, controllers, and boards of supervisors? On what basis should we choose our coroners, zoning commissioners, or commissioners of revenue? Who should we punish when things go wrong? Reward when things go right?

And how can we keep up with the details of hopelessly complicated policy questions? Ohio’s aforementioned August 8 ballot measure proposed raising the threshold for changing the state constitution. It failed 57 to 43 percent, or roughly 1,700,000 to 1,300,000. This apparent matter of process attracted an unusually large number of voters because Ohioans understood that they were engaging in a proxy fight over abortion; advocates expended significant time and energy to explain to the general public what the ballot measure was really about.

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Usually, however, voters are expected to puzzle out even quite complicated issues without the benefit of a government-sponsored education campaign or significant explanatory reporting. In 2022, Georgia voters were asked to approve a statewide ad valorem tax exemption for certain equipment used by timber producers. California has repeatedly asked citizens to vote on regulatory requirements for kidney-dialysis clinics.

Americans are asked to vote too much, and Americans are asked to vote too often. One of the most pernicious ways politicians overburden voters is by holding off-cycle elections. Making time to vote is harder for some people than others; it’s harder for people with inflexible job schedules and needy dependents, for instance. Employers are used to making accommodations for presidential elections—but some random election over the summer? Hardly. As a result, off-cycle local elections are heavily weighted toward higher-income voters, more so than are statewide and national elections.

They’re also heavily weighted toward senior citizens: The most important factor for predicting who votes in city elections is not class or education or race, but age. An analysis by Portland State University’s “Who Votes for Mayor?” project found that people over the age of 65 who live in the poorest, least educated parts of a city typically vote two to five times more frequently than 18-to-34-year-olds in the most educated, affluent parts of a city. Overall, city residents 65 and older were 15 times more likely to vote than those ages 18 to 34.

Ohio Republicans knew that by scheduling the constitutional ballot measure in August, they could dampen turnout and benefit their side. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, had vocally opposed off-cycle elections as recently as December 2021. While testifying in a legislative hearing, he’d pointed to the record voter turnout in November 2020, when “74 percent of all registered voters made their voice heard.” Off-cycle elections, LaRose warned, mean that “just a handful of voters end up making big decisions.” He argued persuasively that “the side that wins is often the one that has a vested interest in the passage of the issue up for consideration. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.” State Republicans voted last year to eliminate most August special elections.

But LaRose, who declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate last month, supported the timing of the August 8 ballot measure, arguing that a statewide issue is “very different” and “not unusual.” According to local Ohio reporting, “There have been only two August statewide votes regarding the constitution”: in 1874 and 1926.  

Nostalgic political commentators long for the bygone days when American democracy still worked. But election-timing manipulation has always been a feature of American local politics. The UC Berkeley political scientist Sarah Anzia looked at the timing of local elections in New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia over the course of the 19th century and concluded, “Election timing manipulation was a common event.” Politicians exploited timing as a way to “exert some control over the electorate.”

For example, in 1857, New York’s nativist Know-Nothing Party and its Republican Party, which controlled the state legislature, bumped the city’s voting schedule so that municipal elections would no longer take place alongside federal ones, but a month later, in December. All of the Democrats voted against the change in part because they feared that it would hurt their mayoral candidate’s chances. (City Democrats knew their voters would show up for state and national elections, but that in a lower-turnout environment, their opponents could out-organize them.) They were right to be scared: Their mayoral candidate lost that very same year.

Off-cycle elections continued, and voter turnout in the city’s elections “consistently fell far below turnout levels in gubernatorial and presidential elections,” according to Anzia. By 1868, more than 155,000 votes were cast for governor in the November statewide election; a month later, just 96,000 people turned out for the mayoral contest. When the city went back on-cycle in the 1870s, voter turnout for the mayor’s and governor’s races reached near parity.

Americans rationally respond to such intense and random demands on our time by simply checking out. In November 2021, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor. That same year in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections, comprising 890 contests and more than 2,500 candidates. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out.

America’s voting problem is primarily a local one. When compared with that of peer nations, our general-election turnout is actually middle-of-the-pack. And although more voting at the federal level is desirable, some political-science research casts doubt on whether the results of national elections would significantly change if everybody showed up. Not so in local elections, where the electorate is remarkably unrepresentative.

In 2020, the year before that dismal local turnout in North Carolina, about 75 percent of voters—five times as many people—turned out for the general election and statewide contests. And in 2022, 51 percent of registered voters, or nearly three and a half times as many people as the previous year, turned out for the statewide election. The “Who Votes for Mayor?” project examined 23 million voting records in local elections across 50 cities, and came away with alarming findings: In 10 of America’s 30 largest cities, turnout didn’t exceed 15 percent. In Las Vegas, Fort Worth, and Dallas, turnout was in the single digits. Portland, Oregon, was the only city in the sample that saw the majority of its registered voters turn out, probably because Portland regularly votes for mayor on the federal-election holiday in November. The city’s special elections are more in line with national trends: In November 2019 and May 2023, voter turnout was only about 30 percent.

The failed Ohio ballot measure is an instructive case study in the low expectations Americans have for voter engagement. In the days following the election, newspapers proclaimed it a “boost for democracy.” A Columbus Dispatch article noted “high participation” and quoted a spokesperson for the Association of Elected Officials who marveled that “so many people turn[ed] out,” deeming the results “the will of the people.”

Relative to other ballot measures, sure. But only about 38 percent of Ohio’s registered voters cast a ballot, a proportion that shrinks to roughly 34 percent when you include all citizens of voting age. Regardless of whether you support the outcome, is it laudable that, on major questions, just a third of voters bother to weigh in?

The minority who do vote end up with disproportionate power. In Tarrant County, Texas, a judge recently told a meeting of the conservative True Texas Project how just 75 people could make a big difference in local elections where “the turnout is so low by percentage … By you bringing neighbors, friends, picking up the phone, doing postings on social media, there are races that, quite frankly, we ought not to be able to win that we can probably win just because we raise awareness and get people out.” At least two candidates endorsed by the True Texas Project ended up winning their races in Fort Worth. In a city of almost 1 million, fewer than 43,000 people cast ballots.

Aligning local elections with national ones would increase turnout and likely create a more representative electorate, but just filling out a ballot doesn’t constitute meaningful accountability. That’s in part because most races at the local level go uncontested: In 2020, 61 percent of city races and 78 percent of county races were uncontested, as were 62 percent of school-board races and 84 percent of judicial races. Even when a race is competitive, finding reliable information about local candidates can be nearly impossible, turning voting into an exercise in randomness or, at best, name recognition.

Incumbents have a staggering advantage in local races. In a 2009 paper, the legal academic Ronald Wright reviewed election data for prosecutors, a role that is both well understood and highly important to voters. (Public safety and crime regularly rank at the top of voters’ list of concerns.) Wright observed that when district attorneys run for reelection, they win 95 percent of the time and run unopposed in 85 percent of races.

This month alone, I found three elections in Delaware that were canceled because not enough people were running. In each case, the candidates who bothered to file simply ascended to their theoretically elected positions. In local government, elected office is apparently first come, first served.

Nature abhors a vacuum: Where voters disappear, special interests rush in. In the absence of regular voter direction, our local elected officials are not directionless. Instead of democracy, what we’ve got is government by homeowners’ associations, police unions, teachers’ unions, developers, chambers of commerce, environmental groups, and so forth.

“All is not well in local government, and it hasn’t been for some time,” Anzia writes in her book Local Interests. Anzia finds, unsurprisingly, that pressure from interest groups works. Political activity by police and firefighters’ unions correlates with greater spending on their salaries, and cities with more politically active police unions are less likely than cities with less active ones to have adopted body cameras. In cities with strong environmental groups, Anzia found, winning candidates are significantly less likely to favor policies conducive to economic growth. And in school districts where teachers’ unions are the dominant interest group, jurisdictions that hold off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers more than those that hold on-cycle elections.

These specific policies may be good or bad. That’s not the point. The point is that the government should act according to public need, not based on who has the money, time, and will to create and sustain an advocacy group.   

Blaming the voters is easy: Democracy is on the line; people need to get up off their asses and vote! The problem isn’t the system; it’s the people. Maybe if they saw one more Instagram infographic or heard one more speech about the importance of civics, they would become regular voters.

Putting aside the moral status of nonvoters, this argument is pure fantasy. As the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped, “Like other performers (including teachers, ministers, and actors), politicians and political activists are prone to overestimate the interest of the audience in their performance.”

Contrary to what good-government types may wish, few Americans want to be full-time political animals. Most of us have absolutely no desire to learn what our county commissioners or district attorneys are up to, let alone take on the herculean task of evaluating their records. Effective representational government must empower voters to hold their elected officials accountable without sucking the life out of its citizens. Even the most dedicated participants in local politics aren’t experts in everything, just in the parts of local government that provide them with benefits they find meaningful.

When ordinary voters do show up in local politics, they’re not walking onto an even playing field. Individuals who become motivated to seek criminal-justice reform after an unjust killing by a police officer, or parents who feel compelled to change school curricula, are entering unfamiliar territory that has been landscaped by special interests. And elected officials know that a flurry of political activity can die out quickly, while interest-group activity remains constant.

When I ask local government officials about this problem, I usually hear denial or resignation. “Nonsense,” Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, told me a few months ago when I asked him whether he worries that low voter turnout yields an unrepresentative government. He suggested that this view calls “into question not only the legitimacy of a municipal election but the integrity of the people elected, as if they don’t represent their community. Those are the things that academics and people say that have never been to a city-council meeting and don’t go to planning-commission meetings.”

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I don’t doubt that most local officials have integrity. Many if not most of the local officials I’ve spoken with are kind, hardworking, and genuinely committed citizens. They are pledging their efforts for very few benefits and are forced to face ire and controversy as they serve their communities. But our system shouldn’t depend on the benevolence of local officials. In a healthy democracy, it should depend on the electorate holding local officials accountable through the ballot box.

Giving power to the people is sometimes conflated with giving people more access to government decision making through, say, community meetings or ballot measures. But if only a small, unrepresentative group of people are willing to be full-time democrats, then that extra ballot measure, election, or public meeting isn’t more democracy; it’s less. Most of us are part-time democrats. That’s not going to change, and political hobbyists should stop expecting it to.

At the Boulder County Recycling Center in Colorado, two team members spend all day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in junk collected from the area’s bins. One plucks out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be reprocessed, while the other searches for contaminants in the stream of paper products headed to a fiber mill. They are Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot, AI-powered robots that each resemble a supercharged mechanical arm from an arcade claw machine. Developed by the tech start-up Amp Robotics, McSortface and Sorts-a-Lot’s appendages dart down with the speed of long-beaked cranes picking fish out of the water, suctioning up items they’ve been trained to recognize.

Yes, even recycling has gotten tangled up in the AI revolution. Amp Robotics has its tech in nearly 80 facilities across the U.S., according to a company spokesperson, and in recent years, AI-powered sorting from companies such as Bulk Handling Systems and MachineX has popped up in other recycling plants. These robots are still niche, but they’re starting to be seen as a step forward for an industry in need of real improvement. “I know it’s kind of a buzzword,” says Jeff Snyder, the director of recycling at Rumpke Waste and Recycling, a waste-management company based in Ohio. “But from an [industry] perspective, AI is incredible. It’s a game changer for us.”

In the ChatGPT era, AI has been endlessly hyped as tech companies scramble to profit off the recent surge of interest. But the technology’s impact on recycling might be closer to the opposite: a meaningful application that is hidden in plain sight. Even that might still not be enough to fully fix recycling as we know it.

Recycling could use a high-tech shake-up. In theory, “materials recovery facilities,” or MRFs—industry insiders pronounce the acronym as a word that rhymes with Smurfs—are supposed to close the loop between consumption and production. They gather the containers and pieces of packaging we throw into bins, do the dirty work of sorting them out, and then sell those materials back to other companies that can reuse them.

In practice, the MRFs aren’t all that good. In 2018, only about a third of all glass containers were successfully recycled in the U.S. That same year, the EPA estimated that less than 9 percent of plastics were recycled, and the number may have fallen since then. In recent years, China, which historically bought much of America’s recyclable scrap, has largely stopped buying it—in part, because the end product of recycling tends to be a mix of different kinds of items that can’t be feasibly reused together. Since then, a few other countries have picked up some of the slack, but not all. With nowhere to send huge quantities of recyclables, many communities have simply started to burn and landfill what used to go to China.

The issue is that it’s long been too hard for recycling plants to sort material with the level of specificity needed to satisfy manufacturers that could theoretically reuse it, Matt Flechter, a recycling specialist for Michigan, told me. The traditional recycling methods used to sort waste—including sieves, blasts of compressed air, glass crushers, powerful magnets, and near-infrared light—do a good job of separating waste into broad categories of paper, glass, and metal. But finer layers of detail often go unnoticed, especially with plastic. It’s hard for recyclers to determine whether, say, a #2 HDPE container is a milk jug, which would be suitable for reuse in food products, or a pesticide container, which wouldn’t be, as thousands of pounds of refuse whizz down the line at 600 feet a minute. Although plastic bottles and plastic clamshells are each recyclable, a poorly sorted mix of them is something no one really wants.

AI stands to change that calculus, giving recycling plants a far more granular view into packaging that otherwise tends to be hopelessly commingled. These recycling bots—from Amp and competitors such as MachineX, Bulk Handling Systems, Glacier Robotics, and Everest Labs—are “vision systems”: In the same way that ChatGPT is trained by ingesting text that has been published online, they absorb lots of photographs of tossed-out items in various states of degradation and disrepair. The robots are then able to identify even tiny differences in a product’s color, shape, texture, or logo—and in the case of Amp, even its SKU, the unique number manufacturers assign to each kind of item they sell, Matanya Horowitz, Amp’s CEO, told me. “We know this is Procter and Gamble, this is Unilever, and so on,” Horowitz said. “If we know the SKU, we can determine anything—I know what adhesive they used; I know what cap they used; I know what was actually in it.”

The bots are helping to create new end-markets that didn’t exist before, recycling operators told me, thanks to their ability to sort types of plastic that otherwise might get downcycled or trashed. Operators said that systems currently tend to be 85 to 95 percent accurate, while robotics companies themselves claim up to 99 percent accuracy. Steve Faber, a representative for Michigan’s Kent County Department of Public Works, which operates a recycling facility in Grand Rapids, said Amp’s bots have allowed the plant to sort out and resell #5 polypropylene, a plastic used in coffee pods and other lightweight food containers, that were previously getting sorted into mixed bales with next to no value.

Recycling robots have been around for a few years, but their momentum seems to be growing during the current AI boom. Waste Management, the largest residential-recycling company in the U.S., has announced plans to invest $800 million in recycling infrastructure by the end of 2025, including new, AI-powered facilities. At the same time, the companies that design this tech are starting to raise serious money—especially Amp, whose $99 million Series C round has seen buy-in from Google Ventures, the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and Sequoia Capital.

That is not to say that the turn to AI has already fixed recycling. The high-tech systems that are needed to keep up with the torrent of recyclables won’t come cheap—an individual robot can cost as much as $300,000, and investments can take years to recoup. Many facilities, Flechter said, are reluctant to adopt the newer approaches because the price tag means they often lose money, and some communities are already too cash-strapped to offer recycling services at all.

Still, as costs eventually decrease, the future looks promising, heralding more than just robots with mechanical arms. Snyder, of Rumpke, thinks AI’s bigger contribution will be to reinvent “high-volume optical sorting,” an approach that uses near-infrared light to determine a product’s material composition before a blast of air diverts it down various chutes. It is faster than the recycling robots, but so far lacks the same kind of accuracy. A version with an AI vision system would be both ultra-quick and ultra-accurate. In partnership with MachineX, Rumpke is in the process of building one of the earliest plants with such technology. When its $90 million facility in Columbus, Ohio, opens in 2024, it will be able to process a full ton of material every minute and 250,000 tons a year.

In a decade, recycling bots could be everywhere, helping facilities churn out perfectly sorted bales of junk that companies can turn into something new. But recycling, even souped up with AI and robotics, will always have limitations. Recycling tech can treat only the symptoms of unconstrained consumerism, not the disease of companies that are dumping far too many single-use products into the world. A few states have begun passing laws that shift the financial burden of collection and reuse back onto packaging producers through hefty fines, but for the most part, “the assumption is that industry can make whatever it wants, and then the recycling industry has to figure out how to deal with it,” says Suzanne Jones, the executive director of Ecocycle, the nonprofit that operates the recycling facility in Boulder. “And that’s backwards.”

At worst, recycling bots could give companies an opportunity to greenwash their reputation. Advances in AI could allow brands to claim their materials are theoretically recyclable, when in practice they aren’t—and when what’s really needed is more money in the system. Some modest efforts are under way to do just that. The Polypropylene Recycling Coalition—a group funded by companies such as Campbell’s, Nestle, and Keurig Dr. Pepper—has since 2020 spent more than $10 million to improve polypropylene collection at 41 facilities in the U.S, including a rollout of new AI-enabled robotic sorters that specifically target that material.

It’s a start, though $10 million barely registers compared with America’s $91 billion waste-and-recycling industry. Of course, from a plastics-pollution perspective, what’s better than a recyclable K-cup is not using a K-cup at all. Recycling bots can’t change the basic fact that recycling, even at its best, is just not a particularly efficient way of dealing with single-use products, no matter how much we might want to believe that it is. Even in this new era of AI, tech alone can only go so far. The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.

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Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, indicted Donald Trump and 18 others on an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in her state. The accused co-conspirators are a reminder that people like Trump are enabled by minor figures who may be as much a menace to democracy as Trump himself.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The agony of Mike Pence Why people won’t stop moving to the Sun Belt Don’t let Donald Trump take his case to federal court.

The Brass Ring, Pulled Away

Former President Donald Trump now faces his fourth round of felony indictments, this time in Georgia, where prosecutors allege in a racketeering charge that he led an effort to overturn the will of the state’s voters in the 2020 election. Not much more can be said about Trump himself: We can note only so many times that he is an emotionally disordered man, beset by feral insecurities, whose actions have, in the words of the retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, “corroded and corrupted American democracy.” So let’s leave him aside and turn to his accused co-conspirators in Georgia (at least five of whom appear to be mentioned in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment accusing Trump of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election, although Smith has not yet charged them).

The indictments in Georgia depict an alleged racket that looks much like a multilevel-marketing scheme, in which the principals (Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows) have something they want to sell (in this case, an election lie). They go out and recruit a gullible and ambitious sales force to spread the word (relying on loyalists such as the lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis), who then pull in another group of sellers (state legislators, election officials, state party officials, and others). Go down far enough and you’ll find the marks who were willing to serve as fake electors. In the end, they’re all tied to a sham product that is going to cost them their reputation and perhaps even their freedom.

But we should not be distracted by the inanity of the alleged plot. The Georgia case is an important window into the actions of Trump’s enablers and courtiers, the mediocre people around the former president who were determined to gain the respect and station to which they felt entitled, regardless of their actual talent. Most of us live our lives as ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. Not every career is fulfilling, and as my working-class father used to say, even Hollywood actors probably hate their job on some days, when they have to drag themselves out of bed for an early-morning call time and sit in a makeup chair for hours. (My one foray into watching real actors at work confirmed this wise observation.)

Since he entered politics, however, Trump has played the role of patron saint to this resentful third string. Ellis, for example, began her legal career as a deputy DA in a rural Colorado jurisdiction; she soon marketed herself as a “constitutional law attorney” on television, as The New York Times noted in 2020, despite a lack of experience that had no “apparent bearing on her ability to present herself as someone of great authority.” Unlike Trump, these are not larger-than-life figures. In fact, their most striking characteristics are how small, how odd, and how incompetent they each are—and yet, to judge from the indictments, how dangerous they were as a group.

Among the accused, only Meadows and Giuliani are anything like national figures. (Powell became famous mostly for going on Fox News and peddling unhinged ideas that even Fox management and hosts thought were “kooky” and “crazy.”) Rudy’s descent from “America’s Mayor” to a debt-ridden huckster has been amply documented. Meadows, for his part, seems to be just another politician addicted to life in the capital, whose friends and enemies alike describe him as something of an Eddie Haskell figure, “slippery,” obsequious, and ever-scheming.

I have already written about Jeffrey Clark—or, as I always call him now, “Jeffrey Bossert Clark,” because he reportedly insisted that his full name be used in Justice Department draft briefs—and John Eastman, two of the most egregious figures in this whole affair. Eastman was a law professor, a job that carries a special duty to be intellectually courageous in the face of a possible conspiracy; instead (like the former liberal lawyer turned Trump defender Kenneth Chesebro) he constructed rationales for overturning the election. Clark, at the time of the election a government employee, seems to have been an unexceptional functionary with a professional chip on his shoulder. He may also have been willing to become a danger to his fellow citizens. According to the Smith indictment, when Patrick Philbin, then the deputy White House counsel, warned “Co-Conspirator 4”—who appears to be Clark—that riots would erupt if Trump somehow remained in office beyond his term, Co-Conspirator 4 answered, “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Imagine the frisson, the sense of importance a mid-level bureaucrat such as “Co-Conspirator 4” must have felt saying something so hideous.

While some apparatchik was allegedly sitting in Washington, D.C., and blithely considering the possibility of using the U.S. military against fellow Americans, others were at work in Georgia, including Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for the rapper Ye, previously known as Kanye West. She is accused of trying to pressure the Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman to make false statements. (Freeman, along with her daughter and election co-worker Shaye Moss, had their lives upended when they were targeted by Trump and his goon squad.)

Willis is also prosecuting a group of people that is alleged to have been involved in a plot to replace Georgia’s true electors with fakes, including a former chair of the Georgia GOP and a current Georgia state senator. Meanwhile, two women—one of whom was a county election supervisor—have also been charged in an alleged breach of the voting system in Georgia’s Coffee County.

All of these people are indicted, not convicted. But few of Trump’s defenders are arguing that any of the accused didn’t actually do the things they’re charged with doing. Rather, Trump World and its associated outlets seem to be disputing whether any of these acts are crimes. (In a statement issued today, Trump’s lawyers said that the Georgia indictment “is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.”)

Nonetheless, without Trump, most of these people would never have been in remote proximity to the levers of national power. When Trump lost, they lost. The brass ring of power and influence—and, perhaps more than anything else, respect—was pulled away just inches from their hands. They now all have the importance they craved, but likely not in the way they expected.

Related:

The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture. Trump’s dangerous wannabes (From 2022)

Today’s News

At least 99 people have been confirmed dead in the Maui wildfires; Hawaii Governor Josh Green has warned that this number could double over the next 10 days as searches continue. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates by 3.5 percentage points, the highest increase since the early weeks of war in Ukraine. Typhoon Lan has hit western Japan. At least 26 people have been injured, and evacuation warnings have been sent to more than 237,000 people.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alex Cochran. Source: Getty.

These State Schools Also Favor the One Percent

By Kevin Carey

Earlier this month, the century-old Pac-12 athletic conference was swiftly and brutally eviscerated. In the space of a few hours, five member universities left for rival conferences offering massive paydays financed by TV-sports contracts. As Jemele Hill put it for The Atlantic, the shift “pits the long-term interests of schools and conferences against their own insatiable greed.”

Sports lovers are used to watching their favorite teams put money ahead of the wishes of their fans. That makes it easy to forget that this isn’t a story about professional-sports franchises—or, indeed, private entities of any kind. All five of the defecting schools are public universities: Washington, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State. The money grab in college football is just one symptom of a troubling strain in American public higher education. Many of our public universities, it turns out, don’t act very much like public institutions at all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Right price, wrong politics The First Amendment is no defense for Trump’s alleged crimes. Afghanistan changed me.

Culture Break

Bluey Images / Disney

Read. “Pemaquid Lighthouse Revisited,” a new poem by Caleb Crain.

“How many years has it been since we were here? / How many summers, which should be spaced apart in memory / by winters, like mica planes by quartz, but aren’t?”

Watch. Bluey (streaming on Disney+), the most grown-up television show for children.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Today is the anniversary of the first day of Woodstock, the legendary 1969 music festival that became a cultural marker for the Baby Boomer generation. I am regularly called a Boomer—I was born in 1960—but Woodstock is an annual reminder that people like me are not, in any way, identifiable as Boomers.

I was 8 in the summer of 1969 and couldn’t have run off to Woodstock even if I’d known what it was. The most enduring comment about it that sticks with me is something Billy Joel said not at the time but in the liner notes of his 1981 live album, Songs in the Attic. For his majestic live version of “Captain Jack,” a depressing anthem about drugs and ennui, Joel left this glum description:

1971 and so many of my friends shoveled under the Long Island dirt. The miracle of modern chemistry killed them if Vietnam didn’t. Woodstock was a nightmare, I was there. Rain, mud, b.o., and acid. You didn’t miss anything.

When I started high school four years later, both Vietnam and the draft were over, and the late 1950s were a sanitized memory on Happy Days. I prefer to think of myself as Generation Jones, a weird notch between the Boomers and Gen X, but whatever I am, I’m not part of the group that went to—or wanted to be at—Woodstock.

— 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.

When it gets hot enough, as it has across the South in recent weeks, barefoot toddlers suffer second-degree burns from stepping onto concrete. People who fall on the blistering pavement wind up with skin grafts. Kids stay inside all day, “trying to survive.” Windshield wipers glue themselves in place, and the ocean transfers heat back into your body. One electric blackout could bake thousands to death inside their homes.

You would think people would flee such a hellscape expeditiously. But as record-breaking heat fries the Sun Belt, the region’s popularity only grows. The numbers, laid out recently in The Economist, are striking: 12 of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in the Sun Belt. Of the top 50 zip codes that saw the largest increases in new residents since the start of the pandemic, 86 percent were in blazing-hot Texas, Florida, and Arizona.

To be sure, during the pandemic people also moved to a few relatively cool cities in Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. But hot places overwhelmingly dominate nearly every ranking of population growth and migration: The 50 counties with the greatest extreme-heat risk grew by nearly 5 percent from 2016 to 2020 due to migration, according to Redfin data. Meanwhile, the 50 counties with the lowest heat risk saw their population decrease from migration by 1.4 percent in the same time period. Those hot counties were led by Texas’s Williamson County, near Austin, whose population grew by 16 percent from inbound migration, and where 100 percent of homes have a “high heat risk.”

[Read: The problem with ‘Why do people still live in Phoenix?’]

The South may be approaching the approximate ambient temperature of Venus, but that’s no deterrent. People keep wanting to move there. (I count myself among these people, as someone who has dedicated the past year of my life to finding a house in Florida.) This unstoppable appeal of Sun Belt cities rests on three factors: These places tend to have less expensive housing, lots of jobs, and warm winters. None of these is sufficient to attract people in large numbers, but together they seem to generate an irresistible force, sucking up disaffected northerners and Californians like a fiery tornado.

Cheap housing

These days, you don’t have to wonder how the other half lives. You can open up Redfin and see how much house you can get in Dallas for less than your New York rent. The median home price in Los Angeles is $975,000. The median home price in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler is $520,000. Once you have this knowledge, it can be hard to evict it from your mind. What would you do with an extra half a million dollars?

The one thing every sunny, growing city has in common is affordable housing. This explains why Los Angeles, with its unimpeachable weather, is losing residents (including to Phoenix). It’s “vastly easier to mass produce housing in the suburbs of Phoenix or the suburbs of Houston than it is anyplace in coastal California or the Northeast,” says Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard. Cities in the Northeast and West tend to make it harder to get construction permits, and they have zoning requirements that make building affordable housing in desirable areas difficult. Plus, it’s just easier to build on an immense, unending desert than around the mountains of California or in old cities like Boston. In a study in 2007, Glaeser found that in the 1970s and ’80s, housing supply increased by 20 percent more in the South than elsewhere in the country.

In fact, many people seem to end up in the South because they aim for the perfect climate of California, quickly realize they can’t afford it, and settle for a similarly warm, cheaper place, like Phoenix or Austin. Just ask Elon Musk.

A “business-friendly” environment

Not all hot, affordable places are created equal. Austin became a pandemic boom town, but Midland, a West Texas city that’s just as warm and even less expensive, did not. This is where a complex mix of economic growth, human capital, and a certain yuppie je ne sais quoi come into play.

The Sun Belt cities that have soared are mostly in states with low taxes, which helps attract businesses. But many are also home to prominent universities that churn out highly educated workers. They’ve successfully created “agglomeration economies” of lots of similar types of companies in close proximity. Austin has the University of Texas, an Apple campus, and throngs of upwardly mobile Californians and New Yorkers who have fled high house prices. Midland, well, does not.

Austin began its strategy of luring tech workers as early as the 1970s and ’80s, when UT’s then business-school dean, George Kozmetsky, recruited computing companies to the area and launched incubators to nurture local talent (one of his mentees was a UT student named Michael Dell). Companies tend to cluster near other, similar companies—a phenomenon that explains Silicon Valley in California, Kendall Square in Cambridge, and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Knowledge workers like to be near people who can provide them with mentorship and job leads. You might not want to stay at your job forever, so it’s nice to have other companies to jump to. Businesses and educated workers tend to attract each other, and attract more businesses, creating a virtuous circle. In the first year of the pandemic, Austin had the highest inflow of tech workers of any major city.

[Read: When will the Southwest become unlivable?]

Many of the booming Sun Belt cities also possess the seeds of a hip Millennial lifestyle: Live music, outdoor recreation, and interesting bars and restaurants. The newcomers demand even more microbreweries and tapas places, which then sprout up and attract more newcomers. “When the people come, they in turn change the place,” says Cullum Clark, the director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. “The place becomes bigger; it becomes richer; it becomes more cosmopolitan.” And expat Californians tend to like that.

Warm winters

Walter Bimson, the chair of Valley National Bank and a mid-century booster of Phoenix, once explained that people would surely move to the desert city, because they “want to flee from shoveling coal and from shoveling snow.”

His hunch—that people love sun—has persisted as a lay explanation for Sun Belt migration, but polling on the significance of weather to people’s moving decisions is sparse. Weather often gets wrapped into a nebulous factor called “amenities” or “quality of life,” which can also include the local schools and crime rates. When asked, many people name better weather as a reason for their move, but not the reason. In 2018 survey data shared with me by the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida, the top reasons people gave for moving to Florida were to be closer to family (37 percent), to start a new job (22 percent), and then the climate or weather (14 percent.) A 2014 Gallup poll found that weather was a prominent reason for those seeking to leave Illinois, Maryland, and Idaho, but it wasn’t the top reason for movers from any state. People who moved during the pandemic were likely to cite financial reasons or COVID risk as their motivations.

Still, it would be weird to ignore the sun in Sun Belt. This is something that all the experts I spoke with eventually conceded—that weather is hard to find in the data behind the Sun Belt’s rise, but it’s also hard to explain away. “No variable better predicts metropolitan-area growth over the last 120 years than January temperature,” Glaeser says. “Everybody likes playing golf in the winter,” says Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley. “People really don’t like cold winters,” says Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. People might not always admit it, but they appear to like warm weather.

Warm winters seem to act as an accelerant on cheap housing and plentiful jobs. People will vaguely consider a place with lots of new businesses and $300,000 homes, but once they see a few hundred Instagram posts of 70-degree February days, they call the moving company. “I think it’s word of mouth. It’s Instagram. A place gets buzz,” says the University of Toronto professor (and Atlantic contributor) Richard Florida. “‘My friends are there. It’s fun. They’re going out to restaurants; they’re going to the beach; winter doesn’t look cold.’” If you can work remotely, why not?

Chambers of commerce, real-estate agents, and industries that attract workers to warm-weather states tend to play up the “golf in the winter” element and play down the “lava-hot July.” “January, February, and March are the three reasons why people were attracted” to the Sun Belt, says Andrew Ross, a professor at NYU who has written several books about Sun Belt cities. “Housing-industry developers, real-estate brokers, they don’t talk about the summers. They talk about January, February, and March.”

A Sun Belt tipping point?

That said, all of these new Arizonans and Texans might leave if their cities continue heating and also escape the realm of affordability. There’s already an exodus afoot from Miami, for instance. The conservative governors of some Sun Belt states likely don’t appeal to the creative, liberal types who are drawn to cities. “Let’s you’re a gay designer who moved to Miami. Now you look up and you see Ron DeSantis,” Richard Florida says. “And you go, What the fuck am I doing here?”

[Read: Summer in the South is becoming unbearable]

Florida thinks the next great migration, for both climate and affordability reasons, will be north. Midwestern towns that can offer good amenities without scorching summers, such as Madison or Pittsburgh, are poised to offer a Sun Belt alternative. The Midwest currently has the most worker-relocation incentive programs, which pay remote workers to move to an underpopulated city. (Indiana alone has 16.) Or people might migrate to slightly cooler parts of warm states, choosing Flagstaff over Phoenix. (This is already happening, to some extent.)

For now, though, climatologists’ dire predictions don’t seem to be fazing people. Sure, Texans would prefer for it to be cooler, but the heat is apparently just this side of tolerable. Many residents of Phoenix and Dallas spend their summer days rotating between air-conditioned houses, air-conditioned cars, and air-conditioned offices, minimizing the felt impact of the triple-digit heat. “The fact that people are moving more into climate-risky places, and away from lower-risk places, suggests either that climate risk isn’t a primary factor that’s driving this, or that something else, like the cost of housing, is weighing out more than the climate risks,” Schuetz says. Knowledge of flood risk can nudge people toward lower-risk homes, according to a study by Redfin, but it’s unclear if this is true for more widespread climate risks, like heat. What’s the “safer” house if 100 percent of a county has a high heat risk?

It would be unfair to write off people moving to the Sun Belt as irrational or ignorant. We would all love a cheap house and a good job in a city that’s just warm enough. But life involves compromise. There aren’t enough houses in California. There aren’t enough jobs in Cleveland. Sometimes the best you can afford is Phoenix. “We can’t tell them not to move there,” Schuetz says, “unless we make it feasible for them to live in other places that are lower risk.”

Abortion access. Gun safety. The treatment of immigrants. The size of the safety net. Ease of voting. LGBTQ rights. On any number of policy issues, red states and blue states have drifted apart from each other over the past three decades, widening the gaps between what families in different parts of the country pay in taxes, receive in benefits, and experience when interacting with the government. At the same time, the cost of housing in these states has diverged, too. Blue states have throttled their housing supply, leading to dramatic price increases and spurring millions of families to relocate to red states in the Sunbelt.

These trends have intensified in the past few years, as conservative legislatures have passed a raft of laws restricting abortion access and targeting LGBTQ Americans and as housing shortages have spread. Now many Americans find themselves stuck in states that are enacting conservative policies they do not support, but where real estate is cheap.

That is one takeaway from a new Redfin survey of people who rent their home, are thinking about moving, or recently moved. Respondents were much more likely to say that they wanted to live in a state where abortion and gender-affirming care were legal than not. But compared to those issues, they were twice as likely to cite housing costs as a major determinant of where they would live.

The report focused on two red states, Texas and Florida. They are among the 20 states that have restricted access to the medical termination of a pregnancy or banned abortion outright since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. And they are among the two dozen states that have implemented statutes affecting trans people: banning gender-affirming care, requiring trans youth to be identified by the gender they were assigned at birth, restricting trans kids’ participation in sports, or barring teachers from discussing what it means to be gay or trans.

Yet such states remain a draw for families from blue, coastal areas. “There’s this trade-off between living somewhere that you can afford and where you have access to jobs,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin, told me, versus living “where the laws are the way that you want them to be.”

In the survey, not everyone professed a policy preference, but roughly a third of Texans and Floridians who had recently moved or were likely to move said that they would like to live somewhere with legal gender-affirming care for kids. That is eight to 16 percentage points higher than the share who said they do not want to live somewhere where such gender-affirming care is legal. About 40 percent of respondents in those states said they would like to live somewhere with legal abortion access, twice as many as said they would prefer to live somewhere without it.

But folks were still much more likely to say that financial considerations played a primary role in where they had settled or would settle down. The cost of living, access to jobs, the size of available homes, and proximity to family were more commonly cited factors.

Over the past two decades, the country’s growing housing shortage has prevented Americans from moving as often as they used to, and as often as would make sense given the country’s wage trends. Jobs pay much more in Boston and Oakland than they do in small towns in Alabama or exurbs in Utah, a differential that has grown over time. But housing costs in those places rose so much due to supply restrictions that they became unaffordable and inaccessible for many would-be residents.

People who are moving tend to be moving to cheaper places. Differences in housing affordability have pulled Americans to the Sunbelt and the Mountain West, and pushed them from expensive megalopolises to smaller cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Redfin’s data, for instance, show that the average home in Miami is selling for $515,000 versus $705,000 in New York, the most common origin of out-of-state movers. Homes in Dallas are half the price of homes in Los Angeles.

“Even if people would want, in a perfect world, to move to a different place that didn’t have whatever-it-might-be laws, they’re kept in place by these bigger, more salient forces for them,” Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. (Frost did not work on the Redfin project.) “Even though there are abortion restrictions, people move because of affordability. Even though there are wildfires and more natural disasters in a place, people move because of affordability.”

Those migration trends have increased red states’ political influence. Texas and Florida alone have added more than 15 million residents over the past two decades, translating into a dozen additional congressional seats. Blue states, in contrast, have throttled their population growth. “It’s a policy choice on both fronts: California has chosen to protect abortion rights, and they’ve chosen to have policies that restrict housing,” Fairweather told me. “I don’t even know if policy makers understand this yet. But California’s housing policies have made the citizens of the United States have less access to those rights.”

In interviews, people personally affected by anti-LGBTQ laws described them as a strong motivator to leave the red states they call home. Jay Bates Domenech, a young trans person from suburban Utah, told me that the state’s political climate had pushed them to spend roughly $10,000 more a semester to go to college out-of-state: Domenech is moving to Colorado this week.

Domenech told me that they had been harassed and bullied for their gender in high school. “A few months ago, a kid followed me down the hallway calling me a pedophile. He took out his phone to take a picture of me,” they told me. “From the moment I came out, there was an underlying anxiety that something was going to happen to me.” Concerns about their physical safety and ability to access health care pushed them to move, they said, adding that they felt targeted by the state’s anti-LGBTQ politicians. “The increase in suicide rates and mental-health diagnoses—it’s something I am seeing at a personal, individual level,” they told me.

But many other queer and trans people don’t have the money or flexibility to uproot their lives. Anthony, who asked me to withhold his last name to avoid any threats to his family, moved from Maryland to Florida five years ago, purchasing a fixer-upper for $220,000. “I’m scared about what the Florida legislature is going to do,” he told me. He and his husband would like to move back to the D.C. area. But high interest rates and the higher cost of living would make it unaffordable to do so.

Redfin’s finding that people would prefer to live in places with legal access to abortion mirrors that of many other polls. States barring or tightening access to abortion have seen an 11 or 12 percentage-point increase in the share of people who say the medical procedure should be easier to obtain.

In the long term, the loss of abortion access is expected to intensify the country’s already intense geographic inequality. The hundreds of thousands of people forced to continue unwanted pregnancies will end up sicker and poorer for it: Not being able to terminate a pregnancy makes a person more likely to become impoverished, unemployed, in debt, and subject to eviction, and an abortion is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. Many companies are avoiding adding employees or doing business in states with strict bans.

Yet the Redfin data suggest that relatively few people will move because of changing health-care statutes. Abortion access is already heavily predicated on a person’s physical location and socioeconomic status: Wealthy Texans fly to Illinois for abortions; poor Tennessee residents find themselves stuck. “There are states that were destinations for people seeking abortions where clinics have closed post-Dobbs, forming abortion deserts, particularly in the southeastern and central United States,” Betsy Pleasants, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Wallace Center for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health, told me. Those deserts are simply too formidable and expensive for many people to cross.

Sam Dickman is one person who did leave Texas as a result of the state’s changing legal abortion landscape. He is a physician and an abortion provider. He and his partner moved to Montana so that he could continue to do his life’s work.

“I see patients traveling in from Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, all these states surrounding Montana, to get abortion care,” he told me. “The median abortion patient is a young, low-income person of color. These are populations who are struggling to afford rent.” He added: “If I asked a patient, Have you ever thought about moving to a place with better abortion access? It would be item No. 15 on their radar. They would look at me like, What are you talking about? I can’t afford to have a kid right now. Obviously, I can’t afford to move.”

The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.

The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.

The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.

[Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio]

In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.

These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.

New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.

“We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.

The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.

When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).  

But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.

Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.

Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.

Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.

The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.

The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.

Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.

But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.

Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.

Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.

The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.

For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

A few days ago, the hurricane forecasts looked good. Dora was going to miss Hawaii, passing by far to the south. And yet the storm still ended up wreaking havoc on the islands, not as a rain-bearing cyclone but as wind—hot, dry wind, which, as it blew across the island of Maui, met wildfire.

A fire with no wind is relatively easy to control; a fire on a gusty day, especially in a dry, mountainous area with a town nearby, is a worst-case scenario for firefighters. And so it was. Fires began burning Tuesday, and by that night, they had reached the tourism hub of Lahaina, eventually burning it flat. Power was knocked out; 911 went down. Residents swam into the cool ocean to avoid the flames. At least 36 people have died so far.

[Read: Hawaii is a warning]

This is the worst wildfire event in Hawaii’s modern history, in terms of lives lost and structures burned. It is the state’s version of California’s 2018 Camp Fire; experts I spoke with also compared it to recent fires on the Greek island of Rhodes and a 2017 fire in Sonoma, California, that spilled into the city of Santa Rosa. The Maui fires are another reminder that we have entered a fire age—a “pyrocene,” as the emeritus professor and wildfire expert Stephen J. Pyne has called it. Humans are still figuring out how to live in this new reality, playing catch-up as the world burns around us.

Though fires are a natural part of many landscapes—and have been for centuries—some areas of fire and smoke science are in their relative infancy. Best practices for mass evacuations in a fire still don’t exist; Maui’s evacuation was further complicated by the loss of power, the state’s lieutenant governor said. Hawaii doesn’t have the same history with wildfire as a fire-prone state like California, which means fewer preparations are in place, according to Clay Trauernicht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He expressed particular concern about two potential contributing factors to fire in the state: old, poorly maintained former plantations and non-native plant species that increase the fuel loads.

In general, dead vegetation fuels fires. On Maui, brush fires spread into a densely built-up area, where homes and other structures fed the blaze; a similar dynamic played out during the Tubbs Fire, in Sonoma County, back in 2017. “Once you’re going [from] burning building to building, there’s not a lot you can do,” Trauernicht told me. I asked him whether this was Hawaii’s wake-up call to prepare for more intense wildfires in the future. “If it’s not, I don’t know what’s going to be, honestly,” he replied.

To see fire weather—hot, dry, windy conditions—in Hawaii this time of year is not unusual, Ian Morrison, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Honolulu forecast office, told me. The NWS had issued a red-flag warning for the area, which indicates to local residents and officials alike that wildfire potential is high. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the majority of Maui is also abnormally dry or in drought; the western side in particular was parched, and ripe for a fire.

You might think those conditions would have been alleviated by Dora: Hurricanes usually mean water, and wet things do not burn as easily. But even this dynamic is shifting. An investigation by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa found that 2018’s Hurricane Lane brought both fire and rain to Hawaii at the same time, complicating the emergency response—dry and windy conditions spread the fire on the edges of the storm, while elsewhere, rainfall led to landslides. In 2020, researchers pointed out that Lane was only one of three documented cases of a hurricane worsening wildfire risk. With Dora, we likely have a fourth.

[Read: A clear indication that climate change is burning up California]

Climate change is projected to make hurricanes and tropical storms worse in the coming years, creating the potential for cascading natural disasters—droughts, wildfires, storms—that bleed into one another. It has also been shown to worsen fires. The past five years have been littered with stories of unusual fire behavior: Canada burning at an unprecedented rate, Alaskan tundra going up in smoke like never before, Colorado’s giant December 2021 fire, California’s unthinkable 1-million-acre fire and its deadliest on record all happening within a few years of one another.

“You’ve got different kinds of climate disasters, all reinforcing each other,” Mark Lynas, the author of the book Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, told me. “It’s all reflective of the fact that as the world heats up, there’s just more energy in the system. Water evaporates faster; winds blow stronger; fires get hotter.”

Lynas, for his part, told me he hadn’t thought about this particular dynamic: “A hurricane-wildfire connection had never occurred to me. It just shows, really, the kinds of surprises that climate warming can throw up.” The Maui fires might be a wake-up call for Hawaii. But perhaps they can also serve as a wake-up call for the rest of us, one of many in recent years. The fire age is raging all around us.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I put this question to readers: “Donald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular candidate with voters in the Republican Party’s presidential primary. Why do you think he is still their first choice?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Randall R. argues that Trump supporters earnestly desire national greatness:

The reason many support Trump (if you have the decency to listen to them) is because they want to make America great again, and there’s no one else close to matching Trump in both prominence and apparent ability to make what they’d say is the most promising and important part of America great, in the face of the internal conflicts that currently exist.

That’s an illusion spread by a politician, offering an addictive thrill that disconnects people from parts of reality. It doesn’t make America great. But making America great, recognizing how it has long been great and how it can be more great, remains important.

Listen to the Trump voters: the neglected, the deplored, the doomscrollers, the people who want to make something of themselves, those who want to raise their family in a better world. Those who vote against Trump fit these same descriptions. It’s essential, for people on opposing sides of what’s become Trump’s divide, to listen to each other with respect, so we can build our way out of America’s problems without being exploited by political operators. You or I have no shortage of illusions in our parts of the political spectrum; shouldn’t we be reexamining those illusions instead of looking down on Trump’s followers?

Bob puts forth a theory of populism:

Populist movements arise from widespread dissatisfaction with cultural and economic conditions and the inability of the government to deal with public concerns. This is fertile ground for charismatic and authoritarian leaders offering quick and simple solutions. Though Trump may be a person of low character, to many of his supporters, he seems like the sort of fighter that is needed—someone who does not follow the rules because the rules are believed to be the problem. James Madison would be sad and disappointed.

Jaleelah analyzes what she sees as the incentives of Trump supporters:

Trump’s supporters sincerely believe that he is being framed, not only because he has been priming them for his conviction for years, but because they have to believe it lest they become severely depressed. Imagine dedicating yourself to a false religion or an unfulfilling career or a bad partner. Imagine losing relationships with your lifelong friends and your adult children who strongly disagree with your choices. When you’ve committed to something at a great cost, it is hard to admit that your commitment was all for nothing.

I don’t think it is strange that so many people insist Trump is innocent. I do, of course, believe he is a fraud who is corrupt enough to have committed the crimes he is accused of. But genuine revolutionary figures get locked up on fake charges all the time. Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were charged, convicted, and imprisoned. Most reasonable people alive today believe their imprisonments were unjust and that states are capable of fabricating evidence against popular figures who threaten the social order. Trump’s supporters are simply applying a reasonable idea in an unreasonable context.

Liberals and progressives do not seem keen to accept repentant Trump supporters. There is little benefit to switching teams. There is a very high cost. Towns that have unified behind Trump are just as keen on cancel culture as their liberal counterparts. No one wants to be confronted by a horde of their neighbors at church or accused of supporting degeneracy at the grocery store. Peer pressure is probably keeping a lot of people in line.

Dan argues that “most people assume that voters look at a candidate’s record and personality,” but “what really matters is whether a candidate gives a voter an identity.” He explains:

The voters are, because of their support for a candidate, a “somebody.” Trump has done this better than any candidate in 50 years. To voters whose worlds have been destroyed by elites, Trump says: You matter. Become a part of this movement and you are standing up to the elites. You can get your life back with me, and be a SOMEBODY again. Trump’s legal cases are easily rationalized as the price he has been willing to pay, personally, to represent all of the people who see him as validating their lives and giving them identities once again. To his supporters, he is sacrificing for “the cause.”

Christopher scolds Trump’s critics for what he sees as a failure to understand their country:

Trump supporters believe that the economic and cultural game is rigged. Trump supporters disagree with teaching little children about gender or allowing gender-reassignment care to impressionable minors and are branded with a pejorative label for it. They see branding that Florida law as “Don’t say gay”––despite the fact that a majority of Americans would likely support the content and intent of Florida’s efforts to ensure age-appropriate instruction––is wrong. Similarly, when someone supports law enforcement or opposes affirmative action, they are labeled “racists,” even though there are principled reasons to take issue. Trump has tapped into the frustration that comes from playing a rigged game. Trump supporters see Trump as challenging the cultural and economic system that excludes them and their views.

The elites and media need to stop dismissing Trump supporters as some fringe group. Trump received more votes in 2020 than did Obama [in 2008] and came in second in 2020 only to Biden. The 2024 election is likely to be close. The issues Trump has tapped into are not fleeting.

Geoff describes a type of voter he has observed as a retail manager in Colorado, in a store that catered to a Trump-voting demographic:

They are white, working-class, and very knowledgeable about stuff and fixing it, but they don’t value education as it is systematized in America. They are very transgressive in their everyday language but are model citizens overall. The most notable sentiment, for me, was commonly phrased as, “Wouldn’t it be great to vote for a POTUS sitting in prison?!” They defend him out of reaction: It’s “unpopular,” and they are raging against the machine. Think if supporting Nixon was the most “punk rock” thing you could do.

Patricia shares how she became a Democrat and describes some Trump supporters she has observed:

I’m 90 years old, a retired hospital administrator. My late husband and I were brought up in Republican families in California and voted that way until we watched Bill Clinton’s impeachment and witnessed the mean streak and hypocrisy of the Republicans.

We have voted for Democrats ever since.

My co-grandma is currently 89. She immigrated from Argentina at the age of 22, so you’d think she’d recognize authoritarians when she smells them, but no, she likes Trump. She loved watching The Apprentice and watches Fox. And her friends email around crazy stuff they find online. She has a Ph.D. in education and taught at a university for years.

I have a 65-year-old in-law who lives in Orange County, California, and has a successful business. A smart man, but not formally educated. He is a Trump supporter because of taxes mostly.

My granddaughter and her husband recently moved to northern Idaho from the Seattle area because they don’t like the regulations in Washington State. They think Trump is not a nice man but are pretty well aligned with libertarianism—they don’t want government interfering in their freedom, so they think Trump is the only choice. Both are college graduates.

And beyond them, I’ve observed that there are people with a seemingly “genetic” trait who simply enjoy seeing a person “stick it” to others. Trump is exceptionally good at ridicule.

Nick thinks his experience of being young and right-leaning helped him understand support for Trump:

Pre-2016, I identified as a conservative. While in college, if I tried to offer a different opinion on topics such as immigration, I felt ridiculed and looked down upon. I decided my two options were to be met with scorn or to hold my tongue. I know I wasn’t the only one. My good friend started a club to bring liberals and conservatives together to talk about major issues. He did everything he could to get conservatives to show up but just couldn’t get it to happen. I am not surprised because I don’t think I was the only conservative who felt like they couldn’t share out of fear of being “canceled” or called a racist or bigot for not going along with the mainstream liberal line. Perhaps Republicans are rallying around Trump despite his egregious undemocratic and immoral acts because they see themselves in him, a conservative being constantly ridiculed by liberals for his beliefs, except he actually speaks up. I don’t think all conservatives are power-hungry autocrats like Trump, and I don’t think most of them share his views. But I do think that we tend to support someone when we see ourselves in them. Identity politics play in both parties; maybe we’re just seeing the conservative version.    

T. argues that we’re witnessing a reaction to cultural change:

I’m an architect in a progressive city out west. I abhor Donald Trump, but I understand why my in-laws in Tennessee support him without reservation. What’s mystifying to me is that so many bright, liberal folks of my acquaintance don’t grasp it. Do you recall the deafening silence after the 2016 election, when Hillary lost to the worst presidential candidate in American history? There were a couple of months of serious self-examination among Democrats, but it quickly cooled, and I haven’t heard anything like it since.

I think our lack of understanding is due to the inability of most of us to put ourselves into the shoes of disadvantaged Trump voters. What you’d see coming your way is an all-consuming political, economic, and cultural wave––one that represents not only change, but also disdain for your way of life and destruction of your sense of who you are. I’m not saying that’s true, but the impression is very real. It’s cultural imperialism, which we understand very well when we talk about gentrification, but we miss completely when the encroaching force comes from our side of the fence. After all, how would we feel if confronted by a way of life that mocks our religion, siphons up our brightest young people and convinces them we’re hopelessly ignorant, sells us out to the global economy, promotes behavior that’s been taboo for thousands of years, and cancels us if we disagree? It fits with the experience of Indigenous cultures that were overrun by modern industrial society during the past 250 years. Those Tennesseans are being sold a bill of goods by a flimflam man, but we set them up for it.

JP describes the Trump support of his loved ones:

They do not go to Trump rallies, nor do they look or sound like those abhorrent Trump supporters you see in interview-reel compilations. They are compassionate, kind to strangers, and even have friends in people of all political stripes. We are a racially diverse bunch: Black, Hispanic, and white. And yet, these same people believe in their bones that for every lie Donald Trump has told, the liberal media has told more. For every crime Donald Trump has committed, the liberal elites in our politics and culture have committed more.

And regarding his claims of election fraud, despite lack of hard evidence, they feel in their gut that he is right on some level. I doubt I could do or say anything to convince them otherwise.

Paul describes the pull of tribes:

Part of being a human being is wanting to belong. One way we do that is to identify with someone or something. Passionate sports fans are a good example. And once we link our identity, our sense of who we are, to those teams, we look at everything about those teams through a positive perspective. People have identified with Trump and now their well-being and self-image are tied to him. That prevents them from viewing any reality other than the one that he creates. It will take some sort of disruption to break up with him, but it doesn’t look like that will occur. When their identity is at risk, the most comfortable path is to stay with Trump and distort new data to fit their views.

Michael believes that demographic insecurity is a factor:

I suspect that support for Trump is rooted in people’s fears of becoming a minority and suffering economic demise due to competition from immigration by humans who are unlike them.

Tim believes that Trump’s appeal is even simpler:

Give someone a reason to feel good about their anger and resentment and you can gain their loyalty.

“It’s almost like the government’s imposing its will on its residents,” Trayon White, the D.C. councilmember for Ward 8, said at the council’s June 6 legislative meeting. He wasn’t talking about a proposed highway, a subway station, a power plant, or—perish the thought—an apartment building. He was talking about trees: specifically, three linden trees on Xenia Street planted a few years ago by D.C.’s Urban Forestry Division. To my surprise, the legislative body of a major American city experiencing escalating homelessness and a serious spike in violent crime dedicated a quarter of its time that day to discussing three trees.

White said he was concerned about the potential risk to property values and what he sees as a “reasonable fear” that once mature, the trees would “be large enough to make it difficult to see through and around the walkway, which is a public-safety concern.” He asked his colleagues to support an emergency resolution to remove them before this happened.  

For a while, the members carried on as though this were a perfectly normal matter for their attention. A few suggested that perhaps expanding the tree canopy was good, actually. But no one really questioned the underlying premise of White’s proposal: that the community had risen up in dendrophobic opposition.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]

“We want to note that these are homeowners who are worried about the value of their homes,” White said. “I just believe that [the District Department of Transportation, or DDOT] can be more friendly in responding to the needs of the community with their request, and if they’re requesting different trees, I don’t see what the big problem is.”

The council went on to debate the merits of the public-safety question. Councilman Kenyan McDuffie recalled that in his ward the city had planted trees in parking spaces so as not to encroach on the already narrow sidewalks. “I still question whether there is the appropriate level of consultation and engagement in the impacted communities,” he said, backing White.

After more than 20 minutes, the chair of the council noted with surprise that “we spent this much time on the issue of removing three trees.” White, recognizing the lack of sufficient support from his colleagues, withdrew the matter from the agenda, allowing the trees to grow another day.

What initially drew me to this story was the obvious mismatch between the rhetoric at the council meeting and the subject at hand. How could a few trees constitute a threat to public safety or property values? Were these trees particularly ugly? And who was behind White’s push to get them removed? Like many stories about government, this seemingly trivial drama turned out to be about power, and how people justify using it.

Xenia Street is in Ward 8, physically separated from most of D.C. by the Anacostia River. That’s not the only thing that sets it apart. This side of the river is overwhelmingly Black and has had a higher unemployment rate, a lower labor-force-participation rate, and a higher poverty rate than the rest of the city. The census tract that contains Xenia Street is one of the most heat sensitive in the city, a metric that reflects the prevalence of asthma, coronary heart disease, and disability, as well as race and income demographics. D.C.’s Urban Forestry Department, a division of DDOT, planted the trees after a beetle infestation harmed several local ash trees. A senior official told me the department is generally concerned about the unequal distribution of tree canopy across wards: At the end of June, Ward 8 had roughly 500 open requests for new plantings; the higher-income Ward 4 had nearly 6,000.

Tree planting doesn’t meet the bar for more serious types of notification and community-input processes that a new road or train station might. But according to Kay Armstead, a former member of the advisory neighborhood commission—an elected body meant to serve as a hyperlocal voice on zoning, bike lanes, liquor licenses—the city did inform the commission of a plan to bring more trees to the neighborhood. In the fall of 2020, it planted 35 trees, some American linden, some apple, on a publicly owned lot between two condo buildings, 450 Xenia Street and 450 Condon Terrace.

I wanted to see the trees for myself. In the weeks following White’s proposed emergency resolution, I visited the quiet residential street on three separate occasions, asking people if they had any thoughts about the trees. No one I interviewed registered strong opinions, or had even heard of the controversy.

One resident of 450 Condon Terrace immediately redirected my attention to a massive hole in the ground of her parking lot, which she said had been caused by a garbage truck. Another told me he hadn’t heard about the controversy but wanted to talk about trash pickup. “I mean, look at this shit,” he said, pointing to a pile of trash on the sidewalk. Trees? Low on the list of priorities. Another man found my line of questioning confusing, to say the least. “They’re oxygen!” When I said some people worried the trees could encourage crime, he laughed at me. “Now, you know that’s crazy. Who’s going to hide underneath these trees?”

[James Fallows: Start planting trees]

So who forms “the community” so opposed to the trees? His name is Darryl Ross.

Ross has been active in local politics for decades. He is treasurer of the Ward 8 Democrats and of White’s constituent-services fund, a controversial purse that some critics have called a “slush fund.” When White refers to constituent outreach to his office over this issue, he’s talking about Ross. (White and his chief of staff both declined to be interviewed for this story.) Ross doesn’t live at 450 Xenia Street, but he used to. He still owns a unit in the building, which he rents out, and is the president of the Xenia Condominium Owners Association.

Ross has been angry about the trees since the day they were planted. He told me he saw workers digging and began calling around, furious that no one had informed the neighborhood about the project, astounded that the city thought 35 trees (“a forest!”) made sense on the street; and frustrated by hypothetical future private costs that the trees would impose on residents.

His 311 requests to remove the trees went nowhere. So he tried officials at DDOT and the Urban Forestry Department, White and several other members of the city council, the office of the inspector general, and current and former members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. He knows he wouldn’t have been able to get so much attention without his connections: “Believe me, I’m using all the leverage I can to get the desired result,” he told me.

After months of effort, in August of 2021, representatives from DDOT, White’s chief of staff, and a senior staffer for at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds met with Ross and a couple of area residents on the site to discuss the problem. The officials agreed to remove 14 of the 35 newly planted trees. The agency also promised to complete a lighting survey, which resulted in the installation of three large streetlights, a data-driven approach to reducing crime.

The “desire to compromise for this individual is because we want to make sure we’re doing this for people, not to them,” a senior official in the urban forestry department (who requested anonymity to speak freely) told me. “If we can mollify someone, engender a sense of ownership … You take someone and make them more of an ally.”

Ross was not mollified. He continued his crusade to have three more trees removed—the ones closest to his condo building’s walkway. He lodged a complaint with D.C.’s Office of the Inspector General, which led to a formal response from DDOT Director Everett Lott, who argued that the department had broken no laws in planting the trees and had in fact exceeded the mandate for public notification. Undeterred, Ross continued his advocacy, which culminated with White’s proposed emergency resolution at the city-council meeting in June.

Ross put me in touch with a few of his allies, most of whom sounded only slightly more informed about the situation than the residents I randomly encountered on my visits. Some had no idea that many trees had already been removed; others were just vaguely aware that at one point the trees had seemed like a problem. One woman told me she thought children might throw fallen apples at cars or building windows. (The trees at issue in the emergency legislation are linden, not apple.)

According to Ross, the condo association was united in opposition. He called the vice president, Hazel Farmer, on speaker in my presence.

“You remember there were four [trees] that were too close to the walkway?” he asked.

“I thought we had finished that,” she said, sounding confused.

“No, no, we are still battling,” Ross replied quickly.

After Ross refreshed her memory, Farmer said she worried that the trees would one day push up the concrete sidewalk, impeding residents’ ability to walk in and out of the building. Ross later clarified that Farmer had already moved out because the steps on the walkway were too difficult for her to navigate.

Xenia Street in 2019 (left) and 2023 (right) (Courtesy of Jerusalem Demsas)

In a July legislative meeting, White withdrew the emergency resolution, citing a compromise reached by the chairman of the D.C. council and DDOT to apply a growth regulator to the offending saplings. This outcome infuriates Ross, who is seeking a meeting with Mayor Muriel Bowser: “At the end of the day we voted for her, we didn’t vote for [DDOT officials], and we had faith in her to do what’s best for the people.”

Ross still has options. If the worst happens and these trees end up extending over the sidewalk, he can call 311 to request tree pruning. According to the Urban Forestry Department, these requests are resolved, on average, within 20 days.

But the more I talked with Ross and his allies, the more I realized the trees were also stand-ins for their broader unhappiness with DDOT, which they see as not acting for them but doing things to them: bike racks “just dropped” in front of some businesses, bike lanes constructed over their objections, and traffic-safety infrastructure—in D.C.’s highest traffic-fatality ward—installed without their consent. This is why Ross was able to enlist supporters in the first place—by tapping into existing anger some residents have with the city’s transportation agency. Anger that, in a ward of nearly 90,000 people, a few individuals do not have the final say.

This is a classic story of local government and its discontents. Government takes action. Angry, well-connected local fights back, annoyed that they weren’t consulted. But when they fight back, claiming the will of the “people,” how do we know if they’re right? Backing up a bit: How do we even decide who the people are?

[From the July/August 2023 Issue: Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis]

In the Xenia Street episode, is it the people who live right next to the trees? How about one street over? Just property owners like Ross? Because the trees are on public land, should all D.C. residents have a say? Is it all Americans? Addressing the reforestation backlog is a national priority. Or, given that trees help mitigate climate change, should all people have a voice? This is the so-called boundary problem, which the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped has “no theoretical solution,” only pragmatic ones. Even if surveying all of humanity were theoretically desirable, it’s a practical impossibility. One has to draw the line somewhere and delegate representatives or spokespersons.

Arguably the best delegates in this matter are local elected officials, who get their authority from voters. The problem is that, at the local and especially hyperlocal levels, nobody’s voting. In 2018, two-thirds of advisory-neighborhood-commission races were uncontested. Even when these contests are competitive, only a handful of people show up to cast a ballot. In the single-member district that includes Xenia Street, Armstead, one of Ross’s allies, lost her election 137–91. Last year, two ANC races were tied following Election Day; in one of them each candidate had garnered 12 votes apiece, while in the other each candidate had claimed just one (presumably their own). Vox populi indeed.

If the ANC can’t quite speak for the people, what about the D.C. council, and specifically Councilmember White? Council voting rates are also dismal: About 8,700 people total voted in the 2020 primary contest that secured White’s reelection, out of roughly 57,000 citizens of voting age in Ward 8.

How about DDOT? As an agency housed in the executive branch, DDOT gains its authority from the mayor. In 2022, Mayor Bowser received fewer than 4,000 votes from Ward 8 during the primary (the true election in this heavily Democratic city). Only about 10,000 people in the ward voted at all in this contest.

There’s no magical threshold at which elected officials become democratically legitimate. But more than half of eligible voters routinely show up for federal and state contests while our municipal elections struggle to top 15 percent. What we’re seeing in local governments is a crisis of democracy unparalleled at other levels of government.

“It’s not the trees; it’s the disrespect,” Armstead told me. She called tree removal a top priority because “when you come to a community and you don’t listen, then [we’re] being disrespected and disregarded.” Ross made a similar point: “It makes me angry because, like I said, we’re the stakeholders. We’re the taxpayers. We fund the salaries for the D.C. government employees, council … This is our money!”

When we collectively feel entitled to hold the government accountable, that’s democracy. But when individuals do, that’s something else: institutional capture.

Because so few people vote in local elections, the power of those who speak up and claim to speak for their neighborhoods is hard to challenge. If a homeowner’s association headed by the neighborhood busybody says he speaks for you, are you showing up to contest that claim? What’s obvious about Ross’s perseverance is that its effectiveness is largely due to its singularity. If everyone engaged as he did, called and emailed and attended meeting after meeting, filing complaints with everyone from the office of the inspector general on down, his power would dilute instantly. No one can claim to speak for a community if everyone’s speaking for themselves.

Democracy is about feedback loops. We elect people. If they do poorly, we choose alternatives. But when the election system falters from disuse, other feedback loops take root. Elected officials at the local level become accountable to the unrepresentative handful of voters who do engage; and public servants become preemptively sensitive to well-connected people who have the time and energy to demand disproportionate focus.

People like Ross may not get everything they want, but they know how to command attention. No fewer than four D.C. councilmembers have become personally involved in the matter of the trees on Xenia Street. Meanwhile, that massive hole in the ground? It’s still there.