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.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trees? Not in my backyard.

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.

Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

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.”

Steven Waldman: The local-news crisis is weirdly easy to solve

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.

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.

Question of the Week

What do you think of the viral hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond”?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Last Tuesday, an obscure YouTube channel was updated with a three-minute-and-10-second video of a man with a red beard and a guitar standing outdoors singing an original song called “Rich Men North of Richmond.” As I write, that video featuring the theretofore unknown singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony has exceeded 18 million views. The song has been uploaded to, and is thriving on, all the major streaming platforms. And it is selling copies. The song reached No. 1 on the all-genre iTunes chart, the Los Angeles Times reported; “Anthony’s other songs, ‘Ain’t Gotta Dollar’ and ‘I’ve Got to Get Sober’ have even relegated Jason Aldean’s controversial ballad ‘Try That in a Small Town’ to the No. 4 position on the chart.”

The song’s lyrics probe political themes as surely as Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” or Pulp’s “Common People” or Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” so it’s understandable that political magazines and commentators are talking about it. Still, I’m struck by how little coverage there is of “Rich Men North of Richmond” as art. No song goes this viral without resonating with listeners on an aesthetic level. Nevertheless, even publications that rose to prominence based on their art criticism are covering the song through the lens of politics. A headline in Rolling Stone reads“Right-Wing Influencers Just Found Their Favorite New Country Song.” An article in The A.V. Club poses the question, “So, how did [the song’s success] happen?” and answers, “It’s largely conservatives.” Here’s an excerpt from Variety:

Since the Virginia native’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” song began taking off from out of nowhere less than a week ago, the Appalachian country-folk singer has been acclaimed by freshly minted fans as a phenomenon of the people and accused by detractors of harboring ugly right-wing attitudes or suspected of being an “industry plant.”

The suspicions of progressive music fans have largely to do with the fast numbers he’s racked up as an independent artist with supposedly no industry backing … What’s known about Anthony … comes largely through a YouTube monologue he put up … “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and, always have,” Anthony says … “I remember as a kid the conservatives wanting war, and me not understanding that. And I remember a lot of the controversies when the left took office, and it seems like, you know, both sides serve the same master. And that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.”

But if an artist is known by the fans they keep, the highest-profile fans Anthony has quickly accumulated are very much on the right … like former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene … and far-right country figure John Rich … If Anthony wants to prove the centrism he professes by picking up some less partisan public figures as fans, he may have his work cut out for him, given the way he’s instantly been embraced as a hero to the right.

I struggle to imagine a mainstream media site reacting to Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi’s praise of a songwriter by suggesting that the artist is therefore a presumptively leftist act who ought to be covered mainly as a political and politicized phenomenon. At the very least, Anthony should be judged by his own actions and words, not the social-media posts of right-wing opportunists with an incentive to associate themselves with anything popular that is not obviously left-coded. Preemptively assigning figures such as Anthony to existing ideological or culture-war factions is needlessly polarizing and can even be self-fulfilling. Mashable dedicates much of its coverage to the possibility that Anthony has some objectionable right-wing beliefs, whereas almost no one outside the most reactionary right-wing websites cares when a leftist singer-songwriter turns out to have some objectionable left-wing beliefs, because that’s not why millions were attracted to the music. Jay Caspian Kang’s reaction at The New Yorker––co-signed by Eric Levitz at Intelligencer––was among a minority of coverage that took the music seriously.

Kang wrote:

If a collection of right-wing Twitter accounts could boost any song to the top of the charts, Jack Posobiec would be the most powerful record executive in the country. There’s something else going on here that can’t be explained through some silly game in which you match the desires of a population with the words that appear in a song and then declare that a people—in this case the white working class—has found their anthem. Anthony might not be some “authentic” sensation, but that doesn’t mean he’s talentless. More than anything, he reminds me of the type of country singer who sings old songs to great acclaim on “American Idol,” but who may ultimately struggle when it comes time to cut a modern album. For the viewer, the delight comes in seeing someone make it but also in the reassurance that there are talented people all over this country who sing in anonymity and who do not bend themselves to fit every musical trend.

Much like “Idol” contestants, such as Bo Bice or Scotty McCreery, Anthony can really sing. His voice isn’t quite as smooth and virtuosic as the country star Chris Stapleton’s, but it carries a similar depth of tone and his screamy rasp never feels like the affectation of an amateur who is trying too hard, but rather does what it’s supposed to do: communicate emotion. What words are put to that voice are far less important than the nostalgia the music evokes, and, in Anthony’s case, the image of the authentic singer-songwriter.

A nuanced discussion of what “authenticity” even means in this context follows.

A Conservative Critique of “Rich Men North of Richmond”

Mark Antonio Wright published one in National Review:

In a world full of Nashville pop-country sludge, Anthony sings with an authentic passion, and many people were instantly taken with his raw and raspy voice. In just the time that you may have been on summer vacation, he came out of nowhere, going from a complete unknown to a musical celebrity as the song spread virally on YouTube and Twitter.

That’s a great American story, but I don’t understand the adulation on the right for this song’s message.

Anthony sings:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

My brother in Christ, you live in the United States of America in 2023—if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working “overtime hours for bullshit pay,” you need to find a new job.

There’s plenty of them out there—jobs that don’t require a college degree, that offer good pay (especially in this tight labor market) and great benefits, especially if you’re willing to get your hands dirty by doing things like joining the Navy, turning wrenches, fixing pumps, laying pipe, or a hundred other jobs through which American men can still make a great living. If you’re the type of guy who’s willing to show up on time, every time, work hard while you’re on the clock, and learn hard skills—there’s a good-paying job out there for you. Go find it. And if you go home and spend all night drowning your troubles away—either on TikTok or by drinking too much—my friend, that’s your fault, not Washington’s. Not that Washington is helping any—it’s not. But when we waste our lives, it’s still our own fault … Washington is not the cause of our national sickness; it’s a symptom. We, as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and the popular culture and get on with living the good life: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.

After a lot of pushback from readers, he doubled down.

“Typically Terrible Arguments”

Songs are ill-suited to ground political debates, Jonah Goldberg argues in a newsletter from The Dispatch:

Now, if the claims of the song were an op-ed, I’d agree pretty much entirely with National Review’s Mark Antonio Wright, who apparently has caught holy hell for daring to disagree with, for want of a better term, the policy substance of a frick’n song. But I find this sort of grading of songs pretty tedious. Give me an hour and I can give you 1,000 words explaining why Lennon’s “Imagine” is otherworldly, romantic claptrap. But why bother? I can give you another 1,000 words on why Edwin Starr’s “War (What Is it Good For)?” would not be well-received by Holocaust victims, American slaves, or Ukrainians resisting Russian genocide.

But songs are typically terrible arguments, so it’s better to spend time debating actual, you know, arguments not set to music. This isn’t a criticism of Wright, who was responding to all of the people hailing “Rich Men North of Richmond” as some bold truth-telling anthem. It is for some people, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean the people who take the song literally are right about their preferred policies—or that they’re wrong.

I agree. But if you disagree and want to read people who use the lyrics as the basis of political analysis, then see Hamilton Nolan and Noah Smith for two extremely different perspectives.

Some Like It Hotter

Olga Khazan argues in The Atlantic that the growing population of the Sun Belt is explained by three of its features:

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.

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 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 …

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.

“Does Color-Blindness Perpetuate Racism?”

The writers Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie squared off in a debate about that question that you can watch here.

Provocation of the Week

In an Atlantic article titled “I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up,” Tyler Austin Harper argues that “anti-racists are overcorrecting.” He writes:

As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color-blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” Though I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked—“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.”

This “acknowledgement” tends to take one of two forms. The first is the song and dance in which white people not-so-subtly let you know that they know that race and racism exist. This includes finding ways to interject discussion of some (bad) news item about race or racism into casual conversation, apologizing for having problems while white (“You’re the last person I should be whining to”), or inversely, offering “support” by attributing any normal human problem you have to racism.

The second way good white liberals often “center” racial difference in everyday interactions with minorities is by trying, always clumsily, to ensure that their “marginalized” friends and familiars are “culturally” comfortable. My favorite personal experiences of this include an acquaintance who invariably steers dinner or lunch meetups to Black-owned restaurants, and the time that a friend of a friend invited me over to go swimming in their pool before apologizing for assuming that I know how to swim (“I know that’s a culturally specific thing”). It is a peculiar quirk of the 2020s’ racial discourse that this kind of “acknowledgement” and “centering” is viewed as progress.

My point is not that conservatives have better racial politics—they do not—but rather that something about current progressive racial discourse has become warped and distorted. The anti-racist culture that is ascendant seems to me to have little to do with combatting structural racism or cultivating better relationships between white and Black Americans. And its rejection of color-blindness as a social ethos is not a new frontier of radical political action.

No, at the core of today’s anti-racism is little more than a vibe shift—a soft matrix of conciliatory gestures and hip phraseology that give adherents the feeling that there has been a cultural change, when in fact we have merely put carpet over the rotting floorboards. Although this push to center rather than sidestep racial difference in our interpersonal relationships comes from a good place, it tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

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.”

US passenger railroad Amtrak is breathing new life into private high-speed train maker Texas Central Partners’ dreams to launch a Dallas-Houston line. The ambitious plan of connecting two of the five largest US metropolitan areas, which has been a decade in the making, proposes a 240-mile (380 kilometer) route that…

Read more...

W

hen in the spring of 2017 Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, made it illegal for the Central European University to offer U.S.-accredited degrees at its Budapest campus, everyone there knew that this was more than an attack on George Soros, the Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist who’d founded the CEU. I was then the university’s president and rector, posts I held from 2016 to 2021, so I witnessed the more than 50,000 citizens of Budapest who marched past our windows one Sunday a few weeks later in defense of our academic freedom. Chanting “Szabad orszag, szabad egyetem” (“Free country, free university”), they knew that their freedom was at stake too. Since coming to power in 2010, Orbán had neutered the country’s supreme court, rewritten Hungary’s constitution, radically curtailed the free press, and stigmatized foreign donations to its civil-society organizations. The chanting crowds knew that the attack on the university was another step in the consolidation of single-party authoritarian rule.

Orbán’s campaign against universities didn’t end with the CEU. First, he decapitated Hungary’s preeminent scientific institution, the Academy of Science, stripping it of its independent research institutes. Then he forced the privatization of a large part of Hungary’s own university system, packing its governing boards with party loyalists and pouring resources into the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a new elite institution with the explicit task of providing a traditional and patriotic education for the Hungarian elite of tomorrow.

[From the June 2019 issue: Viktor Orbán’s war on intellect]

A larger project of geostrategic realignment was at work here. Having thrown out a U.S.-accredited institution, Orbán tried to replace it by offering a campus site on the Danube to Fudan University, a Shanghai-based institution that has recently acknowledged in its statutes the leading role of the Chinese Communist Party. He also took steps to distance himself further from NATO and the European Union.

As a young prodemocracy activist in 1989, Orbán was among the first to call for the repatriation of Soviet troops from Hungary. Three decades later, he has been an outlier among the leaders of NATO and EU member countries for his pro-Russian stance. Slow to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Orbán has urged Ukrainians to seek a peace deal and barred arms shipments across the Hungarian border that would aid the Ukrainian war effort.

Instead of balking at Orbán’s courtship of autocrats or his eviction of a higher-education institution with U.S. accreditation, the Trump administration and its ambassador in Budapest offered only token resistance to the attack on the CEU, seemingly on the principle that any enemy of Soros had to be a friend of theirs. Since 2019, foreign conservatives have been flocking to Budapest to sit at the feet of the Hungarian master. Some of them, such as Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, just seem naive. Ostensibly seeking closer international ties between parties of the right, they seem to want to believe that, like them, he is a constitutional conservative—when he is, in fact, the authoritarian boss of a one-party state.

Others know exactly who he is, and that’s what attracts them: his despotic machismo. The list of American supplicants to the Orbán court includes political figures such as Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson, and right-wing intellectuals such as Rod Dreher, Christopher Rufo, and Patrick Deneen. The U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference has held one of its meetings in Budapest, and Orbán was invited to be a keynote speaker at the group’s conference in Dallas last year.

[Bernard-Henry Lévy: How an anti-totalitarian militant discovered ultranationalism]

American conservatives are not alone in harkening to the music from Budapest. Orbán’s systematic dismantling of liberal institutions in Hungary has made him the titular head of a global national-conservative movement, which currently includes Giorgia Meloni of Italy, Marine Le Pen of France, Santiago Abascal of the Vox party in Spain, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland’s Law and Justice party, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud in Israel, the far-right Sweden Democrats party, and now America’s MAGA Republicans. Each of these right-wing populists takes what they like from Orbán’s menu. Among its ingredients are a fantasy theory that liberals rule the world, a values campaign that denies gay men and women a place in the family, and protectionist economic policies that transfer public assets to party insiders. Add to this one-party rule that dismantles checks and balances, a politics that defines all opponents as enemies of the nation, and a vision of cultural struggle that identifies schools and universities as a crucial battleground for the control of future generations.

All together, this has made an intoxicating cocktail for 21st-century conservatives. The conservative task, Orbán proclaims, is nothing less than reversing the decline of the West. The hour is late. Godless liberalism, hedonism, permissiveness, and cosmopolitanism have done their fatal work. Decadence is at an advanced stage. At a party gathering in July, he thundered, “Today, ‘Western values’ mean three things: migration, LGBTQ, and war.” The idea that Western values might also include helping a democracy repel an invasion is as foreign to Orbán as it is to some far-right American conservatives.

The Germans have a word for this: Kulturkampf. Orbán’s appeal to American conservatives is that he understands politics as a struggle for cultural hegemony. It may be odd to think of American conservatives becoming followers of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who made winning hegemony central to his conception of political strategy, but they share a view of universities as axes of influence. Whoever has cultural hegemony, they believe, will secure political hegemony.

This is a far-fetched idea, by the way. Does anyone, of whatever political stripe, have any hope of exercising cultural hegemony in a country as wildly, exuberantly varied and divided as America? Nevertheless, the goal of cultural hegemony appears to be what drives Governor Ron DeSantis’s focus on gaining control of the Florida education system; rewriting the school curriculum on Black studies and other subjects; firing diversity, equity, and inclusion officers; and giving university trustees the power to review and dismiss tenured faculty in the state system. It also explains the importance DeSantis attaches to his recent takeover of New College, a respectable but little-noticed liberal-arts institution in Sarasota. In January, he packed the board of trustees with his appointees, who imposed a new management team, and dismissed the president—all in service of reinventing the institution as a Christian conservative bastion in his battle against “woke” ideology.

Why would a Republican presidential candidate waste political capital shaking up a small liberal-arts college, and how have universities’ curricula and administration become another battleground for the soul of America? Unlike former President Donald Trump, who doesn’t seem to care much about these issues, DeSantis seems obsessed with controlling the sector—betting everything on this struggle for cultural hegemony.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

In this regard, he is Orbán’s disciple. In Budapest, the CEU was a small, research-oriented social-science and humanities graduate school—hardly a thorn in the side of the Orbán regime, you might think. But that would be to misunderstand how Orbán saw us. To him, our university made a valuable symbolic target in his effort to fashion himself as a conservative culture warrior, fighting back the supposedly tentacular influence of liberal cosmopolitanism. Once universities are framed in this way, they become irresistibly attractive to self-promoting demagogues.

Universities have another crucial feature: They are vulnerable to populist attack. New College in Florida is a small institution, with loyal alumni to be sure, but hardly a powerhouse of political clout. It’s the kind of institution that would have had Stalin ask, archly, How many divisions does it have? The same was true of the CEU. It had some cultural capital, as George Soros’s émigré legacy in Eastern Europe, but Orbán realized that the CEU, as a small American-accredited institution operating in a foreign country with a growing but modest alumni base, was a sitting duck. These demagogues are too clever to pick a fight with someone their own size.

For this sort of right-wing populist, attacking colleges and universities also mobilizes the resentments of people who never went to university and may dislike, often justly, the entitlement that a college degree can confer on its beneficiaries. If a crucial component of the Trump-era Republican electorate comprises people who may not have graduated from high school, then an attack on universities is pure gravy for the demagogue. Similarly, for these angry voters, the downside of such an attack—weakening the scientific, technical, and cultural innovation that universities make possible—does not carry much weight.

[Jacob Heilbrunn: Behind the American right’s fascination with Viktor Orbán]

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Kulturkampf attacks on universities are both definitional, in the sense of the leader’s brand, and diversionary. If a leader were serious about addressing the resentments of an excluded voter base, he wouldn’t focus on universities at all. Instead, he’d take a hard look at the power of corporations, their tax rates and tax avoidance, and their offshoring of jobs, not to mention their overwhelming control of the digital public sphere. That leader would look at the incomes of the richest citizens and see what could be done to transfer some of that wealth to improve schools, hospitals, clinics, and other public goods that give people, especially those without a college education, a fair start in life. But it’s so much easier to target universities and their supposedly cosseted liberal professors than to tackle the perquisites and power of the corporate-donor class that funds his campaigns.

Orbán is a master of such diversionary politics, happily courting liberals’ denunciations for his attacks on academic freedom while patiently getting on with his core business—which is to use state power to enrich his supporters. He once confessed to a friend of mine, a banker, that he had a lot of mouths to feed: He knows, as do other autocrats such as Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that feeding friends is how authoritarians hold on to power.

Six years after Viktor Orbán started his campaign against the CEU, the conservatives who imitate him have grasped how convenient it is to make universities your enemy. These attacks on university autonomy and academic freedom—in U.S. states, in Narendra Modi’s India, and in Erdoğan’s Turkey—are principally about one thing: systematically weakening any institution that may act as an obstacle to authoritarian power. Although American conservatives, no less than their autocratic counterparts abroad, consistently portray their attacks on universities in pseudo-democratic terms—as attempts to protect the silent majority from the ideological hectoring of the liberal elite—their real agenda is to weaken democratic checks and balances.

Universities are not usually understood, and even more rarely defended, as guardrail institutions that keep a democracy from succumbing to the tyranny of the majority, but that is one of their roles: to test, criticize, and validate the knowledge that citizens use to make decisions about who should rule them. Because this is the universities’ democratic rationale, the message for those who want to defend them should be clear. So long as academic freedom is considered a privilege of a liberal elite, it has no constituency beyond academia. Liberals should defend academic freedom not as the privilege of a profession, nor to preserve universities as bastions of progressive opinion, but because universities—like courts, a free press, and independent regulatory bodies—are essential restraints on majoritarian rule that keep us all free. That was precisely what the citizens of Budapest understood when they marched past the CEU’s doors, chanting, “Free country, free university.”

I know a lot of impressive women married to men. Maybe the men are impressive too. I don’t give them much thought, to be honest. By the time I catch up with these women on all they are doing, and commiserate on the state of the world, we rarely have time to talk about their husbands. Sometimes, to be polite, I ask, but they normally don’t come up unless some conflict is brewing. This doesn’t mean that my friends don’t love their partners—just that, when given room to talk about their lives, that’s what they want to talk about: their lives.

Watching Barbie, I remembered how infrequently Ken factored into my narratives when I played with Barbie as a girl. Barbie got dressed up to go to work and out with her friends; Ken just appeared if and when I needed a dramatic storyline. A wedding! A passionate fight! A cheating spouse! (What can I say? I was raised on Dallas and telenovelas.)

This attitude was typical of the girls I played with. Typical, too, was how much that changed when we hit our teens and 20s. With the dolls discarded, and play redefined as clubbing and barhopping and checking off each thing on our overachieving-woman bingo card (culminating with, you guessed it, marriage), the Kens were guest stars no longer. The story—the very fate of my life—revolved around men and their actions. What were they doing? What were they thinking? What were they thinking about me? About us? About our future?! Together?!!  

[Read: The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film]

But as I’ve aged, my attitude has shifted yet again. It’s not that I don’t love men or enjoy their thoughts and company. I date them. I value them as friends and colleagues. But coupling with one is hardly the central preoccupation of my days. And, if I’m being honest, with a few exceptions, I just don’t find them nearly as interesting as I do the women I know. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

This is the secret that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has exposed.

When it comes to our closest friendships, many women I know are already living in a Barbie world. It’s the women who astound us, amaze us, and amuse us, who get things done and make households run. The way we perceive it, their partners and husbands are the “and Kens”—supporting players in ourmy friends’ busy lives navigating professional advancements, cross-country moves, and home renovations while caring for aging parents and mothering children in a collapsing world.

Although most women I know flocked to see Barbie with their girlfriends, a few of my fabulous friends went with their husbands. Everyone reported enjoying the film, but more than one mentioned that in the hours and days afterward, said husbands were suffering from some serious sulky Kenergy. They scratched their heads and worried: Were they the “and Kens” of their own homes, riding in the back of a pink tandem bicycle that Barbie steers?

Barbie is not a perfect or intersectional film. It presents a narrow, mostly white vision of the complexities of womanhood. But what it does reveal—with great humor and moments of pure heartbreak—is the way many women see and experience the world. The movie is stylized and satirized, but there are a lot of truths under all that Pepto Bismol pink. And truths, especially those of women, can be uncomfortable.

In the confines of female friendships, Barbie is everything. But outside that space, women are often treated like we are nothing. Certainly Gerwig knows that. As America Ferrera’s Gloria states in her impassioned monologue, it is impossible to be a woman out in the real world. That world was made by and for men, who don’t have to think about how much Barbie labor it takes to keep a Dream House running.

This is a familiar theme in many women’s group chats and shared Instagram memes, but I’m not sure it’s ever gotten the big-budget pop-culture-saturation treatment that Hollywood usually reserves for films about superheroes or guns or men blowing things up.  

[Read: Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else.]

Perhaps no truth is more uncomfortable than the fact that men might not always be the center of women’s thoughts and worlds.

This may explain why so much of the discourse and press about the film—fully and completely about women, made by a woman—has shifted to center itself on men. Specifically, Ken. We’ve now read articles about Ryan Gosling’s (wonderful) performance, what Ken means for masculinity, how to get Ken’s abs, how to do Ken’s dance, how Ken “stole the show,” what actors would love to be considered for Ken in a sequel.

Sure, these are fun takes about a fun movie. But the sheer number of them made me wonder: Are we so uncomfortable with lingering over a woman’s narrative that we—even the women among us—have to rush to talk about men instead? Are we so afraid of hurting men’s feelings?

I laughed a lot during Barbie, but I cried a lot too—at how hard it is to be a girl, how hard it is to be a woman, how long it might be until the world makes another mega-budget movie about our lives and thoughts. I even got a little misty thinking about how confusing and challenging it must be to be a man right now.

But if there is a sequel, please—don’t make it about Ken.