During my first semester of teaching while in grad school, I made a habit of showing up to my classroom half an hour early. I was green as a sapling and felt wholly unqualified for the task before me, and I had the vague sense that arriving before anyone else and looking prepared was one way to earn the respect of students who were barely younger than I was. The second week of classes, coffee in hand and the day’s reading tucked under my arm, I arrived to find an undergrad crouched in front of a half-open window. He was taking a photo with his phone, and when he saw me, he jumped. My presence was unexpected.

The student, whose name I was struggling to recall, screeched the window shut and turned to face me. His cheeks were flushed red. When I asked if everything was all right, he said he was making sure the windows opened. “My mom told me to always check to make sure they work, just in case, you know …” His voice trailed off and his face turned more crimson still. I must have looked confused because he continued: “In case some gun nut with an AR-15 tries to shoot up the place. When a new semester starts, my mother makes me send her a photo of the open windows in each of my classrooms.” I tried to come up with something to say and found I could not. “She’s a little paranoid, I guess,” he offered. Then another bleary-eyed student shuffled in and the conversation ended.

[Ryan Busse: The rifle that ruined America]

Last night, as I sat on my couch watching CNN anchors discuss a mass shooting that left 18 dead and 13 injured in Lewiston, Maine—the little city where I teach at Bates College and where I lived until recently—I thought about my terrified students who were sheltering in place. About my colleagues who live in town who could have been at the bar or bowling alley where the violence unfolded. About my former neighbors on whose porch my wife and I had spent many evenings drinking wine and talking politics. I thought about the hospital workers who were in the middle of the worst night of their life, and—as the child of a retired police officer—about the sons and daughters and spouses waiting at home while their loved ones ran toward the danger rather than away from it. I thought about all the people waiting for news, or getting news.

And for the first time in years, I thought, too, about that student and that window, opened to prove to his worried mother that he had an escape route. His phrase—“gun nut”—came to my mind again and again as I exchanged worried, confused, furious messages with co-workers and students. As the night wore on and surreality gave way to cold reality, my grief also slowly gave way to guilt. I felt guilty and complicit and, in some imprecise but unshakable way, culpable for the violence on my television and social-media feeds. I felt, for the first time, like I was part of the reason that mothers have to ask their children for photos of open windows. That I was part of the reason America is a country where college campuses and bars and bowling alleys are all too often shooting galleries. I felt guilty because gun nuts are, whether I like it or not, my people: I grew up in gun country. I spent my teenage years working at a Pennsylvania gun club. I’ve been a gun owner nearly my entire life.

In Walker Percy’s classic novel, The Moviegoer, the titular protagonist observes that mass media can make it feel like the only places that really, truly exist are big cities. When you unexpectedly see your small town on the silver screen, however, you get a fleeting sense that you belong to an important place: Where you call home, he says, has been “certified.” “If he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood,” Percy writes of the moviegoer, “it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.” Last night, a place where I work and have called home was certified in the grimmest possible way. I am embarrassed to say that this is what it took—a place I love to become somewhere that a uniquely American tragedy has taken place—for me to fully understand our country’s mass-shooting problem.

The honest truth is that I have always viewed the gun-violence epidemic—and my relationship to it as a gun owner—as an abstraction, remote from my own life or choices. Like many gun owners, I had always supported stronger gun control. If it requires written and practical exams and dozens of hours of training to earn the right to drive a motor vehicle, I have never understood why the same should not apply to firearms. But my views on gun control have also been wonkish, academic in nature: It is something I care about and have written about but have never felt deeply. That changed yesterday as I found myself racking my brain, wondering if I had ever heard my students or colleagues or friends or neighbors mention Schemengees Bar & Grille. Wondering if someone I knew could have been there. Wondering if I was going to get The Call or The Text or The Email.

[Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter: The creator of the AR-15 didn’t see this coming]

Today, as my wife and I stay locked in our home—the gunman, still on the loose, is the subject of a sprawling manhunt—I am filled with nothing so much as rage. Rage at my gun-nut friends from home who will see this tragedy as a reason for less gun control, rather than more of it. Rage at every conservative pundit who has ever uttered the phrase “good guy with a gun.” Rage at the state of Maine, which has some of the most lax gun laws in the country. Rage at the politicians here and beyond who have refused to solve a problem for which solutions readily exist. Rage at myself for being so blind.

If you had asked me before yesterday why I own guns, I would have fed you the same line I had fed my liberal friends and my wife—and, above all, myself—for years. I would have told you that I own guns for hunting, for protection, for blasting clay pigeons out of cloudless October skies. I would have told you that I own guns because I come from a gun family and guns are some of the only things I have left from people I have loved. I would have told you about the rifle that my holler-born, Great Depression–surviving grandmother kept under the bed, the 20-gauge my grandfather used to bring home Thanksgiving turkeys, the 30-06 that took my father’s first deer. I would have told you I own guns because I am a hunter and I own guns because I write things that sometimes make people angry.

But it is only now that gun violence has visited my little corner of the world that I have been forced to confront reality, a truth that has been there all along but that I have refused to admit: I own guns because I like them and because I am an American and I’m allowed to and no one stops me. I own guns because—until this moment—gun violence was something that happened Anywhere else and not Somewhere close to me. I own guns because I have never been forced to question—to really question—why I do or what they’re for or what would happen if I had to work a little harder for the right to own them. You might find this confession myopic or selfish, but it’s also the truth. And I’m admitting it because I think the root of our country’s gun problem is that we refuse—gun owners and gun critics alike—to say this truth out loud.

We have made the gun debate a conflict over facts and motivations and laws and amendments. Gun-control advocates rightly point out that guns do not in fact make anyone safer. That the majority of mass shootings are not ended by the mythical “good guy with a gun” but by law-enforcement or suicide. That buying a gun makes you more likely to die of a gunshot wound, not less. The Second Amendment crowd argues that self-protection is a right, granted by God and the Constitution, and that a degree of risk is the price to pay for living in a free society. I have neither the patience nor energy to rehash these debates. And I don’t think there’s any point in arguing about policy right now. There is zero reason to expect that meaningful laws will be passed as a result of the events that transpired in Lewiston.

So rather than rattle off a list of warmed-over ideas such as “assault-weapons ban” or “mandatory background checks” or “red-flag laws” or “commonsense gun reform” that are probably not going to come to fruition tomorrow or the day after or next year or the year after, I’ll just resort to being honest. The inescapable fact is that the only people capable of shifting the gun conversation in this country are the people who buy them.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Coming undone in the age of mass shootings]

I am, like most Americans who own guns, responsible. Yesterday’s events haven’t made me change my mind about being a gun owner. The reasons that motivated me to own guns in the first place are no different today than yesterday. The shooting in Lewiston changed my mind about being a quiet gun owner. I have spent years of my life making apologies on behalf of my gun-nut acquaintances. Staying silent when friends bring up the National Rifle Association despite my fierce opposition to that organization. Not pushing back when they call minor reforms such as mandatory waiting periods “totalitarian.” Changing the subject rather than asking Why do you need a military-style rifle?

As a gun owner from gun country, I’ll let you in on the dirty secret that everyone knows in their heart of hearts: The AR-15 is America’s best-selling rifle not because people need them for protection or because our country is full of aspiring militiamen or paranoid whack jobs waiting for Civil War. People own AR-15s because they think they’re sexy and cool and manly. Because they have barely any recoil and Army surplus ammo is cheap. Because their buddies have them, so why shouldn’t they? Because they are toys—the most dangerous toys in America, but toys nonetheless. Mothers must ask their sons for pictures of open windows because Americans own AR-15s, and they own them because they are fun.

And if the past 24 hours have convinced me of anything, it is that the only way things are ever going to get better is if more gun owners start asking our friends the only question that matters: How much blood is your fun worth?

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Diana Greene Foster made a painful prediction: She estimated that one in four women who wanted an abortion wouldn’t be able to get one. Foster, a demographer at UC San Francisco, told me that she’d based her expectation on her knowledge of how abortion rates decline when women lose insurance coverage or have to travel long distances after clinics close.

And she was well aware of what this statistic meant. She’d spent 10 years following 1,000 women recruited from clinic waiting rooms. Some got an abortion, but others were turned away. The “turnaways” were more likely to suffer serious health consequences, live in poverty, and stay in contact with violent partners. With nearly 1 million abortions performed in America each year, Foster worried that hundreds of thousands of women would be forced to continue unwanted pregnancies. “Having a baby before they’re ready kind of knocks people off their life course,” she told me.

But now, more than a year removed from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Foster has revised her estimate. After seeing early reports of women traveling across state lines and ordering pills online, she now estimates that about 5 percent of women who want an abortion cannot get one. Indeed, two recent reports show that although Dobbs upended abortion access in America, many women have nevertheless found ways to end their pregnancy. A study by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, signals that national abortion rates have not meaningfully fallen since 2020. Instead, they seem to have gone up a bit. A report released this week by the Society of Family Planning, another pro-abortion-rights group, shows that an increase in abortions in states that allow the procedure more than offset the post-Dobbs drop-off in states that closed down clinics.

[Read: The abortion backup plan that no one is talking about]

Some of this increase may be a result of trends that predate Dobbs: Abortion rates in the U.S. have been going up since 2017. But the reports suggest that the increase may also be due to travel by women who live in red states and the expanded access to abortion that many blue states enacted after the ruling. Still, it is not yet clear exactly how much each of these factors is contributing to the observed increase—and how many women who want an abortion are still unable to get one.

Alison Norris, a co-chair of the Society of Family Planning study, told me that she fears that the public will “become complacent” if they see the likely increase in abortion rates and believe that everyone has access. “Feeling like the problem isn’t really that big of a deal because the numbers seem to have returned to what they were pre-Dobbs is a misunderstanding of the data,” she said.

It seems illogical that more than a dozen states would ban abortion and national rates would hardly change. But even as red states have choked off access, blue states have widened it. And the data show that women have flooded the remaining clinics and ordered abortion pills from pharmacies that ship across the country. More than half of all abortions are done using medication, a pattern that began even before the Dobbs decision.

“It just doesn’t work to make abortion illegal,” Linda Prine, a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital, told me. “There may be some people who are having babies that they didn’t want to have, but when you shift resources all over the place, and all kinds of other avenues open up, there’s also people who are getting abortions that might not have gotten them otherwise.”

With mail-order abortion pills, “it’s this weird moment where abortion might, ironically, be more available than it’s ever been,” Rachel Rebouché, an expert in abortion law and the dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law, told me.

The Guttmacher Institute sampled abortion clinics to estimate the change in abortion counts between the first halves of 2020 and 2023. Areas surrounding states with post-Roe bans saw their abortion numbers surge over that period of time. In Colorado, which is near South Dakota, a state with a ban, abortions increased by about 89 percent, compared with an 8 percent rise in the prior three-year period. New Mexico saw abortions climb by 220 percent. (For comparison, before Dobbs, the state recorded a 27 percent hike from 2017 to 2020.) Even states in solidly blue regions saw their abortion rates grow over the three-year interval from 2020 to 2023: Guttmacher estimates that California’s abortion clinics provided 16 percent more abortions, and New York’s about 18 percent more.

Some shifts predated the court’s intervention. After a decades-long decline, abortions began ticking upward around 2017. In 2020, they increased by 8 percent compared with 2017. The researchers I spoke with for this story told me that they couldn’t point to a decisive cause for the shift that started six years ago; they suggested rising child-care costs and Trump-era cuts to Medicaid coverage as possible factors. But the rise in abortion rates reflects a broader change: Women seem to want fewer children than they used to. Caitlin Myers, a professor at Middlebury College, told me that abortion rates might have increased even more if the Court hadn’t reversed Roe. “It looks like more people just want abortions than did a few years ago,” she said. “What we don’t know is, would they have gone up even more if there weren’t people trapped in Texas or Louisiana?”

One of the most significant factors in maintaining post-Roe abortion access dates from the latter half of 2021. As the coronavirus pandemic clobbered the health-care system, the FDA suspended its requirement that women pick up abortion medications in person. A few months later, it made the switch permanent. The timing was opportune: People became accustomed to receiving all of their medical care through virtual appointments at the same time that they could get abortion pills delivered to their doorstep, Rebouché told me. People no longer have to travel to a clinic and cross anti-abortion picket lines. But access to mifepristone, one of the most commonly used drugs for medication abortions, is under threat. After an anti-abortion group challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug, a federal court instated regulations that would require women to visit a doctor three times to get the pills, making access much more difficult. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to hear an appeal, and has frozen the 2021 rules in place while it decides.

But paradoxically, several of the factors that may have contributed to the rise in abortion rates seem to have sprung directly from the Dobbs decision. In the year since the ruling, six blue states have enacted laws that allow practitioners to ship abortion pills anywhere, even to deep-red Texas. Although these laws haven’t yet been litigated to test whether they’re truly impenetrable, doctors have relied on them to mail medication across the country. Aid Access, an online service that operates outside the formal health-care system, receives requests for about 6,500 abortion pills a month. (The pills cost $150, but Aid Access sends them for free to people who can’t pay.) Demand for Aid Access pills in states that ban or restrict medication abortion has mushroomed since the Dobbs decision, rising from an average of about 82 requests per day before Dobbs to 214 after. The Guttmacher report doesn’t count abortions that take place in this legally fuzzy space, suggesting that actual abortion figures could be higher.

As the Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to an abortion and turned the issue back to the states, it also hardened the resolve of abortion-rights supporters. In the five months after Roe fell, the National Network of Abortion Funds received four times the money from donations than it got in all of 2020. People often donate as states encroach on abortion rights. In many cases, they bankrolled people’s travel out of ban states. Community networks also gained experience in shuttling people out of state to get abortions. “There’s definitely been innovation in the face of abortion bans,” Abigail Aiken, who documents abortions that occur outside of the formal health-care system, told me.

[Katherine Turk: How financial strength weakened American feminism]

Some researchers believe that the Dobbs decision has actually convinced more women to get abortions. Abortion-rights advocacy groups have erected highway billboards that promise Abortion is ok. Public opinion has tilted in favor of abortion rights. Ushma Upadhyay, a professor at UC San Francisco, told me that California’s rising abortion rates cannot all be due to people traveling from states that ban abortion. “It’s also got to be an increase among Californians,” she said. “It’s just a lot of attention, destigmatization, and funding that has been made available. Even before Dobbs, there was a lot of unmet need for abortion in this country.”

Abortion used to be a topic that was “talked about in the shadows,” Greer Donley, an expert in abortion law and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “Dobbs kind of blew that up.” Still, she believes that it’s unlikely that people are getting significantly more abortions simply because of changes within blue states. Just as obstacles don’t seem to have stopped people from seeking abortions, efforts that moderately expand access are unlikely to lead people to get an abortion, she said.

The people I spoke with emphasized that even though overall abortion rates might be going up, not everyone who wants the procedure can get it. People who don’t speak English or Spanish, who don’t have internet access, or who are in jail still have trouble getting abortions. “What I foresee is a bunch of Black women being stuck pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant, in a state where it’s incredibly dangerous to be Black and pregnant,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, a founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, told me.

Bertram Roberts’s fund used to provide travel stipends of up to $250. Now women need three times that. Most people travel from Mississippi to a clinic in Carbondale, Illinois. The trip takes two days—48 hours that women must take off work and find child care for. “If you are in the middle of Texas, and you have to travel to Illinois, even if funds covered all the costs, to say that abortion is more accessible for that person seems callous and wrong,” Donley told me.

Many women spend weeks waiting for an abortion. “It is excruciating to be carrying a pregnancy that one knows they’re planning to end,” Upadhyay said. And although studies show that abortion pills are safe, women who take them can bleed for up to three weeks, and they may worry that they’ll be prosecuted if they seek help at a hospital. Only two states—Nevada and South Carolina—explicitly criminalize women who give themselves an abortion (and few women have been charged under the laws), but the legislation contributes to a climate of fear.

More than a year out from the Dobbs decision, the grainy picture of abortion access is coming into focus. With the benefit of distance, the story seems not to be solely one of diminished access, widespread surveillance, and forced births, as the ruling’s opponents had warned. For most Americans, abortion might be more accessible than it’s ever been. But for another, more vulnerable group, abortion is a far-off privilege. “If I lived in my birth state—I was born in Minnesota—my work would be one hundred times easier,” Bertram Roberts told me, later adding, “I think about that a lot, about how the two states that bookend my life are so different.”

If there’s one thing the White House and its critics seem to agree on, it’s that the Biden administration’s approach to economic policy—which it has branded “Bidenomics”—is a sharp break from how things have been done for the past several decades. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view,” Joe Biden said at an event in July 2021. But what exactly was that wrong path—and what is Biden’s economic team trying to do differently?

In the 1970s, policy makers faced a conundrum. The long postwar boom seemed to have sputtered out. Inflation was rising while unemployment remained high—a combination that mainstream economists had previously thought impossible. Political leaders were under pressure to figure out what was holding back the economy.

A group of economists from the University of Chicago believed they had the answer: regulations. According to these theorists, the ideal economy was one in which money and goods flowed smoothly according to the laws of supply and demand. But regulations on American business introduced friction into the gears of capitalism, stifling economic growth. To get the economy growing again, leaders needed to remove those regulatory obstacles. Call it tweezer economics: Pluck out the inefficiencies clogging up the market, and growth would come roaring back.

[Joel Dodge: My hometown is getting a $100 billion dose of Bidenomics]

But the turbo-growth promised by the Chicago-school intellectuals never materialized. And so, in perhaps the most overlooked element of his economic agenda, Biden has thrown out the tweezers. Instead of trying to generate growth by removing micro-inefficiencies, his policies target growth directly through aggressive spending, creating a high-pressure macroeconomy. It’s an ambitious experiment. If that pressure can force businesses to step up their own competitive game and run more efficiently, Bidenomics could best the old order on its own terms.

The ’70s crisis was very real. Many observers on both the left and right blamed the situation on microeconomic conditions: Workers weren’t productive enough, and businesses weren’t growing enough. In the version of the story that took hold on the right, the culprit was a body of regulations that prevented corporations from running at maximum efficiency. An overreaching federal government had empowered favored groups—labor unions, consumer advocates, environmentalists, and racial and ethnic minorities—to get in the way of free-market capitalism.

For the Chicago intellectuals, the worst offender was antitrust policy. In 1958, the economist George Stigler wrote that businesses that reached a dominant position should be presumed to have done so because of their superior efficiency, because competition “sifts out the more efficient enterprise.” The tough antitrust enforcement of the ’50s and ’60s interfered with this process, he argued, prosecuting the very firms that contributed the most to economic growth. Corporations should be left alone to merge and grow large, lest government kill the geese that laid the golden eggs.

The economists Michael Jensen and William H. Meckling extended tweezer economics into a new realm. In 1976, they famously theorized that “agency costs”—the conflict between executives, who managed a company, and shareholders, who owned it—were holding back corporate efficiency. Executives, they argued, would rather go golfing than work to generate value for shareholders. The solution was to put shareholders in control. Executives should be paid in stocks, rather than flat salaries, to align their incentives. Combine that idea with looser antitrust law and there would be an active competition for control of corporations, especially via hostile takeovers. This, Jensen later wrote, would generate “large benefits for shareholders and for the economy as a whole.”

Another key drag on the economy, according to observers across the political spectrum, was the growing rebelliousness of the American worker. Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz argued that workers needed bosses to protect themselves from their own free-riding inclinations. For businesses to function efficiently, bosses must be able to intensively monitor workers for shirking, and to fire them unilaterally if they were caught doing so. An obvious implication was that labor regulations—above all, laws protecting the rights of labor unions—had to be curtailed.

These ideas, and others like them, were behind many of America’s key economic policy changes since the ’70s. Stigler’s theory of the efficient monopolist eventually conquered both the judiciary and the executive branch; after Ronald Reagan took office, enforcement dwindled and corporate mergers soared. (This was the focus of Biden’s “wrong path” comments in 2021.) In corporate law, Jensen and Meckling’s doctrine of shareholder primacy is now virtually sacrosanct. Finally, the authority of employers over workers has expanded dramatically.

In short, the Chicago school got virtually everything it asked for. Big firms grew bigger, corporations prioritized their stock prices above all else, and private-sector unions were all but wiped out. But 40 years of tweezing out the inefficiencies allegedly holding back the economy did not revive the growth rates of the pre-stagflation era. The U.S. economy grew an average of 4 percent a year from 1948 to 1973. During the crisis years, from 1974 to 1979, it grew more slowly, on average only 3 percent a year. Then came the tweezers, and growth didn’t budge. From 1980 to 2007, it plodded along at the same 3 percent rate of the crisis years, before falling off a cliff after 2007—all the way down to 1.6 percent from 2008 to 2020.

Instead of prompting a return to growth, the policy revolution has made itself felt in other ways. The death of antitrust enforcement, far from unleashing dynamism and investment, may have held them back. The shareholder revolution helped hollow out the American industrial base and transfer massive wealth to financial engineers. And although the labor movement was defanged, the hoped-for productivity explosion never happened.

The post-tweezer era is just a few years old, but it has already scored some early successes. Most important, growth recovered remarkably quickly from the pandemic recession.The economy returned not only to pre-pandemic trends but to pre–Great Financial Crisis trends as well, suggesting that the prolonged pain of the post-financial-crisis recession was avoidable.

Biden’s first big legislative accomplishment was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which unleashed a fiscal fire hose onto the U.S. economy. That law was followed by more legislation that went beyond merely increasing spending. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act steered investment specifically toward fighting climate change. The law eschews the tweezer of, say, carbon taxes, which leave decisions to the wisdom of the market, in favor of direct federal interventions. For example, while previous policies relied nearly exclusively on the tax code to support investments in zero-carbon energy projects, the IRA contains provisions allowing nonprofit utilities that invest in zero-carbon power generation to obtain federal grants.

The IRA, along with the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, also aims to reduce regional inequalities by directing investments to left-behind rural and deindustrialized areas. That is a decisive break from the Chicago-school faith in letting capital flow to wherever it can generate the highest returns. Projects also get extra credit if they have labor peace agreements, prompting some employers to proactively reach labor contracts with unions in order to be the winning bidder on federally backed projects. These measures have already aided unions in wind-turbine and electric-bus manufacturing. Finally, in a departure from Jensen and Meckling’s doctrine of shareholder primacy, the IRA includes a provision to discourage companies from funneling cash to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks, steering them to reinvest in their businesses and employees instead. In other words, the government is investing with the sorts of “strings attached” that the ’70s generation blamed for inefficiency.

Some critics have questioned the wisdom of trying to satisfy too many constituencies with stimulus and infrastructure policy. They point out that the sometimes conflicting goals of unions, environmentalists, and the companies receiving federal funds may gum up and needlessly complicate policy implementation. In other words, by pursuing too many goals, the administration may meet none of them satisfactorily. That’s a real risk—but the Biden administration seems to be betting that some additional inefficiency is a cost worth paying if it builds new constituencies in support of pro-growth policy. If the administration can bring benefits to unions, environmentalists, and rural voters, it might assemble a lasting political coalition behind its vision of green growth.

[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]

The inverse is also true, of course. The post-tweezer revolution could all very easily fall apart. By many metrics, the U.S. economy is in spectacular shape—but voters continue to say they’re miserable. If Bidenomics isn’t popular, it’s unlikely to last. Meanwhile, the administration’s efforts to break up corporate monopolies are running into a buzzsaw of hostile judges steeped in Chicago-school doctrines. The Federal Reserve, in its effort to fight inflation, is stymieing new investment in housing, green energy, and more, by making borrowing more expensive.  

Yet the new model holds great promise. For nearly half a century, the government gave corporate America the hands-off policies it preferred, hoping the wealth would trickle down. Now the government is letting strong overall growth set the foundations for more efficient businesses. Corporations are being forced to use capacity more effectively to keep up with demand—and, thanks to a historically tight labor market, to vigorously compete to attract workers. If macro policy can not only generate overall growth but also compel firms to be more efficient, we might discover that the trade-off between economic strength and social welfare was never really a trade-off at all.

As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.

Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on the bet that they can target each group with harsh immigration policies without paying an electoral price.

For months, they have proposed an escalating succession of hard-line measures aimed at deterring mostly Latino undocumented migrants from crossing the southern border. And following the Hamas terror attack on Israel earlier this month, they rolled out a wave of exclusionary proposals aimed at Muslims. Trump has pledged that, if returned to the White House, he will restore his travel ban on people from a number of majority-Muslim nations, expand ideological screening of all potential immigrants to ensure that they agree with “our religion,” and deport foreign students in the United States who express hostility to Israel.

Trump and other GOP 2024 candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have unveiled these proposals even as many Democratic-leaning activists warn that support for President Joe Biden is suffering in Latino and Muslim communities. Polls have consistently shown widespread discontent among Latinos over inflation and the economy. And many Muslim Americans are angry at Biden for his strong support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he pursues his military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. “There is a level of disgust and disbelief and disappointment at the administration’s handling of the crisis so far,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told me.

The movement of some of these voters away from Biden produces a powerful incentive for Republicans to escalate their rhetorical and policy offensive against immigrant communities. It means that Trump could achieve the best of both worlds politically: offering a harsh anti-immigrant agenda that energizes the most xenophobic white voters in his coalition while still maintaining, or even growing, his support among immigrant communities drawn to him (or repelled by Democrats) on other issues.

That process already seems well under way in the agenda that Trump and other Republicans are advancing about the southern border. The fact that Trump’s vote among Hispanics improved in 2020, even after he implemented such aggressive policies as starting the border wall and separating migrant children from their parents, has undoubtedly encouraged him to go even further with his new proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. and military action against Mexico (both of which DeSantis has also endorsed).

Likewise, if Trump wins the 2024 election and more Muslim Americans vote for him than in 2020, despite his threats to target Muslim immigrants, he will undoubtedly feel emboldened in a second term to impose more exclusionary policies on that community. Stephen Miller, the hard-line architect of much of Trump’s immigration agenda as president, offered a preview of the deportation agenda that might be ahead when he posted a video of a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration and wrote that ICE agents “will be busy in 2025.”

Over his four years in office, Trump instituted policies more resistant to immigration than any president had since the 1920s, and repeatedly disparaged immigrants with openly racist language (including calling Mexicans “rapists” and decrying immigration from mostly Black “shithole countries”). He is now pushing beyond even that agenda. “What comes next will be … spectacular,” Miller posted recently.

As just a first step, Trump has proposed to reinstate all of the key policies he implemented that raised nearly insurmountable hurdles for those who sought to claim asylum in the U.S., including the “remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to stay in that country, typically in crowded and dangerous makeshift camps, while their cases were adjudicated. He’s promised to finish his border wall. And during his CNN town hall last spring, Trump refused to rule out reinstating the separation of migrant children from their parents, his most controversial policy. The Biden administration has reversed all of these policies, and it recently settled a lawsuit in which the federal government agreed not to restore the child-separation policy. Still, experts say that a reelected Trump would almost certainly seek to void or evade that agreement.

After the Hamas attack in Israel, Trump also pledged to bring back his travel ban. A bitterly divided Supreme Court upheld the rule in a 5–4 vote in 2018; if reelected, Trump could unilaterally restore the policy through executive action. “The legal framework,” Mitchell from the Council on American-Islamic Relations told me, “is still there just waiting to be used.”

But Trump has new ideas too. These include ending birthright citizenship (though his legal authority to do so is highly questionable) and launching military actions against Mexican drug cartels. In a speech to a conservative group earlier this year, he promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

He is also calling for requiring prospective immigrants from any country to pass intensified ideological screenings: “If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you’re disqualified; if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you’re disqualified; and if you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified,” he said earlier this month in Iowa. Monday in New Hampshire, Trump raised the ante when he said he would bar entry for those who “don’t like our religion,” without explaining how he defined “our religion.” He’s pledged to deport students and other immigrants who express what he called “jihadist sympathies.”

David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says Trump’s record as president shows that it would be a mistake to dismiss even the most extreme of these proposals as simply campaign rhetoric designed to stir his crowds. “Every word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth ought to be taken seriously,” Leopold told me. If Trump returns to power, he said, we will see a version of his first term’s “anti-immigrant policy on steroids.”

While Trump was president, and his agenda was in the spotlight, most of his core immigration policies provoked majority opposition in polls. In a compilation of results from its annual American Values Survey polls late in Trump’s presidency, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just over half of Americans opposed his Muslim travel ban, about three-fifths opposed his border wall, and fully three-fourths opposed the child-separation policy.

But public tolerance for some of these ideas may be growing amid dissatisfaction with Biden’s record in managing the border and immigration. Less than a third of adults overall—and only about one-fourth of independents—said they approved of Biden’s handling of those issues in the latest annual American Values Survey, released yesterday. A recent national Marquette University Law School Poll found that Americans preferred Trump over Biden on controlling the border by nearly two to one.

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll found that a majority of Americans support building a border wall for the first time since the pollsters initially asked about the idea, in 2016. “With frustration building” over Biden’s record on immigration, “it looks to me that some of these more extreme ideas are gaining traction in the country,” Robert P. Jones, the president of PRRI, told me.

Even many in the communities that Trump’s immigration plans would most directly affect appear more focused on other issues. Every major data source on voting behavior agreed that Trump grew his vote among Latino voters from about three in 10 to nearly four in 10 from 2016 to 2020, largely around economic issues, but also because of gains among cultural conservatives. Though the GOP advance among Latinos stalled between the 2020 and 2022 elections, polls continue to record widespread dissatisfaction among them about inflation, which could further erode support for Democrats in 2024.

The Muslim American community is much smaller—Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the total U.S. population—so reliable information on its voting behavior is less available. Youssef Chouhoud, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, told me that Trump’s vote among Muslim Americans nationwide improved from about one in six in 2016 to roughly one in three in 2020. Key to those 2020 gains, he said, was sympathy to conservative GOP arguments on issues such as LGBTQ rights and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Now, Chouhoud and others note, those Republican gains are being reinforced by the backlash among many Muslim activists against Biden’s expansive support for Israel in the conflict with Hamas. Waleed Shahid, a Muslim American Democratic strategist who has worked for several liberal groups and candidates, says that leading Democrats are underestimating the visceral anger over Biden’s words and actions. “I think, unfortunately, Democratic leadership has their heads in the sand about this,” he told me.

Both Chouhoud and Shahid told me they believed that Trump’s return to anti-Muslim rhetoric reduces the odds that any significant number of voters from that community will abandon Biden to vote for the former president. But they both said they considered it likely that some Muslim American voters disillusioned with Biden might stay home or drift to third-party candidates. “The fact that this chorus” in the Muslim community “is so loud” in criticizing Biden, “even given the full knowledge” of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, “is telling you that there is a groundswell of real animosity toward the policies that the Biden administration is enacting right now,” said Chouhoud, who is also a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan group that studies issues concerning Muslim Americans. This discontent could matter most in the swing state of Michigan, where Muslims are a sizable constituency: A mobile billboard drove through the Detroit area this week displaying a message proclaiming that “Israel Bombs Children” and “Biden Pays For It.”

Shahid says he fears that the 2024 election won’t look like 2020’s—when Democrats of all stripes unified behind the common mission of ousting Trump from the White House. Instead, he thinks, the next election will more closely resemble that of 2016, when a decisive sliver of Democratic-leaning voters, particularly younger ones, backed the third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein rather than Hillary Clinton.

“The Democratic base did not turn out for Hillary in 2016, even though Trump was a right-wing extremist,” Shahid told me. “People somehow have collective amnesia about this. But Biden is historically unpopular with the Democratic base.”

Of course Biden may regain Muslim voters’ trust if he can jump-start renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after the fighting concludes. Similarly, very few Latinos may now be aware of Trump’s proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants and military action against Mexico; if he’s the nominee, that would likely change—and prompt substantial resistance, especially among Mexican Americans.

Still, these tensions reveal a larger dynamic underpinning the potential 2024 rematch between the two men. On almost every front, Trump has formulated a 2024 agenda even more confrontational to Democratic constituencies and liberal priorities than he pursued during his four years in the White House. Yet disenchantment with Biden’s performance could be eroding the will to resist that agenda among key components of the party’s coalition, particularly young people and voters of color.

The pressure that the Middle East crisis is placing on Muslim American support for Biden, even as Trump directly threatens that community, shows how hard it may be for Democrats to maintain a united front—even against an opponent whom they consider an existential threat to all that they value.

Shortly after midnight on October 8, Mohammed Zubair, a fact-checking journalist based in Bangalore, came across a video on Twitter. Less than a day had elapsed since the Hamas attacks in Israel, but the caption on the post claimed that Palestinians had shot down four Israeli helicopters in Gaza. Zubair had seen similar footage dozens of times before—from the simulation video game Arma 3, passed off as visuals from the Ukraine war.

Zubair lives in close quarters with his parents, wife, and children; his only time for solitary concentration is when his kids are asleep. As part of his daily work routine, he scours the internet for fake news and propaganda for an hour after midnight. To him, October 8 felt different: The deluge of disinformation he spotted on Indian social media left him stunned. “The scale of misinformation this time was horrific and unimaginable,” Zubair told me.

A grim video of a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel was shared as an attack on Israeli citizens. A nine-year-old photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, taken before the latter departed for his military service, was portrayed as the leader sending his offspring to war. Footage of a funeral staged in Jordan to evade a pandemic lockdown was misrepresented as Palestinians faking deaths in Gaza. A 2014 video of the Islamic State destroying a mosque in Syria was labeled as the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian mosque.

[Read: The war in Gaza is getting remixed in real time]

For the next few nights, Zubair found himself staying up until well after dawn, debunking the cascade of disinformation through his Twitter account, which has close to 1 million followers. According to him, roughly two-thirds of the disinformation about the conflict was coming from the Hindu right, which is one of the most formidable purveyors of propaganda in the world. Dispensing with complexity and real-world consequences, the disinformation machinery of the Hindu right has been operating in an amoral zone, treating the Israel-Hamas war as little more than an entertaining spectacle happening somewhere far away, and as a windfall for its Islamophobic agenda.

The Hindu-nationalist movement has for decades complained of alienation from India’s largely liberal press, where, it claimed, its ideological vision was given short shrift. With the advent of social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and messaging applications such as WhatsApp, the Hindu right had the tools to undercut the mainstream press and eventually overwhelm it.

The Hindu right’s communications machinery is extensive and organized. A digital army numbering in the tens of thousands imprints the movement’s desired narrative on India’s public, regardless of the facts. In 2018, while addressing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s social-media conclave, Amit Shah, then the president of the party and the country’s home minister since 2019, boasted, “We could make any message go viral, whether sweet or sour, real or fake.”

Zubair told me that the party’s famed information-technology cell was undergirded by a much larger unofficial trolling universe. The party taps low-paid techies with Hindu-nationalist sympathies to spread its message, for example. “For them, it’s additional pocket money to communicate ideological convictions they already share,” he said.

In 2017, Zubair, along with Pratik Sinha, founded Alt News, an independent website dedicated to combatting disinformation in India. Zubair and Sinha had both trained as engineers, and they shared an obsession with the seemingly uncontrollable epidemic of fake news in the country. What began as a three-person enterprise now has close to 20 employees and bureaus in two Indian cities.

As the website’s influence has grown, Alt News has attracted the ire of the Hindu right. In the summer of 2022, Zubair was imprisoned for more than three weeks on a government charge that a satirical tweet he’d posted several years prior had hurt Hindu sentiments. Sinha, who has been a strident critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his role in the 2002 violence in the western state of Gujarat, left the province fearing for his personal safety. The group has nevertheless carried on with work that has become perilous in India; according to Time magazine, Zubair and Sinha were among the favorites to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

Since the Hamas attacks, Hindu nationalists across India have held rallies in support of Israel, while in states governed by the Hindu right, pro-Palestine demonstrators have been arrested. The pattern is a striking anomaly for a country historically sympathetic to the Arab nation’s cause. In the Hindu-nationalist imagination, Israel and India occupy parallel positions—surrounded by Muslim enemies within and without. And the Hindu right approves of a country it perceives as a hard, militaristic, technologically advanced power that is ruthless in dealing with its Muslim foes.

The movement’s identification with Israel is, in many ways, perverse. Hindu nationalism took root in the 1920s, inspired by the rise of European fascism. In 1931, B. S. Moonje, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, was deeply impressed by Benito Mussolini, whom he met on a visit to Italy. M. S. Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the Hindu right, thought the “Final Solution” was a good lesson for Indians “to learn and profit by.”

The timelines of India and Israel track closely with each other: India gained freedom from British colonial rule in 1947, and the creation of Israel came a year later. Both countries were gripped with anxiety upon their founding, as civil conflicts raged in the background. But India and Israel were estranged for more than four decades; formal diplomatic relations would not be established until 1992.

As the largest nation to have shaken off colonialism, India saw itself as the leader of the postcolonial world. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, viewed the Palestinian cause through the prism of that wider anticolonial struggle. India had little history of anti-Semitism: A smattering of tiny Jewish communities had prospered in the country for centuries without facing any form of persecution.

In the decades following its independence, India remained militantly allied to the Palestinian cause. In 1975, India became the first non-Arab country to grant the Palestine Liberation Organization full diplomatic status. In 1983, Yasser Arafat, the charismatic leader of the PLO, received a rapturous reception during a visit to New Delhi.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an era of free-market economics to India and a warming of its relationship with the United States. This shift in orientation set the conditions for India and Israel to establish diplomatic ties in 1992. Since then, the two countries have moved closer. “Over the years, we have seen a shift from India being pro-Palestine to more pro-Israel today,” Suhasini Haidar, the diplomatic-affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, told me. “The relationship has been on an upswing.” More and more Indian Jews have been exercising the right to return; direct flights to Tel Aviv began in 2018.

Last year, India joined a Middle East partnership, comprising Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, that pledged to address shared environmental and economic goals while reaffirming support for the Abraham Accords and other normalization arrangements with Israel. (The move led to a significant worsening of the country’s long-friendly relationship with Iran.) Defense ties are central to the entente between India and Israel. India is, by some distance, the largest buyer of arms from Israel; the country is seen as a dependable source of high-grade military technology. During the 1999 Kargil War—India’s brief conflict with archenemy Pakistan—Israel came to New Delhi’s rescue with immediate military assistance. (Israel has no diplomatic relations with Pakistan.)

Over the past decade, a close personal relationship between Netanyahu and Modi, both right-wing populists embodying a muscular nationalism, has strengthened the ties between the two nations. Haidar covered Modi’s first state visit to Israel in 2017. “It was a five-day lovefest,” she told me. “Netanyahu greeted Modi at the airport. They spent every waking moment together.”

Modi has borrowed from Netanyahu’s bold national-security doctrine. In 2019, a suicide bomber attacked an Indian paramilitary convoy, killing 44 people. Modi responded by striking deep into Pakistani territory. Later that year, during a national election in Israel, Netanyahu sought to buttress his foreign-policy credentials by putting up giant banners flaunting his relationship with Modi, an honor previously reserved for American presidents.

“Israel knows that the Hindu right glorified Hitler,” Haidar told me. “Both sides try to ignore that.”

Hindu nationalists have sought to use the October 7 attack on Israel to further their own domestic ideological ends. They point to the violence in Israel to emphasize the menace of Islamic terrorism, a theme they believe will play in their favor in national elections next year. The subject has proved politically beneficial for Modi in the past: The 2019 military strike against Pakistan, undertaken on the eve of the last election, transformed a sputtering campaign.

[Read: Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics]

Now the Hindu right’s media actors, from national news anchors to itinerant social-media trolls, are playing their domestic political games in a volatile global context. To an inflamed and polarized conflict in the Middle East, the Hindu-right media ecosystem contributes mislabeled videos and fake stories, further muddying the distinctions between true events and motivated falsehoods.

Not surprisingly under these circumstances, the claims that Hindu nationalists put forward are getting taken up by interested actors in other countries. Zubair, who spars online with the Hindu right all the time, now finds himself battling far-right influencers in Israel and the United States who peddle false information originating in India. Five days after the Hamas attacks, Sinha, Zubair’s Alt News co-founder, reflected on Twitter, “Hopefully the world will now realise how the Indian right-wing has made India the disinformation capital of the world.”

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I love Halloween. It’s not the costumes and parties and pumpkins—they’re fun, but I don’t care so much about any of that. What I love is being able to snack openly on candy corn, Necco Wafers, and Squirrel Nut Zippers without judgy looks from others. I can eat that stuff well into November and people will assume it was left over from the trick-or-treaters. But it won’t be left over. It will be from treats I bought for myself and didn’t share with the little ingrates at the door.

Since childhood, I have had an insatiable sweet tooth. I blame my parents—specifically, my father. According to scientists writing in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2019, the perception of sweetness and intake of sugar are, in part, heritable traits. My dad used to keep candy stashed all over the house, all year round: Sugar Babies in the glove box; Milk Duds behind the cushions of the couch; Tootsie Rolls in the sock drawer. I am my father’s son, and eating confectionery makes me happy.

Sugar really can improve mood, in part by soothing negative emotions. Researchers in the journal Appetite showed this in 2022, in an experiment in which participants were told something either emphatically negative (that they’re the type of person who will end up alone, and any friends they have will drift away) or entirely neutral. The participants were then offered a highly sweetened beverage. The people in the negative condition drank nearly 40 percent more of it than those in the neutral group. Apparently, a grape Fanta is just the ticket when you learn you are going to die lonely and abandoned.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them]

Despite the fact that my love of sweets is wired into my DNA, this year my family is urging me—no, hectoring me—to defy nature and resist my Halloween bender. They claim that it is “for my own good.” I believe this is because they hate when I’m happy. Calmly, fairly, and without flying into a rage, I have promised to look further into the scientific evidence on this matter. Does candy pass the cost-benefit test?

Our attraction to sugar probably evolved from our need to find energy-dense food in a calorie-restricted environment. In the Pleistocene period, you would have needed a significant inducement to risk your life climbing a tree for a wild banana, so the brain developed a stimulus to the ventral striatum—part of the reward system—in response to sweet-tasting food.

Besides picking bananas, hunter-gatherers were no doubt stealing honey from bees for countless millennia, but humans first started consuming sugar from cane at least 10,000 years ago, when the Indigenous people of New Guinea domesticated the plant and chewed it raw. We know of Indian texts from around 400 B.C.E. that called for refined sugar in recipes for rice pudding and barley meal. From India, sugar cane spread to Greece and Rome, where one writer marveled at “a reed in India that brings forth honey without the help of bees.” Over subsequent centuries, sugar was much used for medicinal purposes (calling to mind a doctor’s advice to take two Junior Mints and call him in the morning). In 14th-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer referred to sugar (“sugre”) as an excellent gift in The Canterbury Tales.

Candy manufacturing followed the large-scale cultivation of sugarcane in the 18th century, and the first chocolate factory was established in 1765. Although sugar rapidly became the signature cash crop of the plantation slave economy in the Caribbean, the commodity was still expensive and mostly consumed by the wealthy. An anthropological review of colonial-era Maryland noted that thanks to her sugar habit, the governor’s wife, Anne Wolseley Calvert, had lost 20 teeth, and some of those remaining were “decayed down to the root stubs.” That’s a serious commitment to sweets; to oral hygiene, not so much.

[Read: The candy you (probably) won’t get to try]

As the centuries passed and agricultural methods improved, the price of sugar dropped, people got richer, and the amount of sugar consumed skyrocketed—from an average of about six pounds per person per year at the time of George Washington to 130 pounds today. Your regular American might very well start out eating their own weight in sugar every year.

Related to this heavy consumption, a common belief has taken hold that eating a lot of sugar is bad for one’s longevity. My father, who held a Ph.D. in biostatistics, would say, “This will take about 4.3 minutes off my life,” as he poured a bag of jelly beans into his mouth. (In fact, he did die quite young, at 66.) But the data on sugar and life span are not so straightforward.

In a study of Harvard male alumni, researchers writing in The BMJ found that mortality came sooner for men who never consumed candy, compared with those who did. On average, the researchers found, men who’d indulged in sweets lived almost a year longer than abstainers. This does not mean that eating more candy makes you live longer, though: Men who partook one to three times a month had the lowest mortality, but it rose with higher consumption. (The researchers didn’t even consider people like my father, who insisted that a proper breakfast includes dessert.)

Many articles have been written about how heavy consumption of sugar can adversely affect one’s physical health, leading to such complaints as tooth decay, insulin resistance, inflammation, diabetes, and fatty liver disease. Research has also shown that consuming a lot of sugar is associated with compromised hippocampal function, impaired cognition and decision making, and impairments in memory.

To which my dad would have responded, “Yeah, but what about happiness right now?” I’m not at all sure that, if given the option of living to 90 but without circus peanuts, he would have made that choice, and he had a point. The mood enhancements from sweets are real: Experiments show, for example, that eating small amounts of chocolate has an immediate positive effect—but a very short-lived one. The chocoholic’s high, researchers found, wears off after a few minutes.

[Derek Thompson: Halloween’s $1.8 billion candy stimulus]

One way to interpret such findings is that the emotionally driven eating of sweets is not a good strategy to improve mood. An alternative interpretation—one I prefer—is that to maintain a steady sense of well-being, one could consider eating chocolate every three minutes. (Discipline and commitment are important, after all.)

Joking aside, sugar addiction is a real issue. Sugar consumption per capita remains high, even as a majority of Americans say they are actively trying to avoid sugar. If they’re struggling to control their intake, there’s a reason for that: The long-term consumption of sugar has been demonstrated to activate the mesocorticolimbic system in both animals and humans in a way that resembles how substance dependence becomes established. In fact, one experiment has shown that rats display even more intense behavior around sugar than they do with cocaine. Another animal study has found that the withdrawal of sugar can induce a clinical state of anxiety in sucrose-bingeing subjects.

So where does all of this leave us on the sugar and well-being issue? For health and longevity, the research to date suggests that a little is fine, whereas a lot—eating sweets several times a day, for example—can lead to a wide variety of maladies and shortened life expectancy. For mood, the benefits are positive but very brief, and the cost to happiness of actual addiction and withdrawal is serious.

As for my own Halloween-candy haul, I would like to thank my family for their concern, but I judge the issue not fully settled and needing several more years, even decades, of studies to resolve. Now please leave me alone and let me get on with my research.

If there’s one thing the White House and its critics seem to agree on, it’s that the Biden administration’s approach to economic policy—which it has branded “Bidenomics”—is a sharp break from how things have been done for the past several decades. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view,” Joe Biden said at an event in July 2021. But what exactly was that wrong path—and what is Biden’s economic team trying to do differently?

In the 1970s, policy makers faced a conundrum. The long postwar boom seemed to have sputtered out. Inflation was rising while unemployment remained high—a combination that mainstream economists had previously thought impossible. Political leaders were under pressure to figure out what was holding back the economy.

A group of economists from the University of Chicago believed they had the answer: regulations. According to these theorists, the ideal economy was one in which money and goods flowed smoothly according to the laws of supply and demand. But regulations on American business introduced friction into the gears of capitalism, stifling economic growth. To get the economy growing again, leaders needed to remove those regulatory obstacles. Call it tweezer economics: Pluck out the inefficiencies clogging up the market, and growth would come roaring back.

[Joel Dodge: My hometown is getting a $100 billion dose of Bidenomics]

But the turbo-growth promised by the Chicago-school intellectuals never materialized. And so, in perhaps the most overlooked element of his economic agenda, Biden has thrown out the tweezers. Instead of trying to generate growth by removing micro-inefficiencies, his policies target growth directly through aggressive spending, creating a high-pressure macroeconomy. It’s an ambitious experiment. If that pressure can force businesses to step up their own competitive game and run more efficiently, Bidenomics could best the old order on its own terms.

The ’70s crisis was very real. Many observers on both the left and right blamed the situation on microeconomic conditions: Workers weren’t productive enough, and businesses weren’t growing enough. In the version of the story that took hold on the right, the culprit was a body of regulations that prevented corporations from running at maximum efficiency. An overreaching federal government had empowered favored groups—labor unions, consumer advocates, environmentalists, and racial and ethnic minorities—to get in the way of free-market capitalism.

For the Chicago intellectuals, the worst offender was antitrust policy. In 1958, the economist George Stigler wrote that businesses that reached a dominant position should be presumed to have done so because of their superior efficiency, because competition “sifts out the more efficient enterprise.” The tough antitrust enforcement of the ’50s and ’60s interfered with this process, he argued, prosecuting the very firms that contributed the most to economic growth. Corporations should be left alone to merge and grow large, lest government kill the geese that laid the golden eggs.

The economists Michael Jensen and William H. Meckling extended tweezer economics into a new realm. In 1976, they famously theorized that “agency costs”—the conflict between executives, who managed a company, and shareholders, who owned it—were holding back corporate efficiency. Executives, they argued, would rather go golfing than work to generate value for shareholders. The solution was to put shareholders in control. Executives should be paid in stocks, rather than flat salaries, to align their incentives. Combine that idea with looser antitrust law and there would be an active competition for control of corporations, especially via hostile takeovers. This, Jensen later wrote, would generate “large benefits for shareholders and for the economy as a whole.”

Another key drag on the economy, according to observers across the political spectrum, was the growing rebelliousness of the American worker. Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz argued that workers needed bosses to protect themselves from their own free-riding inclinations. For businesses to function efficiently, bosses must be able to intensively monitor workers for shirking, and to fire them unilaterally if they were caught doing so. An obvious implication was that labor regulations—above all, laws protecting the rights of labor unions—had to be curtailed.

These ideas, and others like them, were behind many of America’s key economic policy changes since the ’70s. Stigler’s theory of the efficient monopolist eventually conquered both the judiciary and the executive branch; after Ronald Reagan took office, enforcement dwindled and corporate mergers soared. (This was the focus of Biden’s “wrong path” comments in 2021.) In corporate law, Jensen and Meckling’s doctrine of shareholder primacy is now virtually sacrosanct. Finally, the authority of employers over workers has expanded dramatically.

In short, the Chicago school got virtually everything it asked for. Big firms grew bigger, corporations prioritized their stock prices above all else, and private-sector unions were all but wiped out. But 40 years of tweezing out the inefficiencies allegedly holding back the economy did not revive the growth rates of the pre-stagflation era. The U.S. economy grew an average of 4 percent a year from 1948 to 1973. During the crisis years, from 1974 to 1979, it grew more slowly, on average only 3 percent a year. Then came the tweezers, and growth didn’t budge. From 1980 to 2007, it plodded along at the same 3 percent rate of the crisis years, before falling off a cliff after 2007—all the way down to 1.6 percent from 2008 to 2020.

Instead of prompting a return to growth, the policy revolution has made itself felt in other ways. The death of antitrust enforcement, far from unleashing dynamism and investment, may have held them back. The shareholder revolution helped hollow out the American industrial base and transfer massive wealth to financial engineers. And although the labor movement was defanged, the hoped-for productivity explosion never happened.

The post-tweezer era is just a few years old, but it has already scored some early successes. Most important, growth recovered remarkably quickly from the pandemic recession.The economy returned not only to pre-pandemic trends but to pre–Great Financial Crisis trends as well, suggesting that the prolonged pain of the post-financial-crisis recession was avoidable.

Biden’s first big legislative accomplishment was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which unleashed a fiscal fire hose onto the U.S. economy. That law was followed by more legislation that went beyond merely increasing spending. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act steered investment specifically toward fighting climate change. The law eschews the tweezer of, say, carbon taxes, which leave decisions to the wisdom of the market, in favor of direct federal interventions. For example, while previous policies relied nearly exclusively on the tax code to support investments in zero-carbon energy projects, the IRA contains provisions allowing nonprofit utilities that invest in zero-carbon power generation to obtain federal grants.

The IRA, along with the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, also aims to reduce regional inequalities by directing investments to left-behind rural and deindustrialized areas. That is a decisive break from the Chicago-school faith in letting capital flow to wherever it can generate the highest returns. Projects also get extra credit if they have labor peace agreements, prompting some employers to proactively reach labor contracts with unions in order to be the winning bidder on federally backed projects. These measures have already aided unions in wind-turbine and electric-bus manufacturing. Finally, in a departure from Jensen and Meckling’s doctrine of shareholder primacy, the IRA includes a provision to discourage companies from funneling cash to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks, steering them to reinvest in their businesses and employees instead. In other words, the government is investing with the sorts of “strings attached” that the ’70s generation blamed for inefficiency.

Some critics have questioned the wisdom of trying to satisfy too many constituencies with stimulus and infrastructure policy. They point out that the sometimes conflicting goals of unions, environmentalists, and the companies receiving federal funds may gum up and needlessly complicate policy implementation. In other words, by pursuing too many goals, the administration may meet none of them satisfactorily. That’s a real risk—but the Biden administration seems to be betting that some additional inefficiency is a cost worth paying if it builds new constituencies in support of pro-growth policy. If the administration can bring benefits to unions, environmentalists, and rural voters, it might assemble a lasting political coalition behind its vision of green growth.

[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]

The inverse is also true, of course. The post-tweezer revolution could all very easily fall apart. By many metrics, the U.S. economy is in spectacular shape—but voters continue to say they’re miserable. If Bidenomics isn’t popular, it’s unlikely to last. Meanwhile, the administration’s efforts to break up corporate monopolies are running into a buzzsaw of hostile judges steeped in Chicago-school doctrines. The Federal Reserve, in its effort to fight inflation, is stymieing new investment in housing, green energy, and more, by making borrowing more expensive.  

Yet the new model holds great promise. For nearly half a century, the government gave corporate America the hands-off policies it preferred, hoping the wealth would trickle down. Now the government is letting strong overall growth set the foundations for more efficient businesses. Corporations are being forced to use capacity more effectively to keep up with demand—and, thanks to a historically tight labor market, to vigorously compete to attract workers. If macro policy can not only generate overall growth but also compel firms to be more efficient, we might discover that the trade-off between economic strength and social welfare was never really a trade-off at all.

Even before Bob Menendez was charged earlier this month with conspiring to act as a foreign agent, dozens of his fellow Democrats were calling on him to resign. Prosecutors say Menendez used his political office to influence American policy at the behest of the Egyptian government. He remains a senator—for now—but the latest indictment, coming after corruption charges last month, further complicates his fate. Last week, Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty to all counts, missed an all-senators classified hearing on Israel—no small indignity for a former chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.

According to the indictment, the senator from New Jersey passed along sensitive information to Egypt, acted as a ghostwriter for its officials, and accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes.” While researching my next book, a history of the foreign-lobbying industry in the United States, I didn’t come across anything quite like these allegations. They appear to be the first time that an elected federal official has been formally accused of acting as an agent of a foreign government.

Menendez has repeatedly professed his innocence and his loyalty to America. After his arraignment earlier this week, he released a statement calling the foreign-agent charge “as outrageous as it is absurd.” His trial is set for May, when Menendez says he’ll be shown to have done nothing wrong.

[Read: Why this time is different for Bob Menendez]

Even if the allegations are disproved, however, they could reshape how America prosecutes and punishes the kind of misconduct that Menendez is charged with. Until recently, the U.S. has largely ignored its best tool for deterring covert foreign agents. The case against Menendez signals an overdue willingness to use it.

Menendez’s alleged behavior might be novel, but we were warned of its possibility centuries ago. The Founding Fathers recognized that, in some ways, America is particularly vulnerable to foreign influence. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers. The danger may be greater today: Underpaid and overworked, U.S. officials are ripe for targeting by foreign powers eager to sway decisions in Washington. History, Hamilton noted, “furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalence of foreign corruption in republican governments.” Why would the U.S. be any different?

For years, these concerns appeared overblown. (Though not entirely: James Wilkinson, who served as the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Army under each of the first four presidents, was revealed after his death to be an agent of the Spanish monarchy.) Then came the 19th century’s greatest foreign-corruption scandal.

In the late 1860s, Russia’s czarist regime was broke and desperate to sell Alaska, its easternmost province. So the Russian ambassador, Edouard de Stoeckl, secretly hired former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Walker to persuade Washington to buy it. Walker quickly obliged, publicly endorsing the purchase, planting articles in influential newspapers, and allegedly—no hard proof ever emerged—bribing legislators. Within a matter of months, Congress voted to back the purchase. When the details of Stoeckl’s gambit later spilled out, one critic described it as the “biggest lobby swindle ever put up in Washington.”

Walker’s offenses were shocking, but at least he had the decency to leave office before committing them. This sets him apart from the precedent that Menendez has now allegedly established. A more recent case, however, comes close.

In 1999, nearly 50 years after his death, Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York was revealed to have been a Soviet agent. KGB archives showed that Dickstein used his office to grant Soviets access to U.S. passports and, in one instance, to pass information about a Soviet defector who was later found dead in a hotel room.

Unlike other Americans recruited by the Soviet Union, Dickstein did not appear to have communist sympathies. Rather, Dickstein—whom Soviet officials nicknamed “Crook”—seemed interested only in money. “‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name,” Soviet officials wrote. “This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money … a very cunning swindler.” The Soviets eventually cut him loose, complaining that he wasn’t worth the price he demanded. Dickstein was never found out and spent the rest of his life in public office.

[Read: How the Manafort indictment gave bite to a toothless law]

The revelations were all the more surprising because Dickstein played an instrumental role in passing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, America’s best safeguard against people like himself.

In the 1930s, he led a committee that found that Ivy Lee—sometimes called the “father of public relations,” whose clients included the Rockefellers, Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Schwab—covertly advised the Nazis, helping them launder their image in America. At one point, Lee encouraged Joseph Goebbels to cultivate foreign reporters; he told other Nazis to publicly insist that Hitler’s storm troopers were “not armed, not prepared for war.” (One unsigned memo I found in Lee’s archive described Hitler as “an industrious, honest and sincere hard-working individual.”)

Thanks to these and other revelations, Dickstein and the committee played a key role in persuading legislators to pass FARA in 1938, which required anyone representing foreign governments, especially lobbyists, to disclose what they were doing on behalf of their clients. Dickstein is the only known member of Congress to violate the law he helped enshrine.

According to prosecutors, Menendez largely followed Dickstein’s playbook—passing along sensitive information, steering American policy for the benefit of foreign patrons, and accepting staggering amounts of money for his efforts, including in the form of gold bars.

The fact that prosecutors employed FARA to charge Menendez is a welcome development. The legislation was underused for decades, as foreign-lobbying networks—including those targeting sitting officials—flourished. To cite one statistic: Only three FARA-related convictions were secured from 1966 to 2015.

That wasn’t for lack of rule-breaking. A decade ago, Azerbaijan’s dictatorship and its proxies recruited American lobbyists, scholars, nonprofits, and others to promote Azeri interests without disclosing any of their campaigns. Other dictatorships and budding autocracies followed suit. As one 1990 government report found, barely half of registered foreign agents disclosed all of their activities.

When Donald Trump emerged as a political force, FARA experienced something of a renaissance. Although the former president was never accused in court of acting as a foreign agent, some of his closest allies—including his campaign manager Paul Manafort and National Security Adviser Mike Flynn—were convicted on related charges. (Trump later pardoned them both.) But those prosecutions never targeted a sitting official. That honor belongs to Menendez alone.

The renewed interest in FARA has highlighted the ways in which the legislation can be improved. The legal definition of foreign lobbying needs clarifying, and the Department of Justice should be empowered to use civil fines (rather than just criminal penalties) to target covert networks. Effective reforms have been proposed, but they’ve stalled in Congress. As Bloomberg Law reported, one legislator in particular was responsible for thwarting them: Menendez.

If proven guilty, Menendez will come to represent the culmination of the Founders’ fears—perhaps the most “mortifying example” of foreign corruption in U.S. history. But whether or not he’s convicted, Congress could use the attention his case has drawn to strengthen FARA, keep foreign lobbying in check, and give would-be offenders more reason to fear concealing their activities. If the charges against Menendez are a black mark, they can be a turning point too.

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In recent weeks, statements about the Israel-Hamas war have emerged from corporations of all kinds. Predictably, they have not all gone over well.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

​​A speaker without enemies—for now “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba.” The junk is winning.

The Logic of Speaking Out

Since October 7, more than 150 companies have made statements condemning Hamas’s attacks on Israel. A tracker compiled by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a business professor at Yale, shows the wide-ranging nature of the industries represented. Palantir, which works with governments on data and defense projects and has an office in Israel, took out a full-page ad in the The New York Times that said “Palantir stands with Israel.” Salesforce, which has offices in Israel, put out a statement condemning Hamas’s attack and outlining support for employees there. And brands with less obvious connections to the region, such as Major League Baseball, have issued statements as well.

At one time in American history, tech firms and sports leagues would not have been expected to wade into geopolitical issues. For many years, for better or worse, the role of corporations was principally to make money. But over the past decade especially, some employees and customers have started expecting, or even demanding, that companies speak out on social issues. The rise of the social web, and the eagerness among many brands to establish a direct line of communication with consumers, created an environment in which such a dialogue wasn’t just possible but seemed unavoidable. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement continued to grow, many corporations made statements about racial justice (and many, in turn, faced blowback from employees and consumers who saw the statements as insincere). After the fall of Roe v. Wade, corporations generally took a circumspect approach, more commonly issuing statements about what they were doing to help employees access health care than taking a stance on the morality of abortion. Now companies are once again navigating the tricky terrain of public statements as the Israel-Hamas war continues.

A lot of the pressure on corporations to speak out about political or social issues is coming from younger workers who believe that companies should operate with a sense of purpose beyond just making money, Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told me. And some are vocal: Employees at Instacart and Procter & Gamble have reportedly complained about their employers’ lack of immediate public statements on the Israel-Hamas war. And some workers are pressuring their employers—including major tech companies, according to a Washington Post report—to issue statements condemning the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, which fewer large corporations have done thus far. (Plenty of companies have issued mealier-mouthed statements falling somewhere in the middle, angering even more people.)

It’s important, Argenti said, for executives to think about why releasing a statement in a fraught moment makes sense for them. Companies that speak out on one issue without truly thinking about why they are doing so may get caught in a challenging loop. “If you don’t have a plan for how you’re thinking about” social issues, “then you have to talk about everything,” Argenti said, adding that speaking without a clear reason can lead to “wishy-washy statements that are just trying to get on the bandwagon … That is a very dangerous place to be, because you’re going to get heat.” There are plenty of good reasons, he argued, for an executive to issue a statement—because of business interests in a region, for example, or to speak out on an issue of great personal importance. But saying something just because everyone else is, because employees are outraged, or because you want to seem like the good guy in a charged moment may well backfire. “Corporations are not political entities that have to speak out on every issue,” he told me.

The proliferation of company statements in recent years might suggest that customers are clamoring for their favorite brands to speak up, too, but it’s not clear that the majority of consumers actually care all that much, especially lately. This year, 41 percent of consumers said that businesses should take a stand on current events, according to a poll from Gallup and Bentley University, down from 48 percent last year. Forrester, a research and analysis firm, saw a dip for the first time in four years in the number of surveyed adults who say they “regularly purchase from brands that align with their personal values.” There are certain issues that consumers tend to think companies should comment on: 55 percent of people said companies should speak up about climate change, the Gallup and Bentley polling found. But just 27 percent of people said that companies should speak up about international conflicts (however, these data were gathered before the Israel-Hamas war began).

Businesses aren’t the only ones making statements—or taking heat for their stances. Universities, celebrities, and even many individuals with large followings on social media have shared public statements on the conflict in recent weeks. Sam Adler-Bell, writing about statement mania in New York magazine, suggested that part of the compulsion to speak out has to do with the sense of helplessness many feel about the war and their own ability to affect its outcome. “When our government is this unresponsive, it makes sense that Americans look closer to home for moral clarity. Powerless to influence actual policy outcomes, we settle for battling over discourse,” he writes.

Corporations exist to make a profit, and they sell goods and services that end up shaping our culture. But their role is also slowly morphing into something more personal—and much wider in scope than it once was. Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor tracking statements, told me that in his view, some of the pressure to speak out may come from the role that business leaders play in a time of deteriorating trust in politicians, media, and the clergy. “CEOs have become pillars of trust in society,” he said. The notion of CEOs as America’s hope for moral leadership may be enough to make skeptics raise an eyebrow, but the decline in public trust is worrying and real.

Even for the corporations whose CEOs are driven primarily by a mission in the public interest, more often than not, opining on issues of global foreign policy is of questionable value. Corporations are already deeply embedded in the political system because of their lobbying power and ability to influence regulations. “That’s enough,” Argenti said. “Do we want them involved in thinking about political issues,” too?

Related:

What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Beware the language that erases reality.

Today’s News

Mike Johnson was elected speaker of the House with unanimous Republican support. Hurricane Otis made landfall in Mexico as a Category 5 storm. Michael Cohen took the stand again today in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial after testifying yesterday that the former president instructed him to inflate the value of certain assets.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Zoë Schlanger explores the invisible force keeping carbon in the ground. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ thoughts on what Israel can learn from America’s 9/11 response.

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Evening Read

The Asahi Shimbun / Getty

What If There’s a Secret Benefit to Getting Asian Glow?

By Katherine J. Wu

At every party, no matter the occasion, my drink of choice is soda water with lime. I have never, not once, been drunk—or even finished a full serving of alcohol. The single time I came close to doing so (thanks to half a serving of mulled wine), my heart rate soared, the room spun, and my face turned stop-sign red … all before I collapsed in front of a college professor at an academic event.

The blame for my alcohol aversion falls fully on my genetics: Like an estimated 500 million other people, most of them of East Asian descent, I carry a genetic mutation called ALDH2*2 that causes me to produce broken versions of an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, preventing my body from properly breaking down the toxic components of alcohol. And so, whenever I drink, all sorts of poisons known as aldehydes build up in my body—a predicament that my face announces to everyone around me.

By one line of evolutionary logic, I and the other sufferers of so-called alcohol flush (also known as Asian glow) shouldn’t exist.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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