In Los Angeles, where I live, the rites of autumn can feel alien. Endless blue skies and afternoon highs near 90 degrees linger long after Griffith Park opens its Haunted Hayride. When the highs dip toward more seasonably appropriate numbers, they’ll be accompanied by one of California’s unfortunate traditions: wasted clean energy.

During the fall and spring, cloudless afternoons produce a spike in solar power at a time when milder temperatures necessitate less air-conditioning. When that happens, the state’s solar farms make more energy than the state can use, and some panels are simply turned off. This maddening problem—a result of what energy wonks call the “duck curve”—has been getting worse as the amount of available solar power outpaces the state’s ability to move that power around. In early 2017, just more than 3 percent of the state’s solar was wasted this way. The total reached 6 percent by 2022, according to California’s grid operator, and 15 percent in the early afternoons of March 2021. Wind power also can be wasted if the weather is especially breezy, and California’s combined curtailment of wind and solar set a new record this April.

Now the state has punted this dilemma to its residents. In December, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to slash the amount of money homeowners with new solar panels can make from “net metering,” the practice of selling your own extra solar back to the power company. Because the math for buying new panels is less favorable, fewer Californians are installing them, according to the Los Angeles Times. Many sunny rooftops that could generate clean energy simply won’t.

California is outpacing the rest of the country in the energy transition, but its misadventures in solar are going national. Moving away from fossil fuels requires a huge expansion of renewable energy in America. One government report estimated that meeting Joe Biden’s goal of supplying half of the country’s energy with solar would mean doubling America’s capacity annually until 2025—and then quadrupling it annually through 2030. But without better ways to transport that solar power or store it for later, California and several other states are already turning off perfectly good solar panels and clawing back incentives that entice Americans to install their own. Far more of America’s sunny potential is about to go to waste.

A little clean-energy wastage is inevitable, Carey King, the assistant director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, told me. Such is the very imperfect nature of integrating unpredictable renewables onto a power grid built for the predictability of fossil fuels. Compared with an inflexible coal or gas plant, solar panels are easier to turn off and on, so they are first to be cut during times of energy surplus. Ideally, we could stash away sun power and use it to light up the skyline at night, but that would require a build-out of big batteries that is still in early stages. Excess solar can be moved to less sun-soaked places to help them burn fewer fossil fuels, but electricity doesn’t just teleport from sunny Palm Springs to drizzly Portland. Moving it across long distances requires heavy-duty power lines and navigating the bureaucracies of various agencies that operate them.

Take Texas: The state’s famously independent power grid has relatively few interconnections with neighboring systems to send spare renewable energy elsewhere. When Texas started making a big push toward renewables in the 2000s, King said, the state began turning off solar panels and wind turbines, and slowing the construction of new ones because it lacked enough so-called transmission lines capable of zipping renewable energy from windy West Texas to the big cities in the east. A state-mandated power-line expansion solved the problem then. Now, as Texas’s total wind-energy capacity leapt from 10 gigawatts in 2010 to 40 gigawatts by 2022, those new wires have reached their limit. In 2022, Texas wasted 5 percent of the wind and 9 percent of the solar energy it could have created. Without another big fix to the grid, those numbers could jump to 13 percent of wind and 19 percent of solar by 2035.

Across the country, clean energy is similarly hemmed in by the limits of transmission lines. Existing plants can’t get all their electricity where it needs to go, because there aren’t enough power lines for them to thrive, says Timothy Hade, the co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions, which builds clean-energy systems for homes and businesses. The Biden administration has pledged billions to modernize the grid and expand high-voltage transmission lines, but actually building them is very, very, very hard. As Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic last year, “If you want to build new transmission, then you need to win the approval of every state, county, city, and in some cases, landowner along the proposed route.”

[Read: Unfortunately, I care about power lines now]

The Herculean task of building new transmission lines wasn’t such a pressing issue before the rise of renewable energy. But now solar power is so pervasive that parts of the country have no choice but to turn down the supply. Although that could take the form of fewer industrial-size wind and solar plants coming to fruition, the other option is giving a cold shoulder to people who have their own solar panels and sell it back to the power company through net metering. After all, net metering can create lots of power: California gets more than 15 percent of its energy from big solar farms and roughly 10 percent from residential rooftop panels, according to the EIA.

Like California, other states are choosing the second option. Indiana phased out net metering, and in North Carolina, solar advocates are now suing the state for allowing its giant utility, Duke Energy, to force a minimum monthly bill upon its customers and adjust net metering in a way the advocates say will reduce payouts. Arizona is considering cutting payments for homemade solar, as is Madison Gas and Electric in Wisconsin, according to Energy News Network. A few other close calls show the perilous state of net metering: This year, it has so far survived in New Hampshire, barely, when utilities backed the practice at the last moment. Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice and hit home-solar users with extra fees.

That isn’t to say that the clampdown has happened everywhere. Texas, for example, has allowed Tesla to set up a “virtual power plant” so that people with Elon Musk’s solar panels and batteries can make gobs of money selling back energy whenever they have extra. And there are legitimate fears about using this method as a way to grow the country’s solar supply. Hade calls net metering a “blunt instrument”—too crude an approach for the complex energy system of the future. One major problem is that solar-panel owners tend to be far richer than the average American but don’t pay their fair share for the upkeep of the electrical grid, which is built into the price the power company charges everybody else. The more houses that have rooftop solar, the argument goes, the more that people without solar must pay to maintain all the infrastructure that everyone needs. “Net metering can’t be the end-all solution as we go forward,” King said. “It’s just going to create a little bit too much disparity.”

The growing backlash against net metering isn’t just a response to wasted solar power—it’s also about for-profit power companies wary of rooftop solar panels that don’t make them money. The idea of turning homes, apartment buildings, and businesses with solar panels into mini power plants is a potentially transformative one—and net metering is a big part of how people can afford solar panels in the first place. Solar panels can cost upwards of $10,000, and in California, the extra cash from net metering has helped residents recoup the expensive cost of panels in five to six years. Now it will take up to 15 years, according to one analysis.

In that way, America will end up squandering more potential clean energy down the line. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. homes have installed solar panels so far. The rest constitutes an enormous swath of untapped real estate—billions of square meters of sun-drenched rectangles that could be making clean energy. Incentives for solar energy still exist from states and the federal government, but the result of slowing down net metering is that residents will put on smaller solar panels that make only enough energy for their own use, Hade told me, because they can’t make much money selling their bonus juice. Or they won’t get solar at all.

The squeeze on homemade solar is a missed opportunity in the making. A retreat from net metering makes solar-panel owners less like mini power plants and more like doomsday preppers, perhaps filling the backup battery in the basement with electricity to get through a blackout but adding nothing to the country’s clean-energy supply. With a more nuanced form of net metering to allow people to sell their surplus, or with the advent of “microgrids” that tie together communities and allow them to share energy, American rooftops could contribute gigawatts toward running the country on clean energy. Such a DIY approach would be a way around our inability to build new power lines, but it is deeply at odds with the way America has operated for a century, and will seemingly operate for many more years to come: The power company sends you the power, and you use it.

Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger.

Henriques’s hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps. These maladies destroyed her ability to type—the lifeblood of her profession—without experiencing debilitating pain.

“It was terrifying,” she recalls.

Henriques would join the legions of Americans considered to have a repetitive strain injury (RSI), which from the late 1980s through the 1990s seized the popular imagination as the plague of the modern American workplace. Characterized at the time as a source of sudden, widespread suffering and disability, the RSI crisis reportedly began in slaughterhouses, auto plants, and other venues for repetitive manual labor, before spreading to work environments where people hammered keyboards and clicked computer mice. Pain in the shoulders, neck, arms, and hands, office drones would learn, was the collateral damage of the desktop-computer revolution. As Representative Tom Lantos of California put it at a congressional hearing in 1989, these were symptoms of what could be “the industrial disease of the information age.”

By 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting that the number of RSI cases had increased more than tenfold over the previous decade. Henriques believed her workplace injury might have had a more specific diagnosis, though: carpal tunnel syndrome. Characterized by pain, tingling, and numbness that results from nerve compression at the wrist, this was just one of many conditions (including tendonitis and tennis elbow) that were included in the government’s tally, but it came to stand in for the larger threat. Everyone who worked in front of a monitor was suddenly at risk, it seemed, of coming down with carpal tunnel. “There was this ghost of a destroyed career wandering through the newsroom,” Henriques told me. “You never knew whose shoulder was going to feel the dead hand next.”

But the epidemic waned in the years that followed. The number of workplace-related RSIs recorded per year had already started on a long decline, and in the early 2000s, news reports on the modern plague all but disappeared. Two decades later, professionals are ensconced more deeply in the trappings of the information age than they’ve ever been before, and post-COVID, computer use has spread from offices to living rooms and kitchens. Yet if this work is causing widespread injury, the evidence remains obscure. The whole carpal tunnel crisis, and the millions it affected, now reads like a strange and temporary problem of the ancient past.

[Read: Yes, the pandemic is ruining your body]

So what happened? Was the plague defeated by an ergonomic revolution, with white-collar workers’ bodies saved by thinner, light-touch keyboards, adjustable-height desks and monitors, and Aeron chairs? Or could it be that the office-dweller spike in RSIs was never quite as bad as it seemed, and that the hype around the numbers might have even served to make a modest problem worse, by spreading fear and faulty diagnoses?

Or maybe there’s another, more disturbing possibility. What if the scourge of RSIs receded, but only for a time? Could these injuries have resurged in the age of home-office work, at a time when their prevalence might be concealed in part by indifference and neglect? If that’s the case—if a real and pervasive epidemic that once dominated headlines never really went away—then the central story of this crisis has less to do with occupational health than with how we come to understand it. It’s a story of how statistics and reality twist around and change each other’s shape. At times they even separate.

The workplace epidemic was visible only after specific actions by government agencies, employers, and others set the stage for its illumination. This happened first in settings far removed from office life. In response to labor groups’ complaints, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began to look for evidence of RSIs within the strike-prone meatpacking industry—and found that they were rampant.

Surveillance efforts spread from there, and so did the known scope of the problem. By 1988, OSHA had proposed multimillion-dollar fines against large auto manufacturers and meatpacking plants for underreporting employees’ RSIs; other businesses, perhaps spooked by the enforcement, started documenting such injuries more assiduously. Newspaper reporters (and their unions) took up the story, too, noting that similar maladies could now be produced by endless hours spent typing at the by-then ubiquitous computer keyboard. In that way, what had started playing out in government enforcement actions and statistics morphed into a full-blown news event. The white-collar carpal tunnel crisis had arrived.

In the late 1980s, David Rempel, an expert in occupational medicine and ergonomics at UC San Francisco, conducted an investigation on behalf of California’s OSHA in the newsroom of The Fresno Bee. Its union had complained that more than a quarter of the paper’s staff was afflicted with RSIs, and Rempel was there to find out what was wrong.

The problem, he discovered, was that employees had been given new, poorly designed computer workstations, and were suddenly compelled to spend a lot of time in front of them. In the citation that he wrote up for the state, Rempel ordered the Bee to install adjustable office furniture and provide workers with hourly breaks from their consoles.

A computer workstation at The Fresno Bee in 1989 (Courtesy of David Rempel)

Similar injury clusters were occurring at many other publications, too, and reporters cranked out stories on the chronic pain within their ranks. More than 200 editorial employees of the Los Angeles Times sought medical help for RSIs over a four-year stretch, according to a 1989 article in that newspaper. In 1990, The New York Times published a major RSI story—“Hazards at the Keyboard: A Special Report”—on its front page; in 1992, Time magazine ran a major story claiming that professionals were being “Crippled by Computers.”

But ergonomics researchers like Rempel would later form some doubts about the nature of this epidemic. Research showed that people whose work involves repetitive and forceful hand exertions for long periods are more prone to developing carpal tunnel syndrome, Rempel told me—but that association is not as strong for computer-based jobs. “If there is an elevated risk to white-collar workers, it’s not large,” he said.

[Read: Chronic pain is an impossible problem]

Computer use is clearly linked to RSIs in general, however. A 2019 meta-analysis in Occupational & Environmental Medicine found an increased risk of musculoskeletal symptoms with more screen work (though it does acknowledge that the evidence is “heterogeneous” and doesn’t account for screen use after 2005). Ergonomics experts and occupational-health specialists told me they are certain that many journalists and other professionals did sustain serious RSIs while using 1980s-to-mid-’90s computer workstations, with their fixed desks and chunky keyboards. But the total number of such injuries may have been distorted at the time, and many computer-related “carpal tunnel” cases in particular were spurious, with misdiagnoses caused in part by an unreliable but widely used nerve-conduction test. “It seems pretty clear that there wasn’t a sudden explosion of carpal tunnel cases when the reported numbers started to go up,” Leslie Boden, an environmental-health professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me.

Such mistakes were probably driven by the “crippled by computers” narrative. White-collar workers with hand pain and numbness might have naturally presumed they had carpal tunnel, thanks to news reports and the chatter at the water cooler; then, as they told their colleagues—and reporters—about their disabilities, they helped fuel a false-diagnosis feedback loop.

It’s possible that well-intentioned shifts in workplace culture further exaggerated the scale of the epidemic. According to Fredric Gerr, a professor emeritus of occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa, white-collar employees were encouraged during the 1990s to report even minor aches and pains, so they could be diagnosed—and treated—earlier. But Gerr told me that such awareness-raising efforts may have backfired, causing workers to view those minor aches as harbingers of a disabling, chronic disease. Clinicians and ergonomists, too, he said, began to lump any pain-addled worker into the same bin, regardless of their symptoms’ severity—a practice that may have artificially inflated the reported rates of RSIs and caused unnecessary anxiety.

Henriques, whose symptoms were consistent and severe, underwent a nerve-conduction test not long after her pain and disability began; the result was inconclusive. She continues to believe that she came down with carpal tunnel syndrome as opposed to another form of RSI, but chose not to receive surgery given the diagnostic uncertainty. New York Times reporters with RSIs were not at risk of getting fired, as she saw it, but of ending up in different roles. She didn’t want that for herself, so she adapted to her physical limitations, mastering the voice-to-text software that she has since used to dictate four books. The most recent came out in September.

As it happens, a very similar story had played out on the other side of the world more than a decade earlier.

Reporters in Australia began sounding the alarm about the booming rates of RSIs among computer users in 1983, right at the advent of the computer revolution. Some academic observers dismissed the epidemic as the product of a mass hysteria. Other experts figured that Australian offices might be more damaging to people’s bodies than those in other nations, with some colorfully dubbing the symptoms “kangaroo paw.” Andrew Hopkins, a sociologist at the Australian National University, backed a third hypothesis: that his nation’s institutions had merely facilitated acknowledgement—or stopped suppressing evidence—of what was a genuine and widespread crisis.

“It is well known to sociologists that statistics often tell us more about collection procedures than they do about the phenomenon they are supposed to reflect,” Hopkins wrote in a 1990 paper that compared the raging RSI epidemic in Australia to the relative quiet in the United States. He doubted that any meaningful differences in work conditions between the two nations could explain the staggered timing of the outbreaks. Rather, he suspected that different worker-compensation systems made ongoing epidemics more visible, or less, to public-health authorities. In Australia, the approach was far more labor-friendly on the whole, with fewer administrative hurdles for claimants to overcome, and better payouts to those who were successful. Provided with this greater incentive to report their RSIs, Hopkins argued, Australian workers began doing so in greater numbers than before.

Then conditions changed. In 1987, Australia’s High Court decided a landmark worker-compensation case involving an RSI in favor of the employer. By the late 1980s, the government had discontinued its quarterly surveillance report of such cases, and worker-comp systems became more hostile to them, Hopkins said. With fewer workers speaking out about their chronic ailments, and Australian journalists bereft of data to illustrate the problem’s scope, a continuing pain crisis might very well have been pushed into the shadows.

Now it was the United States’ turn. Here, too, attention to a workplace-injury epidemic swelled in response to institutional behaviors and incentives. And then here, too, that attention ebbed for multiple reasons. Improvements in workplace ergonomics and computer design may indeed have lessened the actual injury rate among desk workers during the 1990s. At the same time, the growing availability of high-quality scanners reduced the need for injury-prone data-entry typists, and improved diagnostic practices by physicians reduced the rate of false carpal tunnel diagnoses. In the blue-collar sector, tapering union membership and the expansion of the immigrant workforce may have pushed down the national number of recorded injuries, by making employees less inclined to file complaints and advocate for their own well-being.

But America’s legal and political climate was shifting too. Thousands of workers would file lawsuits against computer manufacturers during this period, claiming that their products had caused injury and disability. More than 20 major cases went to jury trials—and all of them failed. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled against an employee of Toyota who said she’d become disabled by carpal tunnel as a result of working on the assembly line. (The car company was represented by John Roberts, then in private appellate-law practice.) Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress managed to jettison a new set of OSHA ergonomics standards before they could go into effect, and the George W. Bush administration ended the requirement that employers separate out RSI-like conditions in their workplace-injury reports to the government. Unsurprisingly, recorded cases dropped off even more sharply in the years that followed.

[Read: When the computer mouse was new]

Blue-collar workers in particular would be left in the lurch. According to M. K. Fletcher, a safety and health specialist at the AFL-CIO, many laborers, in particular those in food processing, health care, warehousing, and construction, continue to suffer substantial rates of musculoskeletal disorders, the term that’s now preferred over RSIs. Nationally, such conditions account for an estimated one-fifth to one-third of the estimated 8.4 million annual workplace injuries across the private sector, according to the union’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

From what experts can determine, carpal tunnel syndrome in particular remains prevalent, affecting 1 to 5 percent of the overall population. The condition is associated with multiple health conditions unrelated to the workplace, including diabetes, age, hypothyroidism, obesity, arthritis, and pregnancy. In general, keyboards are no longer thought to be a major threat, but the hazards of repetitive work were always very real. In the end, the “crippled by computers” panic among white-collar workers of the 1980s and ’90s would reap outsize attention and perhaps distract from the far more serious concerns of other workers. “We engage in a disease-du-jour mentality that is based on idiosyncratic factors, such as journalists being worried about computer users, rather than prioritization by the actual rate and the impact on employment and life quality,” Gerr, the occupational- and environmental-health expert at the University of Iowa, told me.

As for today’s potential “hazards at the keyboard,” we know precious little. Almost all of the research described above was done prior to 2006, before tablets and smartphones were invented. Workplace ergonomics used to be a thriving academic field, but its ranks have dwindled. The majority of the academic experts I spoke with for this story are either in the twilight of their careers or they’ve already retired. A number of the researchers whose scholarship I’ve reviewed are dead. “The public and also scientists have lost interest in the topic,” Pieter Coenen, an assistant professor at Amsterdam UMC and the lead author of the meta-analysis from 2019, told me. “I don’t think the problem has actually resolved.”

So is there substantial risk to workers in the 2020s from using Slack all day, or checking email on their iPhones, or spending countless hours hunched at their kitchen tables, typing while they talk on Zoom? Few are trying to find out. Professionals in the post-COVID, work-from-home era may be experiencing a persistent or resurgent rash of pain and injury. “The industrial disease of the information age” could still be raging.

Roughly a decade has passed since experts began to appreciate that social media may be truly hazardous for children, and especially for teenagers. As with teenage smoking, the evidence has accumulated slowly, but leads in clear directions. The heightened rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people are measurable and disheartening. When I worked for the White House on technology policy, I would hear from the parents of children who had suffered exploitation or who died by suicide after terrible experiences online. They were asking us to do something.

The severity and novelty of the problem suggests the need for a federal legislative response, and Congress can’t be said to have ignored the issue. In fact, by my count, since 2017 it has held 39 hearings that have addressed children and social media, and nine wholly devoted to just that topic. Congress gave Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, a hero’s welcome. Executives from Facebook, YouTube and other firms have been duly summoned and blasted by angry representatives.

But just what has Congress actually done? The answer is: nothing.

Everyone knows that Congress struggles with polarizing issues such as immigration and gun control. But this is a failure on a different level: an inability to do something urgent and overwhelmingly popular, despite the agreement of both major parties, the president, and the large majority of the American population.

[Read: The Perils of ‘Sharenting’]

As someone who witnessed this failure firsthand, I am pained to admit that our government is failing parents, teenagers, and children. Congressional dysfunction cannot be reduced to any one thing. But one fact stands out: For a decade and counting, not a single bill seeking to protect children has reached a full vote in the House or Senate.

It is easy to read this and want to give up on Congress entirely. But what we voters and citizens need is a mechanism to force congressional leadership to make hard commitments to holding votes on overwhelmingly popular legislation. Whatever power public opinion and moral duty may have once had, they are no longer working.

The story of child-protection legislation in recent years could be taught as a reverse civics lesson, where bills that have the support of the president, the public, and both houses of Congress fail to become law. It would almost be reassuring if we could blame partisanship or corporate lobbyists for the outcome. But this is a story of culture war, personal grievance, and petty beefs so indefensible as to be a disgrace to the Republic.

During my time in the White House, no meetings were more painful than those with parents whose children had been killed or committed suicide after online bullying or online sexual exploitation. Parents, in more pain than any parent should have to endure, would come in bearing photos of their dead children. Kids like Carson Bride, a 16-year-old who died by suicide after online bullying, or Erik Robinson, a 12-year old who died after trying out a choking game featured on TikTok.

The case for legislative action is overwhelming. It is insanity to imagine that platforms, who see children and teenagers as target markets, will fix these problems themselves. Teenagers often act self-assured, but their still-developing brains are bad at self-control and vulnerable to exploitation. Youth need stronger privacy protections against the collection and distribution of their personal information, which can be used for targeting. In addition, the platforms need to be pushed to do more to prevent young girls and boys from being connected to sexual predators, or served content promoting eating disorders, substance abuse, or suicide. And the sites need to hire more staff whose job it is to respond to families under attack.

All of these ideas were once what was known, politically, as low-hanging fruit. Even people who work or worked at the platforms will admit that the U.S. federal government should apply more pressure. An acquaintance who works in trust and safety at one of the platforms put it to me bluntly over drinks one evening: “The U.S. government doesn’t actually force us to do anything. Sure, Congress calls us in to yell at us every so often, but there’s no follow-up.”

“What you need to do,” she said, “is actually get on our backs and force us to spend money to protect children online. We could do more. But without pressure, we won’t.”

Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer of Facebook, made a similar point to me. Government, he says, is too focused on online problems with intangible harms that are inherently difficult for the platforms to combat, like “fighting misinformation.” In contrast, government does far too little to force platforms to combat real and visceral harms, like the online exploitation of minors, that the platforms could do more about if pushed. This is not to let the platforms off the hook—but government needs to do its job too.

Some of the bills that emerged in the 117th Congress, in 2021 and 2022, sought to strengthen the protection of teenagers’ privacy online. The case for such legislation is not hard to make—lack of privacy makes targeting possible. Senators Ed Markey (a Democrat from Massachusetts) and Bill Cassidy (a Republican from Louisiana) were prominent sponsors of one such bill, named the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act.

Enacting a stronger children’s-privacy bill also seemed a good fallback if Congress should, once again, fail to pass a general privacy law protecting everyone. Whatever promise there may have been for passing such a law last year began to disappear after a nasty fight between Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and her three counterparts, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the chair of the House Commerce Committee; Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee; and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Republican ranking member on the House committee. The latter three co-drafted a privacy bill, with special protections for children, but they did it without Cantwell, and she opposed the bill and refused to introduce it in the Senate. The bill was then promptly roadblocked in the House by the State of California (California feared elimination of its own privacy law and did not want to lose its ability to pass future laws on the matter).  California convinced then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in early September, to announce her opposition, all but ending any chance of passing a general privacy bill. The deadlock over general privacy was its own tragedy, but it made a children’s bill a natural and seemingly attainable alternative.

A bolder approach to protecting children online sought to require that social-media platforms be safer for children, similar to what we require of other products that children use. In 2022 the most important such bill was the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA), co-sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee. KOSA came directly out of the Frances Haugen hearings in the summer of 2021, and particularly the revelation that social-media sites were serving content that promoted eating disorders, suicide, and substance abuse to teenagers. In an alarming demonstration, Blumenthal revealed that his office had created a test Instagram account for a 13-year-old girl, which was, within one day, served content promoting eating disorders. (Instagram has acknowledged that this is an ongoing issue on its site.)

[Read: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine]

The KOSA bill would have imposed a general duty on platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to children, specifically those stemming from self-harm, suicide, addictive behaviors, and eating disorders. It would have forced platforms to install safeguards to protect children and tools to enable parental supervision. In my view, the most important thing the bill would have done is simply force the platforms to spend more money and more ongoing attention on protecting children, or risk serious liability.

But KOSA became a casualty of the great American culture war. The law would give parents more control over what their children do and see online, which was enough for some groups to transform the whole thing into a fight over transgender issues. Some on the right, unhelpfully, argued that the law should be used to protect children from trans-related content. That triggered civil-rights groups, who took up the cause of teenage privacy and speech rights. A joint letter condemned KOSA for “enabl[ing] parental supervision of minors’ use of [platforms]” and “cutting off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”

It got ugly. I recall an angry meeting in which the Eating Disorders Coalition (in favor of the law) fought with LGBTQ groups (opposed to it) in what felt like a very dark Veep episode, except with real lives at stake. Critics like Evan Greer, a digital rights advocate, charged that attorneys general in red states could attempt to use the law to target platforms as part of a broader agenda against trans rights. That risk is exaggerated; the bill’s list of harms is specific and discrete; it does not include, say, “learning about transgenderism” but it does provide that “nothing shall be construed [to require a platform to prevent] any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content.” Nonetheless, the charge had a powerful resonance and was widely disseminated.

Sometime in the late fall of 2022, Chairman Pallone made the decision not to advance children’s privacy or children’s protection bills out of his committee, effectively killing both in regular session. Pallone (and his Republican counterparts) argued that passing a children’s privacy law would take the wind out of the sails of some future effort to pass a comprehensive privacy bill (for which, I note, we are still waiting). When it came to his reasoning for killing KOSA, Pallone mentioned the concerns of the special interest groups—his spokesman pointed out to me that “nearly 100 civil rights organizations had substantive policy concerns with the bills.” There was, finally, as his staffers freely admitted, as a form of payback involved—a desire, shared by McMorris-Rogers, to punish Cantwell for having blocked the adult-privacy bill. A spokesman for Pallone insisted to me recently that “there was never a path forward for either COPPA or KOSA” based on the opposition of unnamed members of Congress and the civil rights groups, and that “young people will quickly age out of age-specific protections” anyway. (I note that civil rights groups don’t actually have voting rights in Congress.)

There was, in fact, one last path forward in 2022. Senator Blumenthal managed to get KOSA inserted in the early draft of an end-of-year spending bill, subject to the sign-off of House and Senate leadership. It was, however, promptly and shamelessly removed by Mitch McConnell, presumably to avoid giving Democrats the win. This mess of infighting, myopic strategy, and political maneuvering meant Congress failed to do anything to protect children online last year.

To be sure, there was and is, to be sure, a serious, substantive debate to be had over KOSA. Teenagers do have privacy and speech interests; but parents have interests as well. As a teenager, I resented anything that seemed like censorship or parental oversight; as a parent, I feel differently. Reasonable people can and do disagree over the balance that should be struck. But at some point, in a democracy, the vote needs to be called. Polls show that 70 percent of Americans and about 91 percent of parents want stronger legal protections for children online. If a majority, indeed a supermajority, of Americans want stronger protection for teenagers online, it is simply wrong to never call a vote.

I am well aware that part of the power of leadership and committee chairs lies in their control over the holding of votes. But that doesn’t make it less horribly undemocratic, and it is in these “non-votes” that the power of corporate lobbyists and special interests really makes its mark. That’s why what we need is some mechanism for a popular override—say, if legislation attracts more than 50 co-sponsors, leadership must hold a floor vote, win or lose.

It doesn’t help that there has been no political accountability for the members of Congress who were happy to grandstand about children online and then do nothing. No one outside a tiny bubble knows that Wicker voted for KOSA in public but helped kill it in private, or that infighting between Cantwell and Pallone helped kill children’s privacy. I know this only because I had to for my job. The press loves to cover members of Congress yelling at tech executives. But its coverage of the killing of popular bills is rare to nonexistent, in part because Congress hides its tracks. Say what you want about the Supreme Court or the president, but at least their big decisions are directly attributable to the justices or the chief executive. Congressmen like Frank Pallone or Roger Wicker don’t want to be known as the men who killed Congress’s efforts to protect children online, so we rarely find out who actually fired the bullet.

The American public has the right to be angry: Things are not okay. That said, other parts of government have done what they can.  The White House and FTC have tightened oversight using existing authorities. Some states have passed their own child-protection legislation, and this fall, 44 state attorneys general sued Instagram (Meta) alleging that the site knew its site was dangerous but promoted it as safe and appropriate anyhow. Both the children’s-privacy bill and KOSA were reintroduced this year, and the latter has picked up 48 co-sponsors, including prominent progressives like Elizabeth Warren. While vocal detractors remain, the major LGBTQ groups no longer oppose the legislation.

At this point both parties, the president, and the public want a law passed—which is why we need a commitment to hold a floor vote in both chambers. Protecting children is a fundamental role in any civilized state, and by that measure we are failing badly.

Riverton, Wyoming, a city of about 11,000 people at the feet of the Wind River mountain range, seems far away from the world of Big Finance. Yet like so much of America, Riverton has become well acquainted with the business that most epitomizes today’s Wall Street: private equity. In 2018, the local hospital, SageWest, was purchased by Apollo Global Management as part of the giant private-equity firm’s $5.6 billion deal to buy a chain of hospitals called LifePoint Health. Even before Apollo got involved, LifePoint had merged Riverton’s small hospital with the hospital half an hour away in Lander, the county seat. Vivian Watkins, a Riverton resident who once served as Wyoming’s economic-development director, told us that the idea sounded viable—at first. “They told us the new trend in hospitals is ‘centers of excellence,’ so you’ll have maternity care in one place and, say, orthopedics in another,” she said.

But in the Apollo era, Watkins and other Riverton residents concluded that, instead of dividing specialties between the two hospitals and beefing up the ones remaining at each location, hospital managers were simply stripping away essential services from their community. The drive to Lander isn’t hard in the summer, Watkins told us, but in the winter, the roads are often closed. Many more patients needed to be transported out of the county altogether. According to state data reported by The Wall Street Journal, the number of air-ambulance flights out of Fremont County grew sixfold from 2014 to 2019. “We went to the local CEO of both hospitals and said, ‘We’re quite concerned. What can we do to help? How can we keep services here?’” Watkins said. “To make a long story short, the answer was, ‘No, no, no—you don’t understand that we don’t want to do that.’” Apollo referred all questions about its role in Riverton to LifePoint. A spokesperson for LifePoint—which folded Riverton, Lander, and other hospitals into a new company called ScionHealth in 2021—said in an email that “our ownership structure had nothing to do with our approach to this market” and that “investment in the Riverton and Lander communities increased after the Apollo PE investment.”

This article is adapted from Nocera and McLean’s new book.

A nascent effort by a group of prominent Riverton citizens to build a new hospital intensified after the Apollo takeover. In addition to raising several million dollars via community contributions and donated land for the new Riverton Medical District, the group just closed a $37 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which uses taxpayer money to help rural development efforts. This is hardly the only time that government dollars have been used to clean up after, or subsidize, private-equity firms’ self-enrichment. In Watsonville, California, state officials kicked in to help buy a local hospital out of bankruptcy after its own brush with private equity. During the pandemic, many hospitals owned by private-equity firms, run by billionaires and themselves flush with cash, got loans and grants from taxpayers.  

[Brendan Ballou: When private-equity firms bankrupt their own companies]

We are longtime financial journalists. In our new book, The Big Fail, we wrote about how the pandemic both exposed and exacerbated preexisting problems in America. One such problem is how financial engineering has helped hollow out our health-care system. Every struggling hospital’s story is painful in its own way, but Riverton’s woes are a snapshot of the turmoil that has engulfed the hospital sector in the almost three decades since private-equity funds—which use debt to buy companies with the ostensible goal of improving them—decided that the hospital business would make a good investment. By 2011, seven of the largest for-profit chains were owned by PE firms, according to the researchers Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, who have written a number of articles and reports about private equity’s influence on health care.

According to the private-equity sales pitch, the money that investors earn is supposed to come from using their financial and operational savvy to make their portfolio companies more profitable—such as by bringing in new technology to companies that can’t afford necessary upgrades on their own. In reality, investors can prosper even when the underlying business fails.

To eke out gains, private-equity firms have cut nursing staff, slashed services, and even, in at least one case early in the pandemic, made an explicit threat to close an institution unless it received taxpayer money. Many hospitals purchased by private-equity firms have been forced to pay consulting fees to their new overlords for access to their strategic brilliance.

Far from setting troubled hospitals on a more sustainable path, PE investors’ forays into health care have mostly brought debt to essential institutions—and misery to patients and communities. In many instances, they’ve shown considerable rapaciousness and utter indifference toward the demands of running a hospital. As the pandemic underscored, hospitals are part of America’s vital infrastructure. Yet when investors take over a hospital and scale back services, sell its real estate, and weigh it down with rent payments on buildings that it used to own, the very people who depend on that institution don’t get any say in the matter.

One of the first private-equity hospital deals took place in 1996, when the PE industry was young and acquisitions in which investors borrow a lot of money to buy the target company were called leveraged buyouts, or LBOs. An investment firm called Forstmann Little & Company acquired the hospital chain Community Health Systems, or CHS, for close to $1.5 billion. The new owners began expanding it dramatically, buying more hospital companies and piling on more debt with each additional acquisition. This was and still is a common tactic in the private-equity playbook: Fold in other companies so it appears as though you’ve got a fast-growing business. Then you can flip it back to the public markets, via an initial public offering, before the problems that inevitably follow a debt-fueled acquisition binge show up in financial reports. By 2004, when Forstmann Little sold its interest in the hospital chain, it had tripled its early investment, Batt and Appelbaum estimated.

When private-equity investors see others using a certain tactic to make money, they copy it. In 2004, the firm Blackstone and other investors bought another hospital chain, Vanguard Health Systems—which later, following the “Big is better” mantra, acquired hospitals such as the Detroit Medical Center. In the ensuing years, Vanguard also added more than $1 billion of debt—money that was in part used to pay dividends to private-equity investors. Such actions have become known as “dividend recapitalizations”: The company borrows additional money not to invest in itself, but to pay the investors who control it. In 2006, three private-equity firms—Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and Merrill Lynch’s buyout unit—acquired HCA Healthcare, a publicly traded chain of hospitals and clinics, in what was then the largest LBO in history. Combined with dividend recapitalizations, HCA’s return to the public markets in a 2011 IPO resulted in the PE firms making more than three times their original investments in just five years. HCA, we should note, became highly profitable by reducing expenses and extracting more revenue from insurers.  

Yet many other hospital companies have struggled to operate with the debt they took on under private-equity firms’ control. As Batt and Appelbaum wrote in 2020, “The hospital chains faced major challenges in meeting loan obligations accumulated through LBOs of add-on acquisitions; and local health markets experienced instability caused by the pressure of high levels of debt in these national hospital systems and by the imperative to earn high returns for investors.”

So CHS, which had expanded rapidly under Forstmann Little’s control, began selling hospitals to pay down debt. The first deal came in 2016, when CHS spun off 38 struggling rural and small-town hospitals into a separate publicly traded company called Quorum Health Corporation. In the course of that split, the fledgling unit took on $1.2 billion of debt to pay a dividend to its outgoing parent firm. (In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Quorum declared bankruptcy.) CHS’s stock price plunged from $46 a share in mid-2015 to less than $3 today.

[Eileen Appelbaum and Andrew W. Park: How private equity ruined a beloved grocery chain]

Even money-losing hospitals still have assets that investors can exploit. As it happens, Watsonville had been a Quorum hospital. In 2019, Halsen Healthcare, a small health-care-management firm, bought Watsonville and sold the hospital’s land and facilities to a real-estate-investment company called Medical Properties Trust, or MPT. Because of that deal, known as a sale-leaseback, Watsonville now had to pay about $4 million a year in rent to occupy a facility that it had previously owned. At that point, Watsonville’s financial position looked unsustainable, and the hospital filed for bankruptcy in 2021. (Using state money and other donations, a nonprofit established by local and county governments and community groups purchased the hospital last year.)

According to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, an advocacy group, almost 400 U.S. hospitals are still owned by private-equity firms. In deal after deal, private-equity-backed hospital companies made big promises about how the hospitals would improve. But the hospital business is hard. Over time, many PE-owned hospitals were sold off into less and less stable financial structures to pay down debt that wouldn’t have existed were it not for the previous dealmaking.

Little-known MPT became a huge buyer of health-care real estate globally and now bills itself as “one of the world’s largest owners of hospitals.” The proceeds of selling off buildings and land allowed private-equity investors to keep paying themselves dividends and fees even as hospitals were being crushed by enormous debt. Many deals left the hospitals worse off. Long leases and stiff rent payments translate into “financial instability or lack of resources for improving care for patients and training and upgrading workers,” Appelbaum and Batt wrote in 2021. MPT did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but it has previously defended its practices. “No hospital in our portfolio has ever failed or curtailed services due to an inability to pay rent—because rent constitutes only a small percent of overall hospital expenses,” a company spokesperson told CBS News earlier this year.

The Apollo-owned chain LifePoint, which operated the Lander and Riverton hospitals, has also raised money selling real estate to MPT. As a result, the two Wyoming hospitals found themselves owing at least $6.5 million in annual rent payments on what had previously been their own property, according to calculations by The American Prospect. (LifePoint told the Journal in 2021 that it has used the proceeds from its real-estate sales to MPT to reinvest in its hospitals and reduce its debt, not to pay a dividend to Apollo—but of course, the debt wouldn’t exist in the first place if not for Apollo’s purchase.)

Communities that rely on PE-owned hospitals have good reason to fear a steady erosion of services. The credit-rating agency Moody’s, noting LifePoint’s very high debt, concluded in 2021 that “LifePoint’s ownership by private equity firm Apollo Management will result in the deployment of aggressive financial policies.” According to its most recently available annual statements, for the year ending in 2022, the company had almost $6 billion in debt. That could “require us to dedicate a substantial portion of our cash flow from operations to the payment of interest and the repayment of our indebtedness, thereby reducing funds available to us for other purposes,” the company wrote.

Apollo itself, however, has already done well. In 2021, the firm booked a $1.6 billion gain by selling LifePoint from one of its funds to another, Bloomberg reported that year. In fairness to private equity, the hospital business, and particularly the rural-hospital business, has been under immense pressure because of declining populations, increased poverty, and low Medicaid-reimbursement rates. The pandemic and the widespread staffing shortages that resulted have only increased the difficulty. Hospitals facing all of these challenges might benefit from owners with experience in health care and a focus on long-term sustainability, but the one thing that private equity has indisputably brought to health care—its ability to borrow money on behalf of the companies it acquires—has been far less helpful.

In a 2018 review of 390 private-equity deals, Daniel Rasmussen, a former Bain analyst who now runs an investment firm called Verdad, found little evidence of superior strategic insight, and that what PE consistently does across industries is not to bring great strategic wisdom to running businesses, but rather to add debt. “While debt magnifies positive returns and enhances the returns of good decision-making,” Rasmussen argued in American Affairs, “it can also cut the other way, exacerbating negative returns and punishing bad decisions.”

Government policy has been slow to recognize the damage that private-equity firms’ decisions can do to the hospital industry. In Massachusetts, state regulators approved Cerberus Capital Management’s acquisition of hospitals in 2010 with a strict condition: no dividend recapitalizations for three years. They didn’t foresee that Cerberus would extract money by selling the real estate to MPT, because that tactic hadn’t yet become widespread. (In total, Cerberus made roughly $800 million on its investment in the hospitals that became Steward Health Care, Bloomberg reported.) In Pennsylvania, where the closure of multiple institutions by Prospect Medical Holdings and other private-equity-backed chains has left swaths of so-called hospital deserts, lawmakers have proposed but not yet passed legislation to limit dividend recapitalizations and sale-leaseback transactions. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and a group of other lawmakers have proposed the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which would reform private-equity practices broadly, but it has gone nowhere.

[Carter Dougherty and Andrew Park: Book publishing has a Toys ‘R’ Us problem]

Even though private-equity firms still own many hospitals, they appear to have lost interest in acquiring more, at least based on deal announcements. But they have been piling into other areas of health care, including dermatology, mental health, and autism care, and exposing some of the most sensitive services to private equity’s single-minded focus on squeezing out profits. “If [private-equity firms] want to return a huge investment bonanza to people who invest in dog food, God bless them, go for it,” Watkins told us. “I believe medical care needs to be in a completely different realm.” Indeed, the private-equity foray into hospitals shatters any pretense that investors in a business do well only if everyone does well, and should remind Americans that some things ought to be more important than financial gains.

This essay was adapted from the new book The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.

Peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.  

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.   

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.    

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.  

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.  

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.  

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.  

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”   

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.  

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.   

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.   

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders if there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country.  If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend with Phillips on his farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—with party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuking him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.  

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make good-bye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive “DEAN”-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” he trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

Chipotle has tweaked its menu prices for food inflation—but it still needs to revise it for rising labor costs.

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Earlier this month, a woman in San Francisco was hit by a car while crossing the street. Had the story ended there, it would have been just another one of the small tragedies that occur on America’s roads, where roughly 100 people die every day. But this woman’s body ricocheted into another lane of traffic. She was hit again, this time by a robotaxi from the start-up Cruise. The car braked, coming to a stop with her pinned underneath. Then it started driving again, dragging the woman along with it for an agonizing 20 more feet. The woman, whose identity has not been made public, remains in the hospital, in serious condition.

Since driverless cars from Cruise and its competitor Waymo started taking paid passengers in San Francisco this summer, they have been entangled in a series of high-profile hiccups—including a collision with a fire truck and the wrath of protesters, who have placed traffic cones on their cars’ cameras. A bad few months for America’s robotaxis has now gotten considerably worse: On Tuesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s license to operate its driverless cars in the state, contending that they are “not safe for the public’s operation” and that the company “misrepresented” safety information. (The DMV has accused Cruise of not showing officials the full video footage from the accident involving the woman, which Cruise has denied.) Last night, Cruise announced that it was voluntarily pausing its driverless operations nationwide.

Waymo’s robotaxis are still roaming the streets of San Francisco and now several other cities, but the path to a world in which self-driving cars are everywhere, chauffeuring us around while we nap, still feels far away. Even so, the machines may have already won. Many new cars from major manufacturers such as General Motors, Ford, and, yes, Tesla already have advanced autonomous features that can control many parts of the driving process without a human touching the wheel. And more partly autonomous cars are coming. Your next car won’t be driverless, but it might be driver-ish.

[Read: It’s a weird time for driverless cars]

A recent ad for Ford’s BlueCruise system is a glimpse into this future. It shows a pregnant Serena Williams driving a Lincoln Navigator and, as the music swells, dramatically letting go of the steering wheel. With BlueCruise, a driver can go hands-free on the highway as the car stays in its lane and keeps a distance from other vehicles. The latest version can help the driver change lanes, with the vehicle doing so automatically after the turn signal is tapped. BlueCruise has been integrated into models such as the Ford Mustang SUV and the Ford F-150, the latter of which is among the best-selling cars in the country. General Motors also has a hands-free tool as part of its Super Cruise system; available on models such as the Chevy Volt EUV and the GM Suburban, it can likewise independently stay in a lane and change lanes on demand.

Both of these are what are called “level two” systems. Autonomous driving can be broken down into six different levels, from zero to five, according to a classification system created by the Society of Automotive Engineers International. A level-zero vehicle might have a basic feature such as automatic emergency braking, whereas a level-five vehicle can fully drive itself anywhere. It may not even have a steering wheel. The robotaxis made by Waymo and Cruise are level-four systems: No one is behind the wheel, but the cars are geo-fenced and limited to specific driving conditions.

Carmakers have long had souped-up cruise-control tech that meets the bar for level one, but now level-two and level-three systems are popping up in the cars they sell. The most well known is Tesla’s Autopilot and the more advanced “full self-driving” beta, in which the car drives completely on its own. Despite the name, it is still a level-two system, meaning a human must constantly monitor the driving. (Because anything that requires consistent human supervision is level two, this stage encompasses a huge range of potential autonomous features.)

Then there is level three, which is like the awkward middle child of autonomous systems: Everything below it requires the driver’s full attention, and everything above it doesn’t require any attention at all. At this stage, the driver must be able to drive when prompted by the system, but she can otherwise take her eyes off the road. Last month, Mercedes-Benz became, with its Drive Pilot feature, the first automaker to introduce a level-three system in the United States. Drive Pilot can be used only in certain conditions (not at night or in the rain) and only in certain areas (California and Nevada have both approved it). But when activated, it’ll be able to navigate road signs and traffic. As it does, you can lean back and play Tetris, which is included in the cars’ entertainment system.

Right now these autonomous features are primarily loaded into higher-end cars, says Paul Waatti, an industry-analysis manager at AutoPacific, a market-research company. Mercedes’s Drive Pilot system has an annual subscription fee of $2,500 a year, on top of the $100,000-plus sticker price for the all-electric EQS sedan that is equipped with it. Tesla’s full-self-driving mode can cost up to an additional $200 a month. Still, Waatti expects these features to trickle down to more automakers’ fleets in the coming years. BMW, Volvo, and Stellantis (the manufacturer of Jeep and Dodge) are also working on level-three technology.

Forget about the robotaxis for a moment, and start looking out for robo-creep: smaller but still powerful autonomous systems subtly taking over parts of the human driving experience. “We’re going to continue to see more autonomous features come into play,” Waatti told me. “But we’re not going to see fully autonomous cars for quite some time, especially that are going to be able to be sold to the public.”

These features are taking off in part because car companies are seeing dollar signs in offering them for a monthly fee, which is what Mercedes and Tesla are doing. “The secret that the car-company executives won’t tell you,” Reilly Brennan, a founding partner at the transportation-focused venture-capital fund Trucks, told me, is that compared with driverless cars, these driver-ish cars are “a much better business for them, because it allows them to sell both hardware and software.” Research from the consulting firm McKinsey found that about half of global consumers would be willing to pay up to $9,999 for these features, or that much in monthly fees.

A future in which everyone around you on the freeway is quietly playing Tetris in their car might be a ways off. Tesla’s Autopilot feature has been linked to at least 17 fatal crashes and has faced lawsuits. Drivers aren’t made to cede control to computers but still be ready to take back control at a moment’s notice. For safety reasons, GM’s Super Cruise has a camera over the dashboard that tracks head and eye movement, and the machine deactivates if it thinks a driver is distracted; other autonomous systems have similar mechanisms.

Most drivers will have to keep paying some attention for the foreseeable future. Ani Kelkar, an associate partner at McKinsey, told me that, in the best-case scenario, the company projects that 12 percent of new passenger vehicles will be level three or higher by the end of the decade. By contrast, he said, McKinsey expects level-two or higher vehicles to make up the majority of those sold, and 65 percent in the best-case scenario. Drivers will remain behind the wheel for now; they just might do less of the actual driving. The machines will start rounding off the corners, perhaps taking over in annoying stop-and-go traffic, mindless highway road trips, and the nuisance that is parking. They’ll ease the burden of driving, but you won’t be totally off the hook.

None of this is to say that Waymo or Cruise or another self-driving-car company won’t also eventually figure out how to crack the code to robotaxis. But their challenge is bigger. Level four—what the robotaxis are attempting—“is just tremendously difficult” and “humongously expensive,” Ramanarayan Vasudevan, a professor of mechanical engineering and robotics at the University of Michigan, told me. These cars are costly to build and costly to scale, and companies need to figure out how to recoup all of these investments while also charging fees that can compete with ride-hailing apps and taxis. (According to The Wall Street Journal, Cruise lost $1.9 billion from January to the end of last month.) And that’s still just level four, where the cars are stuck in certain cities and neighborhoods. “Level five is a science experiment,” Vasudevan said. He doubts it’s possible.

Of course, driver-ish cars might not be as revolutionary as driverless ones, which promise to cut into problems such as drunk driving. But level-two and level-three systems are here right now, parked on the lots at your local dealership—or maybe even in your driveway. Over time, a few autonomous features will become many autonomous features. And then you’ll have far more time to play Tetris on the highway.  

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.”

Apple went to the White House yesterday in support of a nationwide right-to-repair law. This isn’t a huge surprise considering the iPhone maker backed a California right-to-repair law a few months ago. But it’s a sharp U-turn from Apple’s stance a couple years ago, when self-repair was out of the question and the…

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