The world could have a new superpower in the Great AI race: Saudi Arabia reportedly has $40 billion earmarked to invest in artificial intelligence technology. A fund that size would be one of the world’s largest to-date targeted toward the development of AI, according to the New York Times.

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“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” Christine Blasey Ford said in the fall of 2018, introducing herself to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a television audience of millions. Early in One Way Back, the memoir Ford has written about her testimony, its origin, and its aftermath, she repeats the line. She feels that terror again, she writes. She is afraid of having her words taken out of context, of being a public figure, of being misunderstood. “Stepping back into the spotlight comes with an infinite number of things to worry about,” Ford notes, before returning to the story at hand. The moment is brief, but remarkable all the same: Rare is the writer who will confess to fearing her own book.

Memoirs like One Way Back are sometimes treated as justice by another means: books that step in where accountability has proved elusive—­correcting the record, filling in the blanks, and restoring a narrative to its rightful owner. One Way Back, more than five years in the making, is partly that kind of reclamation. Ford’s story, for many Americans, began and ended on the day of her testimony: the day when she shared details of an attack at a house party in 1982—an assault committed, she alleged, by Brett Kava­naugh, then a Supreme Court nominee. The memoir corrects the story by expanding it, placing the testimony in the broader context of Ford’s life and detailing what came later. And it rescues its author, in the process, from the confines of iconography. Ford the narrator is quirky and insightful and prone to interrupting herself with long digressions (into psychological theories, the radness of Metallica, the mechanics of surfing, the ecosystemic importance of kelp forests). She lets her idiosyncrasy loose on the page. But Ford knows better than most the toll that telling one’s story can take.

Kavanaugh, who denied Ford’s allegations, was confirmed to the Supreme Court by a two-vote margin on October 6, 2018—a year and a day after The New York Times published the investigation about Harvey Weinstein that helped inspire #MeToo’s growth into a mass movement. This was a resonant coincidence. Over the course of that year, countless people had put their wounds into words, trusting that the stories they told could be tools of justice. They wanted to be heard. They asked to be believed. They practiced a civic form of faith. What they did not anticipate—what they should not have needed to anticipate—was the caveat that has revealed itself in the long years since: Stories may be believed, and still ignored.

[Read: Megan Garber on the logical fallacy of Christine Blasey Ford’s ‘choice’]

Ford’s own story, in many ways, was an exception to #MeToo’s rule. She was listened to. She was, to a lesser extent, heard. Half a decade later, though, her claim rests in the same in-between space where the claims of many others do: It lingers, alleged but never litigated—its airing cut short when Kavanaugh was confirmed. One Way Back channels the frustrations of that abridgment. But the book also details Ford’s life after the confirmation: the death threats, the upheaval, the backlash. As her story goes on, its testimony comes to read as an indictment—not of one person, but of a form of politics that sees stories as weapons in an endless war. For her, the personal unexpectedly became political, and then the political proved to be inescapable. Ford, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, is used to making sense of her experience by naming it. The intervening years, though, have resisted that kind of therapeutic clarity. So does, to its credit, the memoir itself. Closure, in Ford’s story as in so many others, is a relief that never comes.

Ford grew up near Washington, D.C., among gated houses and country clubs and people who treated politics as their business and their birthright. She left as soon as she could (college in North Carolina, grad school in Southern California, then family and home and work in Northern California). She taught at Stanford. She spent her free time surfing. She followed politics in the generalized way that most Americans do. In the summer of 2018, though, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, and Kavanaugh’s name was in the news, and the night lodged somewhere in her memory—receding and recurring and receding again over the years—returned. Ford realized, to her surprise, that her childhood field trips to marbled monuments had stayed with her: She had retained a sense of civic duty.

“Let me be clear: This is not a political book,” Ford writes early in the memoir, and you could read the disclaimer in many ways—as an attempt to distinguish between partisan politics and a broader form of civic engagement; as a defense against long-standing charges that she is a pawn of the Democratic Party; as an effort to set One Way Back apart from other Trump-era memoirs. But that disclaimer, its phrasing right out of the career politician’s playbook, also distills one of the book’s core tensions: Politics, in the memoir, encroaches on everything else. Ford does not want it to encroach on her story. Ford came forward in the first place, she suggests, not as an activist, or even necessarily as a feminist. She came forward as a scientist. She had a piece of evidence to share, and believed that those assessing Kava­naugh’s fitness for office would be glad to have it. “I thought that if the people on the committee had taken this very esteemed job in public service, they wanted to do the right thing,” Ford writes. “I thought I could save Trump the embarrassment of choosing an unviable candidate.”

“Hold for laughs,” she writes, referring to the woman who believed politics to be public service and Donald Trump to be capable of embarrassment. But Ford also conveys pride in the woman she was—an idealist who, in her idealism, was both mistaken and correct.

Ford decided to relay her claim in July 2018, and spent the dizzying weeks until late September trying, and failing, to be heard. She reached out to politicians and journalists, telling them what she could remember of the party that night 36 years earlier: the scene in the house; the boy on top of her, groping, laughing, so drunk that she feared he might kill her by accident; the bathing suit she wore under her clothes. She was not raped, she repeatedly clarified, but assaulted. Ford describes the politicians she confided in, on the whole, as sympathetic but hesitant. They listened, and their aides took very good notes, and Ford wasn’t quite sure what they did after that.

She was not fully aware of the politics of the matter: Her story was a grenade that nobody wanted to be holding when it exploded. She simply knew that her story was not turning into action, and she was slightly baffled by the delay. And the politicians, she implies, didn’t know what to do with her. They wanted to know why she was coming forward—why now, why at all. “Civic duty,” in partisan politics, is an explanation that raises doubts.

In relating all of this, Ford is asking readers to accept what the politicians, in her description, could not: that she would do something simply because she considered it the right thing. Authorship may have an authoritarian edge—the writer includes and excludes, edits and spins, creating a story that is an act of will—but it brings vulnerability, too. Every testimony, whether delivered to the Senate or to readers, will confront audiences that double as judges. And American audiences tend to treat earnestness itself as cause for suspicion.

Ford the memoirist faces the same challenges that Ford the witness did. To tell her story—to have that story believed—she has to sell herself as the storyteller. She has to deliver a testimony that serves, inevitably, as self-defense too. No wonder Ford regards her book with fear. Even before she testified, One Way Back suggests, Ford lost hold of her story. She had planned to stay anonymous; instead, in September, her name became public. (Five years later, she remains unsure of who leaked her identity and changed her life.) Then the smear campaign started, and the death threats began. She did not realize that her testimony would be televised, she writes, half-acknowledging her naivete, until she was making her way to the Senate chamber.

And she did not realize that, in the testimony itself, she had brought data to a gunfight. The professor had prepared for the occasion as if it was a lecture, marshaling details and context, aiming for clarity. Kava­naugh spoke after Ford, and the gulf between the two testimonies was, in retrospect, an omen. She offered evidence. He offered grievance. She spoke science. He spoke politics. She was piecing together fragments of a story, parts of which she had forgotten. He was controlling the narrative.

[Anita Hill: What it was like for me to watch Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony]

With Kava­naugh’s confirmation, Ford expected to move on as the news cycle did. But although coverage tapered off, the smears continued. In mid-­September, after her name had become widely known, Ford—along with her husband, Russell, and their two adolescent sons—had moved out of their house. “Hotel arrest,” as Ford calls it, was a safety precaution made necessary by the threats, and made possible, in part, by a GoFundMe campaign that an anonymous donor started. It was a surreal blend of luxury and fear: extreme isolation, ongoing uncertainty, days’ worth of room-service cheeseburgers.

And the strangeness extended beyond the Senate vote. Ford could not return home. She could not return to work. She could not go out in public without protection. The media attention trained on her friends and family in the lead-up to the testimony—and the partisan cast of the event—had strained some of her relationships, and cost her some others. The fear that had been acute became chronic. She entered another phase, “hibernation.”

By this point, the reader has learned enough about Ford to understand why the precautions would have seemed like punishments. She is rebellious by nature. She is curious by profession. She is prone to overthinking. And there she was, surviving but not fully living, in a confinement made more confusing because it was punctuated with kindness—and made more frustrating because it refused to end. Earlier in the memoir, Ford describes the relief she felt when she assumed that the whistleblower chapter of her life was behind her. “I did it,” she thought to herself, after her testimony’s opening statement. “Hardest part is over.” The book is full of lines like that—false endings, further evidence of Ford’s naivete—and they do not merely foreshadow the hardship to come. They turn a memoir, at junctures, into a horror story. Just when the heroine thinks she has escaped, she hears the thudding footsteps once more.

As Ford’s story goes on, those moments of revoked catharsis condition the reader to do what Ford started to do: treat the promise of resolution with suspicion. Soon the scientist was struggling to diagnose her own situation. She spent a stretch in a fog that she calls her “gray blanket era.” She talks about life in the “abyss.” She considered moving (to a small town where she could “teach at a community college, and listen to grunge music all day”). She flailed for a time, and her book flails with her.

Ford is aware, she notes, that people would prefer a tidier story, a more hopeful one. Audiences are happy to consume accounts of other people’s pain; they tend to expect, though, that the storytellers will consider it their role to guide them to an end. But Ford cannot. One Way Back is a title derived from surfing—a sport that begins in freedom and ends in a foreclosure of options. Once you’ve paddled out past the break—­once you’ve fought to reach the calm of the open ocean—­you have only one way to get back to land: through the waves, either riding them or caught within them. We watch as Ford, for a period, gets pummeled so regularly that she seems to lose her bearings. She is getting sadder. She is, perhaps worse, becoming cynical. Whether she can even believe in a way back isn’t clear.

Ford the former idealist finds respite, briefly, in the formulaic, accusatory stories of partisan discourse. The scientist explains the other side as “evil.” She toggles between anger and despair, wanting to hope that things will get better, but suspecting all the while that hope might be a delusion. She talks the endemic talk of memoir as a way to control the narrative. The woman who always looked for the biggest waves—and who once dared to briefly try piloting a small plane (despite a deep fear of flying)—seems, in those moments, to be unmoored. Many people she encountered earlier in the memoir saw idealism as a form of weakness. Now she seems at risk of believing them.

One Way Back is proof that Ford has emerged from the abyss, but what makes her account unusual and valuable is the way it refuses the comfort of firm ground. The psychologist, by the end of the book, might offer closure. The scientist might offer conclusions. The author might offer catharsis. But Ford can offer none of those. Instead, she offers a model of resilience.

Her predicament is singular, but has become a familiar one. Readers, too, might have struggled against cynicism. Readers, too, might have believed that their optimism was a virtue—only to be left wondering whether they had been foolish or betrayed. The waves keep coming. They have their own small currents. They can force you forward; they can pull you back. They can propel and impede you at the same time. The only thing to do in the tumult, Ford suggests, is keep aiming for the shore.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again.”

The point of a public intellectual is to make wild arguments with maximum conviction. And in this respect, Andrea Long Chu—transgender woman, Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic, irrepressible provocateur—always exceeds my expectations.

In a recent cover story for New York magazine, Chu makes the case for child gender transition using the most unpopular rationale possible: in essence, that minors should be allowed to have mastectomies and other gender surgeries if they want them, simply because they want them. “We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex,” Chu writes. “It does not matter where this desire comes from.”

Counterpoint: It does.

The most broadly appealing version of the argument for medical transition is that a small number of people have a psychological condition (gender dysphoria) that makes them unhappy (because their sexed bodies feel alien to them) and doctors have treatments (hormones and surgery) that can help.

In making the case for youth transition, activists have tended to emphasize the first part of that story—the distress of gender-nonconforming children—to justify treatments that would otherwise sound extreme. Even Marci Bowers, the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, has noted that blocking puberty early means patients might never develop adult fertility or sexual function. The price of a genetically male child never growing an Adam’s apple or having his voice break—the outcomes that will help that child pass more easily as a woman one day—can be giving up orgasms and the ability to have biological children.

Put simply, this is not something that most parents would agree to—unless the alternative was worse. And so medical-transition advocates have highlighted the possibility of suicide by gender-nonconforming minors: Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter? (Thankfully, adolescent suicides for any reason are rare, although rates have risen in the past decade.)

Treating gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis with a medical solution, Chu argues, has “hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity”—the idea of a male or female essence (or something in between) that resides inside all of us. She notes that this argument was copied from the marriage-equality fight, where activists stressed that being gay was an innate and unchangeable state, not a trend, a pathology, or something into which a person could be groomed or seduced. Adopting a similar “born this way” argument for medical transition, Chu writes, “won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance.”

[From the July/August 2018 issue: When children say they’re trans]

She doesn’t think this is enough. Instead, she makes an argument for full-throttle libertarianism, albeit without ever using the word. She doesn’t want grudging accommodations and delicately balanced rights. She wants people like her—born male and living as women—to have unfettered access to female sports and services, based purely on their self-identification. And she wants Americans of any age to have the right to “change sex,” a phrase she seems to define specifically in terms of medical body modification.

The stark facts of child transition are that when the puberty-blocker model was developed, a few hundred minors sought treatment every year—England’s main clinic had only 210 referrals in 2011—and those treated were mostly natal males who had suffered gender dysphoria since early childhood and exhibited no other mental-health issues. What kicked off the current debate was a steep rise in the number of children seeking care, and the changing demographics of those children. In recent years most of the patients have been genetically female, and many of them presented with other issues, such as autism, eating disorders, anxiety, or past trauma.

Undoubtedly, such children need parental support, counseling, and appropriate medical treatment. The “affirmative” model departed from this assertion, though, characterizing extensive psychological assessments as transphobic gatekeeping. Removing barriers to medical transition was a “life-saving” approach, supporters claimed.

However, the evidence that adolescent medical transition prevents suicide turns out to be thin. As early as 2018, the Gender Identity Development Service—Britain’s leading child gender clinic, staffed by doctors involved with transition-related care—criticized a television drama called Butterfly that showed a gender-nonconforming 11-year-old attempting suicide. “It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition,” the clinic declared in a statement. “It would be very unusual for younger children referred to the service to make suicidal attempts.” Last month, a Finnish study concluded that suicide was rare among minors seeking help at gender clinics, and when deaths occurred, they reflected overall mental-health challenges rather than being specifically linked to gender dysphoria.

This emerging evidence doesn’t bother Chu, because she regards evidence as a real downer. She criticizes the writer Jesse Singal’s 2018 Atlantic cover story on child transition—which included interviews with doctors and patients who had a variety of perspectives on the issue—and claims that it ushered in an unwelcome phase of the transgender debate. “The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it,” she writes. “First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights.”

[Daniela Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon: Take detransitioners seriously]

For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.

The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors.

Whenever I read Chu’s work, I get the sense that she’s mocking the strand of feminism for which I have argued all my adult life. The project of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, has been to decouple the material reality of being born female from notions of passivity and femininity. But in her book, Females, Chu writes enthusiastically about “sissy porn,” in which “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” (Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the more standard definition of XX chromosomes and the body type evolved to produce large gametes.) Shorn of identifying information, the author of that quotation could be assumed to be an old-school misogynist rather than a darling of the progressive left.

But such trollishness is Chu’s preferred style when writing about gender. (Her literary criticism is more straightforward.) She has written that she transitioned to experience “benevolent chauvinism” and to wear hot pants, and argued that “my new vagina won’t make me happy, and it shouldn’t have to.” The modern trans movement has largely tidied away the suggestion that sexuality—and particularly, the sexual fetish known as autogynephilia, where men become aroused by the thought of themselves as women—has anything to do with transition. Yet Chu has steamrolled through that taboo too, wondering aloud whether sissy porn made her trans. Sometimes I think only her ideological opponents actually read her work. Certainly, liberals tend to get uncomfortable when you quote from it, because they know perfectly well that this is not the trans-rights narrative approved by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. You have to argue against her with one hand tied behind your back, politely overlooking her actual, published statements, including her claim that the anus is “a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed.”

Anyway, it turns out that I wasn’t wrong to think Chu is mocking me—because she is, specifically, by name. Her New York article includes me on a list of supposed gender-critical “militants,” alongside Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Meghan Daum, and Bari Weiss. “Many of these writers live in self-imposed exile on Substack, the newsletter platform, where they present themselves as brave survivors of cancellation by the woke elites,” she writes. Never mind that to most of America, my European center-left views make me a woke elite. My offense is to be “preoccupied with the ‘science denial’ of radical activists, who have put wokeness before rational standards of care.” Yes, I do think doctors should have a good evidence base before giving out drugs used for chemical castration. Guilty as charged!

Chu identifies my fellow militants as an insidious force against the affirmative gender-care model. The queer theorist Judith Butler believes that only fascists—and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, whom Butler sees as fascists in disguise—have questions about the new orthodoxy on gender. But Chu is willing to grant us membership in a third category. We are TARLs, or trans-agnostic reactionary liberals. (To my ears, this doesn’t sound as catchy as TERF, but then, I haven’t yet had the newer term screamed at me through a megaphone by a six-foot figure in a balaclava.) “The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left,” she writes. “On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.” Again, guilty as charged.

The ostensible hook for Chu’s argument is a new book by Butler, and the essay begins with a review of it. My impression, however, is that Chu finds Butler’s prose dull (relatable) and their persona dour; she clearly prefers her own rhetorical fireworks and provocative poses to Butler’s pioneering work in the field of impenetrable subclauses.

Chu’s real motivation, surely, is a sense that her side is losing. In Europe, where the “Dutch protocol” of puberty blockers was developed in the 1990s, several countries are turning toward talk therapy as a first-line treatment instead. Just after Chu’s essay was published, England’s National Health Service announced that it would no longer routinely prescribe puberty blockers for dysphoria, saying that the evidence for their safety and effectiveness simply was not good enough. France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and even the Netherlands have also pulled back—hardly a roster of countries that you’d describe as being to the right of the United States. Crucially, these decisions have been led by doctors, not politicians, unlike in the U.S., where the debate is extremely polarized and the most high-profile opponents of youth transition are Republican governors.

[Helen Lewis: The only way out of the child-gender culture war]

But even in America, the debate is shifting. Quite a bit of Chu’s essay is devoted to complaints about media organizations that have not sufficiently echoed the activist line—that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, and that the “science is settled.” The New York Times is deemed to have fallen into the hands of barbarians, or at least failed to stop them from storming the affirmative gates. (Its recent publication of more skeptical articles has led to staff revolts.) “The paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter … as an issue of access,” Chu laments, ignoring the fact that if rates of women seeking abortions, say, rose by thousands of percent in a decade, the Times probably would write about the phenomenon.

The loss of the Times as a reliable ally matters because the American model of youth transition is best described as consensus-based rather than evidence-based—which is to say, it rests on the agreement of credentialed experts rather than on the conclusions of highly rigorous studies. And when the clinical rationale for underage medical transition disappears, what is left is ideology. “The belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism,” Chu writes. She would prefer to make a radical claim for unfettered personal freedom, even for minors: “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” (It doesn’t, of course—it means that male puberty and higher male testosterone levels confer significant sporting advantages, but that’s me being a reality-accepting nihilist again.)

Above all, Chu argues, we should treat children’s statements about their identity with unquestioned reverence: “To make ‘thoughtfulness’ a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.”

In making a case this way, Chu shows a titillating disdain for respectability politics—and will surely irritate many people who share her political goals. For skeptics of puberty blockers like me, who are used to arguing against people who claim that any overreach in gender medicine is not really happening, or that too few patients are involved to be worth caring, or that we should be writing about something more important instead—all the riotous flavors of denial and whataboutism—Chu’s case for unlimited agency for teenagers is refreshing. She said everything out loud, and her argument is logical, coherent, and forcefully delivered. You just won’t hear it made very often, because it’s about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs.

One Tuesday last month, Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a video to Instagram, but not to his Stories, where it would quickly disappear. This one was a keeper. He put it right on his permanent grid. It shows Zuckerberg sitting on his living-room couch in comfy pants and a dark T-shirt, while his friend Kenny records him through Meta’s mixed-reality headset. Zuckerberg proceeds to rattle off a three-and-a-half-minute critique of Apple’s new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro. His tone is surprisingly combative. At certain points, he sounds like a forum post come to life. “Some fanboys get upset” when people question Apple, he says, but his company’s much cheaper headset is not only a better value; it is a better product, “period.” CEOs of the world’s most valuable companies don’t often star in this kind of video. It reminded me of a commercial that a car-dealership owner might make about a rival.

I don’t mean to moralize. Marketing is a matter of taste, and Zuckerberg is entitled to his. I mention this video only because it’s part of a larger atmosphere of chippiness in the world of Big Tech. Just last year, a slow-burn feud between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk flared into threats of violence—albeit refereed—when Musk suggested that the two face off in a cage match. “Send Me Location,” Zuckerberg replied on Instagram. In the weeks that followed, Musk, who habitually lobs sexual taunts at his rivals, called Zuckerberg a “cuck” and challenged him to “a literal dick measuring contest.” But amid the tough talk, Musk also seemed to be playing for time. He said that he’d contacted Italy’s prime minister and minister of culture, and that they had agreed to host the fight in an “epic location” among the ruins of ancient Rome. Zuckerberg implied that this was all news to him. Within days, Musk said he would ask his Tesla to drive him to Zuckerberg’s house to fight him in his backyard. He even said that he would livestream it. Alas, Zuckerberg was out of town. Eventually, both men got injured—they are, after all, middle-aged—and the whole idea was abandoned.

Captains of industry have been known to mix it up on occasion. Collis Huntington, the American industrialist and railway magnate, once called Leland Stanford a “damned old fool.” Michael Ovitz said that David Geffen was part of a “Gay Mafia,” determined to bring him down. But, to my knowledge, none of them ever proposed a cage match. Even in their histrionics, the drama kings of tech aim to disrupt.

Their schoolyard feuding cuts an odd contrast with the earnestness that so often emanates from Silicon Valley. We have long known, for instance, that very serious conflicting views about AI safety played a role in November’s boardroom drama at OpenAI, but it was also driven by interpersonal resentments. Last week, The New York Times reported that before Sam Altman’s ouster, Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, sent Altman a private memo “outlining some of her concerns with his behavior.” According to the Times, she told OpenAI’s board that when Altman went to sell some new strategic direction, he would put on a charming mask, but when people dissented or even just delayed, he would freeze them out. In a statement posted to X, Murati described these anonymous claims as misleading, and said that the previous board members were scapegoating her to save face. Altman reposted Murati’s post with a heart emoji, the lingua franca of reconciliation at OpenAI. Now that he’s back with a new board in place, the company line is: It’s time to move on.

Musk, who cannot seem to stand the idea that there might be tech drama somewhere that does not involve him, has been trolling OpenAI relentlessly on X. Last week, he posted a doctored image of Altman holding up a visitor’s pass that read “ClosedAI,” and followed up this past Tuesday with a word-cloud image of the company’s logo, in which every word was lie. (Not his best work.) He also filed a lawsuit against the company. It alleges that by pursuing material gain instead of the good of all humanity, OpenAI’s executives have breached their “founding agreement.” The company responded with a blog post that soberly refuted some of Musk’s claims, but Altman also went to X to respond personally. He tracked down an old Musk post from 2019, in which he had thanked Altman for criticizing Tesla’s naysayers. Altman replied with “anytime” and a salute emoji, implying that Musk is now the one bitterly rooting against the high cause of innovation.

Moguls in other sectors rarely put one another on blast like this in public. (They have the decency to call a reporter and do it on background.) It’s hard to know whether this performative strain in tech culture reflects something essential about the industry. Maybe its leaders are just unusually visible, because the legacy media are more interested in them, or because they figure so prominently on the social-media platforms that they operate. Or maybe a few outlier personalities—Musk in particular—are responsible for most of the soap-opera vibes. It could also be the general cultural atmosphere. Over the past 20 years, a fashion for aggrieved and confrontational behavior has migrated out of reality television into the wider entertainment and business worlds, and also into politics, in the person of Donald Trump.

If the tech titans weren’t so self-serious, their bad behavior might simply blend into this broader coarsening. Folk wisdom and life experience tell us that rivalries and infighting will emerge, organically, anywhere that there is money and power. That’s why we direct our scrutiny wherever those things accumulate. But the leaders of the tech world want to wave us off, on the grounds that they are playing for higher stakes than just money and power. They tell us that yesterday’s technologists were the framers of our very civilization and that today’s are ushering in a benevolent future. They assure us that they have thought through that future’s risks and know exactly which ones to worry about, up to and including those that may be existential. They insist that they are the grown-ups. We will believe it when we see it.

Joe Biden courted the leaders of the Teamsters this week, looking for the endorsement of the 1.3-million-member union. He will probably get it. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, calls him “the most pro-union president in history.” He’s already won the endorsement of many of the country’s most important unions, including the United Auto Workers, the AFSCME public employees’ union, the Service Employees International Union, and the main umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO.

Biden’s real concern in November, though, isn’t getting the support of union leaders; it’s winning the support of union members. Labor’s rank and file were a valuable part of his winning coalition in 2020, when, according to AP VoteCast, he got 56 percent of the union vote. Today, things on this front are looking a little shakier, particularly in key electoral battlegrounds. A New York Times/Siena survey of swing states late last year, for instance, found that Biden was tied with Donald Trump among union voters (who, that same survey noted, had voted for Biden by an eight-point margin in the previous general election).

That slippage is not itself a reason for Democratic panic, because it suggests that the drop-off in union support has been similar to the decline in support for Biden generally. But the softening support among union voters is striking in light of how hard Biden has tried to win their trust. He has certainly shown his love for workers during his three-plus years in office, but not even unionized workers seem to love him back.

[Read: Is Biden the most pro-union president in history?]

Biden has made plenty of symbolic and rhetorical gestures, including the exclusion of Tesla CEO Elon Musk from a 2021 electric-vehicle summit at the White House, most likely because of Musk’s anti-union stance, and walking a UAW picket line during the union’s strike against the Big Three carmakers last fall. He’s made support for labor, and the working class generally, a legislative priority, pushing bills that subsidize investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, protect union pension funds, fund apprenticeships, and boost wages for federal contractors. He also kept Trump’s trade tariffs, which industrial unions mostly favored, in place. And the people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board have handed down a series of rulings that have made it easier for workers to organize and harder for employers to punish them for doing so. To give just one metric (from the Center for American Progress), the NLRB ordered companies to hire back more illegally fired workers in Biden’s first year than it did during Trump’s entire four years in office.

Biden has done all of this at a time when unions are enjoying a big surge in popularity. Fifteen years ago, public support for unions, as measured by Gallup, dipped below 50 percent for the first time since it was first surveyed, in the 1930s. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans say they support unions, one of the highest marks since the ’60s, and polling found that two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans supported the recent strikes by the UAW and by Hollywood screenwriters and actors, which not only enjoyed a high profile but were also successful. Perhaps this means that Biden would be doing even worse in the polls if he hadn’t been so pro-labor. But so far, the political rewards seem to have been meager at best.

[James Surowiecki: The Big Three’s inevitable collision with the UAW]

Some of this can be explained straightforwardly by the fact that the same issues dragging down Biden’s popularity among voters generally, such as inflation and immigration, also hurt him with union voters. That seems particularly true for white men working in old-line industries, a segment of workers who were already disposed to support Trump. (According to a Center for American Progress Action Fund study, white male non-college-educated union workers supported Trump over Biden by 27 points in 2020, though Biden did nine points better with them than he did with white male non-college non-union workers.)

On top of this, the percentage of American workers in unions has not risen over the past three years—only about 10 percent of all workers are unionized, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in the private sector, that proportion falls below 7 percent (despite some high-profile organizing campaigns such as the one at Starbucks). So even though the public has become more supportive of labor organizations, union issues simply have less cultural and political resonance than they once did. And unions themselves are less integral to their members’ daily lives than they once were, particularly in former industrial strongholds that are now swing states, as the Harvard scholars Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol document in their recent book, Rust Belt Union Blues. That means it takes more work to reach union voters and win their support; endorsements from leaders alone won’t deliver workers’ votes.

Another dimension of Biden’s limited success is that he faces an opponent in Trump who, unlike most Republican presidential candidates, has also courted union voters aggressively while selling himself as a tribune of the working class. That stand is mostly marketing: During Trump’s presidency, the NLRB was actively hostile to union organizing efforts, and when House Democrats passed a bill that would make joining unions easier for workers and significantly weaken states’ right-to-work laws, the Trump White House threatened to veto it. (The president never got the chance; the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.) But Trump’s rhetorical nods toward labor have helped blur the contrast between him and Biden. And the fact that Trump’s signature economic issue is raising tariffs has also helped him with union voters.

[David A. Graham: Why isn’t Trump helping the autoworkers?]

What that suggests, of course, is that Biden needs to do a better job of sharpening that contrast on labor policy. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. Much of the struggle over workers’ rights and interests today takes place in a courtroom or through administrative hearings or via regulatory changes. This sort of bureaucratic haggling means that it’s hard to make labor issues vivid for voters—even union voters. For all the difference in the NLRB’s record during the Biden administration compared with that under Trump, administrative-agency rulings are not the stuff of a rousing stump speech.

These problems are not insurmountable—and the unions themselves will be trying to help Biden surmount them. (The Service Employees International Union, for instance, just announced that it would be spending $200 million on voter education in this election cycle.) And once the presidential campaign gets fully under way, union voters may well move back in Biden’s direction. But Biden’s difficulty in landing their support is a microcosm of his struggles with voters broadly: The way they feel about him seems disconnected from what he’s done.