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More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position

A Red Line

Alexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.

Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.

The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”

Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.

Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.

Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.

But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.

Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.

For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.

Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.

So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.

Related:

Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

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Evening Read

Tony Evans / Getty

We’re All Reading Wrong

By Alexandra Moe

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.”

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A new sweetener has joined the ranks of aspartame and stevia. Trump is getting what he wants. Bad Bunny has it all—and that’s the problem.

Culture Break

Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Watch. Challengers (out now in theaters) is a sexy sports thriller with plenty of moody intrigue.

Read. These are six cult classics you need to check out.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan

I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.

— Charlie

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Walt Hunter, a contributing editor who focuses on poetry and fiction. His past stories cover AI’s poor attempts at writing poetry, the intimate work of Louise Glück, and Jorie Graham’s musings on the demise of the world.

Walt recently became a father, and his 15-week-old son, Julian, has already exposed him to a new catalog of media, including the book Spring Is Here and “newborn eats dad’s nose” videos. When Walt isn’t watching kid-friendly YouTube videos, he enjoys reading Ali Smith’s clever and engrossing novels; binge-watching Blue Lights, a police show set in Belfast; and listening to “A Day in the Water,” by Christine and the Queens.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The accidental speaker Why your vet bill is so high The happiness trinity

The Culture Survey: Walt Hunter

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: My favorite show in a long, long time (well, at least since the previous season of Shetland ended) is Blue Lights (out now on BritBox). The show, which is set in Belfast, follows three rookie police officers and their more seasoned partners. It’s a nail-biter with romance and some comic relief. Perfect for binge-watching during the first few weeks of our son’s 3 a.m. meals.

An other online creator that I’m a fan of: For the past 100-plus days since Julian was born, I’ve been exploring the universe of “newborn eats dad’s nose” videos. In doing so, I have broken Instagram and now receive only recommendations of videos of people playing the piano with chickens on their heads or pushing seals around in carts. [Related: The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube]

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Julian recommends the book Spring Is Here for the ever-surprising calf cameo near the end.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Ours, by Phillip B. Williams, a novel about a town of freed slaves in 19th-century Missouri. For a nonfiction option, Winters in the World, by Eleanor Parker, is an enchanting book about the seasons and weather of medieval England. Can I include some poetry? Right now I’m reading the work of Ama Codjoe, Divya Victor, and Jenny Xie while also exploring some of the 19-century poets published by The Atlantic—Celia Thaxter, for example, who wrote beautiful descriptive verse about the coasts of New England.

An author I will read anything by: Ali Smith. I started with her quartet of seasonal novels right after Autumn came out, and then went back to her earlier works. She has a reputation for clever wordplay, which is certainly a feature of her style. But she would be hard to categorize as a postmodernist; she’s really just an incredible novelist in the long line of Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, with some Muriel Spark thrown in. Her characters struggle with the inhospitable conditions of the present by insisting on friendship and forgiveness. And there’s a beautiful touch of allegory in her work—characters can have names such as Lux and Art—which I take to be a reminder of the place of stories in our everyday lives. [Related: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: This isn’t really a museum, but my partner, Lindsay, and I recently visited the Eden Theatre in La Ciotat, France, and watched a few Lumière films (the train pulling into La Ciotat Station is one of the first films, along with the lesser-known Repas de Bébé). I like very small and focused museums and shows: Last summer, the Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris, had an exhibition on Jean Genet’s suitcases and papers. Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers is one of my favorite novels, and it was neat to see some of his ephemeral scribbles. Another recent favorite was the Judson dance exhibition at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York City a few years back.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2017 and went to a random show in a record store around the corner from our house. A band called Friendship, from Philadelphia, played a quiet song called “Skip to the Good Part.” It’s a barroom love song, and the singer wistfully mumbles encouraging lines such as “Our days are full of shit and so few.” The loud song is just a song I play loud, and that’s “A Day in the Water,” by Christine and the Queens. This song is for a cool morning in early summer, or a too-hot afternoon in late summer. It pulls you out of your reality and into a space that feels like pure music. Music for me is either ruefulness or transcendence.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Ann Hulbert’s story on the theme of marriage in George Eliot’s novels. It’s one of the best pieces of literary criticism I’ve read in many years. Ann argues that marriage opens rather than forecloses possibilities for experimentation in Eliot’s fiction. I love the idea that a novel might encourage us to rethink the coordinates of reality and to treat what seems permanent as susceptible to revision and change.

The last thing that made me cry: The film Petite Maman, by Céline Sciamma, a short fable in which a little girl meets her mother as a little girl. It’s a perfect work of art. In my favorite scene, the two kids share headphones and listen to a song called “The Music of the Future,” which then plays in the film as they take a canoe out to a mysterious pyramid. Almost everything I like about art is in this scene.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”

The Week Ahead

The Idea of You, a romantic-comedy film starring Anne Hathaway as a single mother who starts a whirlwind relationship with a famous singer (premieres on Prime Video on Thursday) The Veil, a spy-thriller miniseries, starring Elisabeth Moss, about two women who are caught in a dangerous web of truth and lies (debuts Tuesday on Hulu) Mean Boys, a collection of essays by Geoffrey Mak about our societal thirst for novelty (out Tuesday)

Essay

Gregory Halpern / Magnum

Why a Dog’s Death Hits So Hard

By Tommy Tomlinson

My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.

Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred … We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.

By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog … So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The story that’s holding Taylor Swift back Why does Taylor Swift see herself as an albatross? A sexy tennis thriller—yes, really We’re all reading wrong. Bad Bunny has it all—and that’s the problem. What the author of Frankenstein knew about human nature The new quarter-life crisis

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Columbia University’s impossible position Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Trumpification of the Supreme Court

Photo Album

A view of the Cuernos del Paine, a cluster of steep granite peaks in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park (Lukasz Nowak1 / Getty)

Take in the splendor of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

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In all the years I’ve spent covering American consumerism, I’ve heard one type of question from readers far more than any other: This can’t go on forever, right?

Maybe they’d learned what happens to the huge volume of online purchases that get returned, or saw one too many questionably sourced mascaras and sunscreens hawked on TikTok Shop, or realized that the newly minted e-commerce behemoth Temu is spending many millions of dollars to urge you, quite explicitly, to shop like a billionaire. Whatever the impetus, the people asking this question tend to regard the consumer landscape with a mix of exhaustion and incredulity. The ever-expanding American closet is already swollen with cheap clothes, and our junk drawers and spare rooms and storage units already overfloweth with everything else. Americans have so much excess stuff that much of it can’t even effectively be given away. Can we—the people who have bought so much already—really keep buying more, and at a hastening clip?

As pickled as I am in information and theories about consumption, I’ve never really known how to answer this. I can’t blame anyone for being tired—of the advertising and affiliate links that have eaten search results, of constant prompts to purchase random things, of clothes made of plastic that fall apart after a few washes. Consumer choice is the animating logic of so much of American life, and buying things is how we are taught to assert our agency or express our political views or embrace our identities. Amazon has been on a decades-long push toward a logical extreme of American consumption capacity. The company’s newest crop of even cheaper, China-linked competitors—Temu, Shein, and TikTok Shop, most prominently—seem intent on pushing further.

[Read: Temu is speedrunning American familiarity]

The endgame to all of this, one might reasonably expect, has to be drawing nearer, if only because the United States is already so full-to-bursting with unwanted junk that entire industries and media genres have cropped up to help people pare down their possessions. Surely, one might reasonably expect, something’s got to give. There must be some sort of ceiling, some point of exhaustion—if not emotional, then financial. This can’t go on forever … right?

By the numbers, Americans still seem plenty enthusiastic about high volume and low prices. As the ultra-cheap internet retailers have sprung up, shoppers have rushed by the tens of millions to patronize them. The biggest ones are already pulling in billions of dollars of sales from the U.S. each year. And even though these retailers primarily draw in shoppers through super-low prices, they’re very popular with people who already have plenty. According to a recent report from Earnest Analytics, a credit-card-data firm, almost half of Temu’s American sales come from people making more than $130,000 a year, and the retailer’s popularity is growing the quickest with that same group of high earners. Wealthier people have more buying power in the first place, but that’s exactly the point: If even they haven’t yet gotten their fix of cheap stuff, we might be nowhere close to the extremes we’re ultimately capable of.

“It may seem like the air is getting thin, but we have not reached ‘peak stuff,’” David Garfield, the global head of industries for the consulting firm AlixPartners, told me in an email. According to Garfield, the underlying phenomena all point to continued growth, especially for inexpensive products: Demand is strong; impulsive purchases have never been easier; and the rise of influencers has made sales pitches even more omnipresent and sometimes more difficult to discern from genuine recommendations. On the supply side, a growing number of third parties that Garfield calls “infrastructure players”—transport and logistics companies, easy-setup e-commerce platforms, contract manufacturers—have entered the market in order to move larger volumes of goods into consumers’ hands more and more efficiently.

Garfield also pointed to one of the less discussed ways that pandemic changes have continued to affect how Americans spend their money: Before 2020, he said, consumers were in a slow, steady, long-term pattern of moving their spending incrementally away from goods and toward services—things such as hotel stays and Uber rides. Pandemic shutdowns reversed that trend virtually overnight, and four years later, a greater proportion of consumer spending is still going to goods than it was in 2019. Population-level spending habits move with all the agility and grace of a container ship; without a pandemic-level force to send them swiftly back where they came from, people just seem to be used to buying a little bit more stuff than they used to, especially online.

Much of that stuff, when bought from American retailers, is now significantly more expensive than it was in the recent past. Since 2019, prices for many types of consumer purchases in the U.S. have shot up. On average, goods cost nearly 20 percent more than they did before the pandemic. This, according to the e-commerce analyst and Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas, is among the reasons that ultra-cheap retailers that ship to the U.S. from overseas have found such enthusiastic audiences. “During uncertain economic times,” he told me, “price tends to bubble up to become the most important variable” in how even greater numbers of people make purchase decisions.

[Read: It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want]

Confounding all of this is the reality that price and quality are not as closely tied to each other as they once were. Kaziukėnas challenged a common assumption that the novelty of stores like Temu and Shein will have to wear off eventually: Not everything they sell is as off-putting or low quality in person as you might think. Much of it, according to Kaziukėnas, is identical to what American brands and retailers sell—it is, after all, coming from existing manufacturers—but at a much lower price. Temu and Shein were designed to drive overhead down to a minimum: They’ve bet that lots of people are willing to trade instant shipping and robust customer service for lower prices, and they’ve largely been right. American retailers’ emphasis on speed and variety requires more overhead because they’ve built systems with more steps between manufacturers and buyers. “Amazon and eBay would happily replicate Temu’s ship-from-China model if they hadn’t spent decades optimizing for a different kind of experience,” Kaziukėnas said.

When you look at the data, lots of people who say they hate this phenomenon of cheap, high-volume consumption tend to be enthusiastic participants in it. Kaziukėnas pointed to a recent report published by The New Consumer and the venture-capital firm Coefficient Capital that found that Shein shoppers are considerably more likely to express concern about the environment and sustainability than shoppers overall. “There is a disconnect between what we tell ourselves, what we tell others, and how we behave,” Kaziukėnas said. Dan Frommer, the founder of The New Consumer, echoed those sentiments: “The allure of cheap stuff is universal, almost, to American culture,” he told me. Some people may get burned by junky products and turn away from these types of retailers, which may raise prices on some of their products as they dial back discounting that was implemented in order to lure an initial customer base, Frommer said. But he thinks they’ll stick around in some significant capacity for the foreseeable future, even if their recent meteoric growth cools.

If Shein, TikTok Shop, and Temu are popular even among the economically comfortable and environmentally conscious, the question of what it would take to turn a meaningful number of Americans away from these kinds of retailers gets significantly more difficult to tease out. Frommer mentioned that the same concerns over foreign ownership that currently threaten to bring down TikTok could possibly be applied to many ultra-cheap internet retailers, if lawmakers were so inclined. Kaziukėnas said that he didn’t think consumers were likely to make this choice themselves anytime soon, but that regulatory measures designed to make foreign retailers’ existing business models less viable could harm their ability to compete against American retailers on price. One such measure—closing the de minimis loophole, which, in effect, allows foreign retailers to import goods into the U.S. one purchase at a time without paying taxes or duties—is currently being considered by Congress.

Ken Pucker, a professor at Tufts University and the former chief operating officer of Timberland, agrees that regulation is likely the most efficient way to reform particularly wasteful consumption and production practices, but he sees the looming possibility of a second path. One of the major things that enables American buying habits, he told me, is the separation of consumption from production. Goods are produced far away, and when we tire of them, the trash they create is also swiftly moved out of our field of vision. Rarely do Americans—and especially the well-off Americans who drive this sort of consumption—experience the downsides of plastics production or discarded cheap goods, such as groundwater contamination. “We no longer see the effect of the consumption that we still enjoy,” he told me. We just experience the upsides of convenience and abundance.

Eventually, this separation will be more difficult to uphold. As the physical effects of climate change become more difficult to outrun even for the relatively affluent, Pucker said, the joys of consumption and realities of production are bound to recouple. You can see it beginning to happen already: A recent report found that PFAS “forever chemicals,” which are used widely in the manufacture of stain- and water-resistant products and linked to a host of medical issues, are present in high concentrations in sea spray the world over.

Maybe, one day, buying cheap stuff as a form of entertainment will run afoul of new behavioral norms that a changed physical reality creates. People might begin to feel ashamed, or at least more self-conscious, about buying things they don’t even really want as a salve for stress or boredom. But if we have to wait for wastefulness to become uncool, then we probably have our answer as to whether this will all slow down anytime soon.

Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.

You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)

The contradiction between TikTok and Section 702 is maddening, but it points to lawmakers’ continued failure to wrestle with the most basic questions of how to protect the American public in the algorithmic age. It’s quite fair to worry, as Congress does, that TikTok’s mass collection of personal data can pose a threat to our data. Yet Meta, X, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other popular platform also suck up our personal data. And while the fear around foreign meddling that has animated the TikTok ban has largely rested on hypotheticals, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that Facebook, at least, has effectively operated as a kind of “hostile foreign power,” as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance put it, with “its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”

[Read: The largest autocracy on Earth]

Congress has largely twiddled its thumbs as social-media companies have engaged in this kind of chicanery—until TikTok. ByteDance is hardly a candidate for sainthood, but who would want to beatify Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? Abroad, America’s surveillance draws much of the same political condemnation Congress is now levying at China. The privacy advocate Max Schrems repeatedly sued Facebook to stop the company from sharing Europeans’ data with the U.S., where the information could be searched by intelligence agencies. He won multiple times. Last year, European Union regulators fined Meta $1.3 billion for transferring Facebook user data to servers in the United States.

Congress’s tech dysfunction extends well beyond this privacy double standard. The growing backlash to platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is not aimed at any of the substantial issues around privacy and surveillance, such as the ubiquitous tracking of our online activity and the widespread use of facial recognition. Instead, they’re defined by an amorphous moral panic.

Take the Kids Online Safety Act, an alarmingly popular bill in Congress that would radically remake internet governance in the United States. Under KOSA, companies would have a duty to help defend minors from a broad constellation of harms, including mental-health impacts, substance use, and types of sexual content. The bill might actually require companies to gather even more data about everything we see and say, every person with whom we have contact, every time we use our devices. That’s because you can’t systematically defend against Congress’s laundry list of digital threats without massive surveillance of everything we say and every person we meet on these platforms. For companies such as Signal, the encrypted-messaging app that political dissidents rely on around the world, this could mean being forced to operate more like Facebook, WhatsApp, and the other platforms they’ve always sought to provide an alternative to. Or, more likely, it would mean that companies that prioritize privacy simply couldn’t do business in the U.S. at all.

Perhaps the biggest protection Americans have against measures such as KOSA is how badly they’re designed. They all rest on proving users’ age, but the truth is that there’s simply no way to know whether someone scrolling on their phone is a teen or a retiree. States such as Louisiana and Utah have experimented with invasive and discriminatory technologies such as facial recognition and facial-age estimation, despite evidence that the technology is far more error-prone when it comes to nonwhite faces, especially Black women’s faces.  

But these misguided bills haven’t completely derailed lawmakers pushing real reforms to U.S. mass surveillance. Within days of the House passing the TikTok ban and Section 702 renewal, it also passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which closes the loophole that lets police pay companies for our data without getting a warrant. Yet the bill now finds itself in limbo in the Senate.

Regulating technology doesn’t have to be this hard. Even when the products are complex, solutions can be shockingly simple, banning harmful business and policing practices as they emerge. But Congress remains unwilling or unable to take on the types of mass surveillance that social-media firms use to make billions, or that intelligence agencies use to grow their ever-expanding pool of data. For now, America’s real surveillance threats are coming from inside the house.