The nation’s tiniest state legislative chamber has been unusually prolific lately. In its most recent session, Alaska’s Senate overcame years of acrimony and deadlock to pass major bills to increase spending on public schools, combat climate change and a state energy shortage, and strengthen penalties for drug dealers. “The universal feeling,” Cathy Giessel, the senate’s majority leader, told me, “was that this was the most productive two years that we have experienced.”

Giessel, a Republican who first took office in 2010, attributes this success not to her colleagues, exactly, but to how they were chosen. In 2022, Alaska became the first state to experiment with a new kind of election. All candidates—regardless of party—competed against one another in the primary, and the top four vote-getters advanced. In November, the winner was determined by ranked-choice voting, in which people list candidates by order of preference. The system—called Final Four Voting—gave a substantial boost to moderates from both parties. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski won a fourth term, and a centrist Democrat defeated Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, capturing a House seat that Republicans had held for a half century.

But Final Four had an even bigger impact in the state Senate, where Democrats narrowed the GOP’s long-standing majority. Giessel, who had lost in a traditional primary two years earlier, won her seat back. She and seven of her colleagues ditched three far-right GOP lawmakers to form a governing coalition with Democrats. The group decided to set aside divisive social issues such as abortion and gender identity and focus exclusively on areas where they could find common ground.

[Read: The political-reform movement scores its biggest win yet]

The legislative dealmaking that ensued was exactly what the designers of Final Four Voting had hoped for when Alaskans approved the system in a 2020 statewide referendum. In essence, Final Four is a radical reform designed to de-radicalize politics. Its purpose is to make general elections more competitive and to encourage compromise among lawmakers who had previously held on to power simply by catering to a small, polarized primary electorate that determines the winners of most modern campaigns. This year could be an inflection point for the reform: Four more states—ranging from blue to deep red—could adopt versions of Final Four, and Alaskans will vote on whether to repeal it. In November, voters frustrated with both parties will have a chance to transform the way they pick their leaders—or quash what reformers hope will be the future of American elections.

Final Four isn’t inherently ideological, but it appeals most to voters frustrated with polarization—“normal people who want normal things done,” as Scott Kendall, a former Murkowski aide who led the 2020 campaign to adopt Final Four in Alaska, put it to me.

The ideas that make up Alaska’s system aren’t new. California and Washington State have had nonpartisan primaries for years, and South Dakota voters could approve them in November. Maine has ranked-choice voting for federal elections; Oregon could adopt ranked voting this fall. But Alaska is the first state to combine the two reforms. Final Four backers hope that many more will follow, and they are pouring millions of dollars into ballot initiatives this year to expand it to Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana.

A sweep for Final Four would reshape not only state capitols but also Washington, D.C., where the system would, in the coming years, elect up to 10 of the U.S. Senate’s 100 members. Representing a combination of red and blue states, they could “form a problem-solving fulcrum” to address challenges that typically resist compromise, Katherine Gehl, who devised Final Four Voting and has spent millions of dollars campaigning for it, told me. “You really can see in Congress a difference with as few as 10 senators,” she said, citing comprehensive immigration reform as an example.

To gain a firmer foothold, advocates of Final Four must clear a number of obstacles. Critics say the system is too confusing for voters to grasp and too complicated for election officials to administer. They also question whether the reform enjoys the broad public support that its wealthy backers claim it does. The proposal faces bipartisan opposition in Nevada. In Alaska, critics on the right hope to scrap the system in its infancy.

And don’t get Colorado started.

The state’s Democratic and Republican parties disagree on virtually everything—except, that is, their shared loathing of Final Four Voting and the businessman, Kent Thiry, who’s trying to bring it to their state. The former CEO of the Denver-based dialysis company DaVita, Thiry has funded successful ballot drives to overhaul political primaries and enable nonpartisan redistricting in Colorado. He’s also a co-chair of the reform group Unite America, which is funding efforts to expand Final Four in other states. Thiry believes that in a year in which most voters don’t like their choices for president, the Final Four movement can “surf that wave of discontent” and offer people in Colorado and elsewhere an opportunity to vote for something new.

[From the December 2019 issue: Too much democracy is bad for democracy]

To Shad Murib, the Democratic Party chair in Colorado, Thiry is simply tossing “a hand grenade” into an election system that voters in the state already like. “It’s a way to rig elections for the highest bidder,” he told me, arguing that doing away with party primaries makes it easier for wealthier candidates to buy their way onto the ballot.

David Williams, the chair of the state’s Republican Party, sees the proposal the same way. The highest bidder, he told me, would be Thiry himself. “This is the one thing me and my counterpart agree on,” Williams told me. “This guy wants to destroy both political parties so that he can get elected.”

Thiry considered a run for governor in 2018, but he told me he was ruling out a bid in 2026. Critics of Final Four, he said, are using his past flirtations with a campaign “as an excuse to not discuss the actual substance of the issue.”

What he doesn’t deny, however, is that reforms such as Final Four are designed to reduce the power of the two major parties. He compares American democracy, rather floridly, to a highway. “The parties control all the on-ramps and the off-ramps, and the toll that they charge in order to get on a democracy highway is kowtowing to the far left or the far right and relatively ignoring the majority in the middle,” Thiry said. “We intend to blow through the toll gates and take back possession of that highway.”

How much voters want this kind of change remains to be seen. Final Four owes its support less to a grassroots movement than to a series of expensive persuasion campaigns funded by a group of wealthy philanthropists. In most cases, they are going around state legislatures, where party leaders aren’t interested in reforms that could threaten their rule.

In Colorado, Democrats say the voting system doesn’t need fixing. Participation in its all-mail elections is already among the highest in the nation, and its Democratic governor and senators are relatively moderate dealmakers. “It’s a solution in search of a problem,” Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of Colorado’s congressional delegation, told me. To head off Final Four, the state legislature passed a bill that could block voter-approved election reforms from taking effect for years, or possibly forever. Final Four backers are urging the governor, Jared Polis, to veto it.

On top of being unnecessary, critics see the system as a tool of wealthy centrists looking to carve a path to high office for themselves and their allies. But reformers point out that campaigns now aren’t exactly the province of the poor or even of the middle class. Rich people already have a leg up, including in Colorado. Polis, for example, is a tech entrepreneur who spent more than $20 million of his own money to win the post in 2018 after self-funding his first bid for Congress a decade earlier. “They’re just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,” Gehl told me about Final Four’s critics. The system guarantees that four candidates make the November ballot instead of two, she pointed out. “If you double the number of people who can get into Disney World, how does that decrease access?” she said.

In Alaska so far, Final Four hasn’t shown much preference for wealthy office-seekers; indeed, it has seemed to attract candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2022, an Alaska Native won a seat in Congress for the first time, and more women ran for office than in the five previous cycles combined. “The open primary blows the doors open not just for women but for minorities,” Giessel said. “It changes the game completely.”

The debut of Final Four in Alaska had its challenges. The sudden death of 88-year-old Representative Don Young on a plane flight in March 2022 opened up Alaska’s lone House seat for the first time since he took office, in 1973, and forced the state to roll out its new system in a special election months earlier than planned.

“It felt like chaos,” Kendall, the Final Four campaigner, told me. Mary Peltola, a centrist and a Murkowski ally, ran as a Democrat and defeated both Palin and another Republican, Nick Begich, through ranked-choice voting. Although the two Republicans collectively earned more votes than Peltola in the initial tally, more than one-quarter of Begich’s voters ranked the Democrat above Palin.

Republicans responded to the defeat by bashing ranked-choice voting, echoing the GOP’s opposition to the system in Maine, where voters approved it after two victories by the Trumpian Governor Paul LePage. Critics of Alaska’s system have succeeded in gathering enough signatures to place a repeal measure on the ballot in November, which Kendall is fighting in court.

Phillip Izon, who is running the repeal drive, told me that the system in Alaska is “fundamentally flawed” and would require “generations” of voter education before people could adequately understand it. He cited the high number of voters who refused to rank their candidates during the special election, and a subsequent drop in turnout in the November midterms. “They say it’s cheaper. They say it’s faster. They say it helps third parties,” he said. “And none of this is true.”

[Read: A radical idea for fixing polarization]

Central to Izon’s critique is the sense that Alaskans didn’t really want Final Four to begin with. In 2020, the transformation of the state’s election system was packaged into a single ballot question with other proposed changes, most notably a popular push to ban “dark money” in state campaigns. Voters, Izon argued, had been “brainwashed” into approving Final Four. Izon told me that he is not registered with either party and doesn’t want his effort to be labeled as partisan. But a video on his campaign’s website leads with quotes from Donald Trump, who has denounced “ranked choice crap voting” as “a total rigged deal.”

Backers of the system say Izon is misstating or exaggerating his claims. “There was no hiding the ball,” Kendall told me, referring to the 2020 referendum. Nor did Republicans get wiped out under Final Four in 2022. Although they lost the House seat to Peltola and a few seats in the legislature, conservative Governor Mike Dunleavy easily won reelection. “We had a lot more opponents the last time around than we do now,” Kendall said.

Yet the champions of Final Four are clearly unnerved by the repeal effort, worrying that it could stunt the idea’s momentum not only in Alaska but elsewhere. The fact that Alaskans could ditch the system so quickly offers opponents in other states a handy talking point. In Nevada, for example, voters approved a version of the system (with five final-round candidates instead of four) in 2022, but under the state’s constitution, they must do so again this fall for it to take effect. “Change is hard. New is hard, and making the case in a crowded year is hard,” Gehl said.

When I spoke with Thiry, he also seemed prepared for some defeats. “Voters are appropriately going to not just run off to the first fancy and new idea that they hear or see,” he said. “If you look at the history of movements in America, every one that we looked at took some heavy hits early on, but they persevered. And we have every intention of doing the same.”

Kohei Saito knows he sounds like a madman. That’s kind of the point, the Japanese philosopher told me during a recent visit to New York City. “Maybe, then, people get shocked,” he said. “What’s this crazy guy saying?”

The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.

The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.

Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word.

As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage.

This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies. He took a job at the prestigious University of Tokyo and became a regulator commentator on Japanese TV—one of the few far-left talking heads in that country’s conservative media sphere. When we met up in April, he was touring the northeastern U.S. to promote the new English translation of the book, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and planning to appear on a series of panels at Georgetown University to discuss his ideas. One day during his New York stint, we visited the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where a young protester named Tianle Zhang spotted him and waved him over, telling Saito he’s the reason he’s applying to graduate school. They took a selfie together and Saito posted it on X.

Saito’s haters are just as passionate as his admirers. The right-wing podcaster James Lindsay recently dedicated a three-hour episode to what he called Saito’s “death cult.” Liberals who favor renewable energy and other technologies say Saito’s ideas would lead to stagnation. On the pro-labor left, Jacobin magazine published multiple pieces criticizing degrowth in general and Saito in particular, calling his vision a “political disaster” that would hurt the working class. And don’t get the Marxist textualists started; they accuse Saito of distorting the great man’s words in order to portray Marx as the OG degrowth communist.

It’s understandable why Saito provokes so much ire: He rejects the mainstream political consensus that the best way to fight climate change is through innovation, which requires growth. But no matter how many times opponents swat it down, the idea of degrowth refuses to die. Perhaps it survives these detailed, technical refutations because its very implausibility is central to its appeal.

Economic growth, the French economist Daniel Cohen has written, is the religion of the modern world. Growth is the closest thing to an unalloyed good as exists in politics or economics. It’s good for the rich, and it’s good for the poor. It’s good if you believe inequality is too high, and if you think inequality doesn’t matter. Deciding how to distribute wealth is complicated, but in theory it gets easier when there’s more wealth to distribute. Growth is the source of legitimacy for governments across the political spectrum: Keep us in power, and we’ll make your life better.

Japan has worshipped as devoutly as anyone. After the country’s defeat in World War II, GDP replaced military might as a source of national pride. Japan’s economy grew at a rate of nearly 10 percent until the 1970s and remained strong through the 1980s as its automotive and electronics industries boomed. So when the Asian financial bubble burst and the Japanese economy collapsed in the early 1990s, the country faced not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of meaning. If Japan wasn’t growing, what was it?

[Read: Does the economy really need to stop growing quite so much?]

Saito was born in 1987, just before the crash, and he grew up in a time of stagnation. As a student at a private all-boys secondary school, his politics were moderate, he says. He thought of problems like inequality and consumerism in terms of individual moral failings rather than as the consequences of policy choices. But the war in Iraq got him reading Noam Chomsky, college introduced him to Marx, and the 2008 financial crisis spurred him to question the capitalist system. Saito briefly enrolled at the University of Tokyo, but transferred to Wesleyan University, which he found insufficiently radical, on a scholarship. He graduated in 2009.

The 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster at Fukushima pushed Saito to reconsider humanity’s relationship with nature. “Fukushima caused me to question whether technology and the increase of productive forces create a better society,” he said. “The answer was no.”

Saito moved to Berlin and got his Ph.D. at Humboldt University, where he studied Marx’s views on ecology. In 2016, he published an academic treatise on Marx’s “ecosocialism,” the English translation of which won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for books in the Marxist tradition.

Around that time, the idea of degrowth, which had been kicking around environmentalist circles for decades, was gaining steam in Europe. Saito started reading thinkers such as Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, and Kate Raworth, all of whom argued that there are planetary boundaries we can’t exceed without causing mayhem. Thinkers since Thomas Malthus had been talking about limits to humanity’s expansion—sometimes with disturbing implications, as in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, which described with disgust a teeming Delhi slum. But degrowthers identified the pursuit of GDP as the culprit, arguing that it fails to account for all kinds of human flourishing. Greta Thunberg amplified the degrowth message further when she mocked capitalist society’s “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Japan was a ripe target for these ideas. For decades, the country had been mired in low and sometimes even negative growth. The problem was no longer new, and the government’s proposed solutions—negative interest rates; trying to boost worker productivity—were losing their appeal. “A lot of young people feel like, I don’t want to work endless overtime and give up my family life and all my hobbies just to serve a corporation until I die,” says Nick Kapur, an associate professor at Rutgers University at Camden who studies modern Japanese history. “For what? Just to grow our GDP?”  

Saito saw an opening: to connect degrowth with the Marxist ideas that he had been studying closely for years. Degrowth on its own had bad branding, he told me between bites of Beyond Burger at Tom’s Restaurant in Morningside Heights. The solution, he said with a grin, was to add “another very negative term: communism.”

When we met, Saito had traded his usual blazer and clean-cut look for an oversize denim jacket and a boy-band tousle. He has a disarming sense of humor: When he signs a book, he stamps it with a cartoon image of himself alongside Marx. But he’s serious about the need to embrace degrowth communism. He argues, not unreasonably, that degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, which encourages individuals to act selfishly and grow their riches. “Many people criticize neoliberalism,” Saito said. “But they don’t criticize capitalism. So that’s why we have ethical capitalism, sustainable capitalism, green capitalism.” Degrowth communism instead targets what Saito says is the root cause of our climate woes—capitalism itself—rather than just the symptoms, and prioritizes the public good over profit.

While degrowthers and Marxists have plenty of intellectual overlap, the match has always been an awkward one. Marx is generally considered pro-growth: He wanted to leverage the productive tools of capitalism to bring about a socialist future in which the fruits of that production would be fairly distributed. Saito, however, rejects that “Promethean” characterization of Marx. In Capital in the Anthropocene, he instead argues that Marx converted late in life from productivism to, yes, degrowth communism. To make his case, Saito cites some of Marx’s lesser-known writings, including a draft of his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary writer Vera Zasulich and Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was published after Marx’s death.

Saito’s book is a mishmash of political polemic, cultural criticism, and obscure Marxist exegesis. He calls individual actions like using a thermos instead of plastic water bottles “meaningless,” and mocks the UN Sustainable Development Goals, dismissing them and other market-friendly solutions as “the opiate of the masses.” Instead of relying on technology alone to save humanity, he argues, wealthy countries need to give up their consumerist lifestyles and redistribute their resources to poor countries to help them navigate the transition to a slower global economy. He advocates transitioning away from capitalism toward a “sharing economy,” and offers a mix of solutions both modest and bold. Workers should own their businesses. Citizens should control local energy production. Also: “What if Uber were publicly owned, turning its platform into a commons?” Saito argues that this arrangement would produce not scarcity but “radical abundance” as we freed ourselves from the obligation to generate ever-higher profits: “There will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening, and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read … Compared to cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work nonstop for hours and hours every day, this is clearly a richer lifestyle.”

On a superficial level, Saito put a fresh young face on old environmentalist ideas. Well spoken and self-deprecating, he didn’t have the off-putting self-seriousness of many ideologues. After years of ineffective stimulus and grind culture, Saito’s ideas may have intrigued Japanese audiences looking for “the opposite of the status quo,” Nick Kapur told me. Saito’s analysis also offered a kind of tonic for Japan’s national neurosis around slow growth: What if this is good, actually?

On a recent Saturday, Saito sat onstage at the People’s Forum, a community center in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, along with three other panelists: a historian, a geographer, and a journalist from The New Republic. It was a friendly crowd, but each of the panelists cast gentle doubt on Saito’s pitch. The historian said he’d like to see more modeling of the impact of degrowth policies; the geographer wondered how a degrowth agenda would ever expand beyond small, local experiments; and the journalist, Kate Aronoff, suggested that degrowth had a branding problem.

Saito had just begun his U.S. tour, and he was already encountering more resistance than he’d expected. “One thing surprising about American culture is they’re really anti-degrowth,” Saito told me after the event, as we walked along a chaotic stretch of 9th Avenue. When an American writer recently laced into him online, Saito’s European friends came to his defense. But here he was more isolated.

The simplest case against degrowth is that it’s not necessary. The prospect of boosting GDP while reducing emissions—known as “decoupling”—used to look like a moon shot. But now it’s happening. In more than 30 countries, including the United States and much of Europe, emissions are declining while GDP climbs, even when you factor in the “consumption-based emissions” generated in places that manufacture goods for rich countries. Solar and wind are cheaper in the U.S. than fossil fuels. Electric vehicles, for all their struggles, will make up half of global car sales by 2035, according to one recent estimate. Decoupling still isn’t happening nearly fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but green-growthers argue that we can speed up the process with enough investment. “It’s easy to say we need a socialist revolution to solve the climate crisis, but that’s not going to happen in the timescale,” says Robert Pollin, a progressive economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky on the Green New Deal.

Other detractors say that degrowth would be actively harmful. It’s one thing to ask billionaires to cut back, but what about everyone else? Are they supposed to abandon hope of raising their standard of living? Saito includes working-class Americans in his indictment of the “imperial mode of living” that he blames for carbon emissions. This was too much for Matt Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, and the left-leaning climate journalist Leigh Phillips, who co-wrote an article for Jacobin accusing Saito of doing “capital’s work” by “dividing the international working class against itself.”

Perhaps the most vicious reads of Saito target his interpretation of Marx. In the eyes of his critics, his reliance on a handful of passages in order to prove that Marx embraced degrowth communism amounts to a kind of fan fiction. One otherwise-sympathetic scholar wrote in a Marxist journal that the evidence Saito marshals is “simply not very convincing.” Huber and Leigh describe various claims about Marx’s views made by Saito as “wild,” “remarkable,” and “unsubstantiated.” Even John Bellamy Foster, the University of Oregon sociology professor who pioneered Marxist ecological studies in the 1990s and published Saito’s first book, told an interviewer that “no concrete evidence could be found of Marx actually advocating what could reasonably be called degrowth” and called Saito’s analysis “profoundly ahistorical.” (Saito responded in an email that Huber and Phillips “never read Marx’s notebooks that I investigate. Thus, they are not in a position to judge whether my claims are unsubstantiated because I am rereading Marx’s texts based on new materials.” As for Foster’s criticism, Saito wrote: “​​Marx never used the terms like degrowth, sustainability, and ecology. It is an attempt to push beyond Marx’s thought because there is no necessity to dogmatize Marx and he did not complete his work.”)

The question of whether Marx was a degrowther is academic—and so is degrowth itself, unless it can find a viable political path. Right now, that path is murky at best. The next politician to win reelection by urging voters to accept a lower standard of living will be the first. In the U.S., policies like a carbon tax and a national cap-and-trade program are dead on arrival. Even in Europe, farmers are protesting environmental regulations that they say erode their livelihoods. In today’s politics, proposing sacrifice seems like an obvious form of political suicide that would only empower politicians who don’t care about climate change.

Saito nonetheless insists that degrowth is politically possible. It starts small, he says, with workers’ cooperatives and citizens’ assemblies, and then spreads from city to city. Europe is already taking the lead, he says: Amsterdam recently banned building new hotels, while Paris restricted parking for SUVs. (One could fairly ask whether these are degrowth policies or just traditional forms of regulation.) The Spanish government has piloted a four-day workweek, Barcelona has introduced car-free “superblocks,” and the Spanish city of Girona has begun to explore how to implement “post-growth policies.” Saito says success is simply a matter of convincing a critical mass of citizens to push for degrowth. He cites the statistic popularized by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that it only takes 3.5 percent of the population protesting to enact change.

Isn’t expecting rich countries to act against their own interests a little optimistic? “Oh, yeah,” Saito said. “But the capitalist alternative is much more optimistic.” For Saito, the long-term alternative to degrowth communism is not green growth but “climate fascism,” in which countries lock down, hoard their resources, and disregard the collective good. Faced with that prospect, humanity will make the right choice. “As a philosopher,” he said, “I want to believe in the universality of reason.”

Saito does propose a few concrete fixes: Ban private jets. Get rid of advertising for harmful goods and services, such as cosmetic surgery. Enact a four-day workweek. Encourage people to own one car, instead of two or three. Require shopping malls to close on Sundays, to cut down on the time available for excessive consumption. “These things won’t necessarily dismantle capitalism,” he said. “But it’s something we can do over the long term to transform our values and culture.”

Of course, transforming values might be the heaviest lift of all. “Changing people’s preferences is really hard,” Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston who studies growth, told me. “You don’t need to change people’s preferences if you just make solar really cheap.” The Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, says people fundamentally care about raising their material living standards and always will. “Trying to reform humanity is not a project of much interest to economists,” he told me. “We talk about what to do, not how to wish for another form of human being.”

Saito admits that he might be overshooting. He isn’t expecting countries to scale down in the next decade, but maybe after that. He’s not opposed to green-energy subsidies; he just wants degrowth to be part of the conversation. He emphasized that his ideas aren’t designed with realism in mind. “I’m not an activist,” he said. “I’m a scholar.” His job is to provide the theory behind the change. Making it work is up to others.

Degrowthers like Saito seem to be caught in a double dilemma. They bristle at the suggestion that degrowth would take us back to premodern standards of living—yet in trying to dispel that notion, they narrow their vision so far that it resembles business-as-usual left-of-center politics. A typical rundown of degrowth policies looks like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America: health care for all, universal basic income, a smaller military, mutual aid, better public transportation, decolonization, and so on. Adherents reject the view that degrowth would require some authoritarian power to impose it, but have yet to articulate a political plan besides changing one mind at a time.

“At bottom it’s not actually an evidence-based agenda,” Ted Nordhaus, the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and self-described “eco-modernist,” told me. “It’s sort of a worldview and a vibe.”

And yet, for many, the vibe hits. Degrowth captures a core truth of the fight against climate change: What we’re doing is not enough and might even be making things worse. Degrowth might fail too, but in the eyes of its supporters, at least it’s directionally correct. It’s the protest vote of climate activism.

While in D.C., Saito co-headlined a workshop with a few dozen students at Georgetown, where they discussed degrowth. The group was mostly in favor, according to two students who attended. Fiona Naughton, a rising sophomore who studies international labor policy, told me she and many of her peers find Saito’s ideas inspiring. “A lot of us have felt such immense climate anxiety and considered whether or not we should have children,” she said. “Degrowth gives us hope for a future that we haven’t felt in a long, long time.”

I also followed up with Tianle Zhang, the protester who’d taken a selfie with Saito at the Columbia rally, and asked him about how he’d discovered Saito’s work. Zhang said that as a kid in Indiana, he’d watched the news in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. In college, he’d sensed a gap between the immensity of the problem of climate change and the attempts to address it. Saito was one of the few scholars he found who was trying to connect thinking about the environment with a broader theoretical critique of capitalism and society.

Zhang said he was also deeply influenced by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled priest who descends so far into climate despair that he considers committing an act of terrorism. “For me, it was showing the failures of conventional morality to handle the issue of climate,” Zhang said.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why the age of American progress ended]

Degrowth’s appeal might be similar: not political, not even economic, but moral. In the climactic final scene of First Reformed, Hawke’s character wraps himself in barbed wire as he prepares to possibly do something horrifying and futile. This seems like a fitting metaphor for not only Saito’s proposals—Saito acknowledges that degrowth would require pain—but also their psychological appeal. We have been bad, and we must atone.

Beyond its stark moral claims, the very fact of degrowth’s unreasonableness gives it weight. Degrowth advocates have called it a “missile word,” designed to provoke. There’s a reason we’re talking about degrowth and not the “steady-state economy,” which environmentalists have been pushing for decades. As the prominent degrowth thinker Jason Hickel has written, the term itself upends conventional wisdom: “It is only negative if we start from the assumption that more growth is good and desirable.” To this way of thinking, the inconceivability of degrowth only highlights how trapped we are in the growth-fetishist mindset.

At the end of our dinner, Saito told me he’s working on his next book, about the role of government when it comes to implementing degrowth. “The state has to intervene, but how can we make a democratic transition?” he asked rhetorically. I asked if he had an answer. He said, “Not yet.”

Great Britain's Josh Kerr and Keely Hodgkinson both put in impressive performances to win their races at the Diamond League meet in Eugene, Oregon.

Dozens of used electric-vehicle batteries were stacked like cordwood on pallets in a warehouse-style building about 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada, when I visited the site last week.

The batteries were bound for an assembly line that would begin the chemical process of recycling up to 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel they contain. Eventually, after treatment in two more buildings on the site, the metals will become a high-value, fine black powder called cathode active material that is shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to Toyota and Panasonic for the manufacture of new EV batteries.

This cutting-edge recycling process has been developed by a company named Redwood Materials. Founded by J. B. Straubel, a former chief technology officer at Tesla, Redwood has invested about $2 billion in this 300-acre facility located in an industrial park in rural Storey County, not far from where Tesla has built a massive “Gigafactory” manufacturing complex.

With about 900 employees now on-site, and a workforce of 1,500 expected when the plant is operating at capacity, Redwood’s Nevada facility embodies the economic opportunities spinning off from the environmental imperative to reduce carbon emissions and combat the risk of global climate change.

[Read: Biden’s blue-collar bet]

The facility is also a testament to the incongruous political dynamics forming around the emerging electric-vehicle industry and the broader transition toward a clean-energy economy.

Electric vehicles are being adopted at the fastest rate inside blue-leaning major metropolitan areas. In polls, self-identified Democrats now express much more openness to purchasing an EV than Republicans.

Yet counties that Donald Trump won in 2020, such as Nevada’s tiny Storey County, are receiving the most private investment, and the jobs associated with it, in new EV-production facilities, according to a Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

The paradox is that even as those red-leaning places are receiving the greatest direct economic benefits from the EV transition, they have mostly elected Republican House members who voted last year to repeal the new federal tax incentives that have encouraged these investments. These places are also likely to provide most of their votes this fall to Trump, who has pledged to repeal “on day one” all of President Joe Biden’s efforts to accelerate the EV transition.

All of this raises doubts about whether it’s sustainable for the emerging EV industry to rely preponderantly on Democratic-leaning places for both its sales and political backing, while providing the greatest economic lift to Republican-leaning places electing political figures hostile to government support for the industry. Put another way: Is red makers for blue takers a viable model for the green economy?

“Every industrial order requires policy support, and so you can certainly imagine all sorts of problems if you have a complete disconnect of the production side from the consumption side,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, told me.

The risk of losing federal support has come as the electric-vehicle industry faces a noticeable slowdown in its previously rapid sales growth. That means the industry could experience even greater disruption if Trump wins and succeeds in repealing the incentives for EV adoption that Biden signed into the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

If the incentives are rescinded, U.S. companies across the emerging EV industry will find it much more difficult to survive the rising competitive challenge from China, Albert Gore III, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me.

“The role of public policy in achieving the objective of eventually out-competing China in manufacturing batteries, battery components, and EVs themselves is really significant,” said Gore, the son of the former vice president and environmental advocate Al Gore. “Those two bills have taken existing momentum [in the industry] and accelerated it and magnified it.”

At this early stage in the industry’s development, the mismatch between the geography of EV production and consumption—between the makers and takers—could hardly be greater.

In its tabulation, Brookings Metro identifies more than $123 billion in U.S. investments in EV plants since Biden took office. Almost exactly 70 percent of that spending has flowed into counties Trump won in 2020, Brookings found.

The environmental group Climate Power tracks all private-sector investment in clean energy, including facilities that manufacture components for generating solar and wind electric power, and plants that provide semiconductors for clean-energy products and improvements to the electric grid. In its latest report, the group found that since passage of the IRA, Republican-held House districts had received three-fourths of the total $352 billion in clean-energy investment under that broader definition; the GOP districts had also received 53 percent of all the jobs associated with those investments.

In contrast, the places where EVs comprise the largest share of new vehicle registrations are entirely large blue-leaning metropolitan areas, according to a recent New York Times analysis using data from S&P Global Mobility. All six of the metro areas where EVs exceed 20 percent of new registrations are on the West Coast, including five in California and Seattle; other places where EVs have made the most inroads, the Times found, include Portland, Oregon; Denver; Las Vegas; Phoenix; and Washington, D.C. Deep-blue California alone accounts for more than one-third of all U.S. EV registrations.

Polling shows that uncertainty about EV costs, reliability, and charging infrastructure is evident among a broad range of Americans. But the partisan gap over EVs remains striking.

In Gallup polling this spring, about one-fourth of Democrats said they either own or are seriously considering purchasing an EV; nearly another half of Democrats said they were somewhat open to buying one. But Republican voters have become deeply resistant to EVs;  in both the 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys, about seven in 10 say they would never buy one. Other polling this year has found that while Democrats, by a ratio of about 10 to one, believe that EVs are better for the environment and more energy efficient than gas-powered cars,      a plurality of Republicans say that traditional internal-combustion-engine vehicles are better on both counts. Republicans are also far more likely than Democrats to say that gas-powered cars are safer, more reliable, and more affordable to operate. And of course, many more Republicans than Democrats to begin with reject the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are dangerously transforming the environment.

Brian Deese, who helped devise Biden’s clean-energy strategy as his first director of the National Economic Council, told me that economics, not politics, explained the geography of EV production. In choosing where to locate their plants, Deese said, companies are not focusing on a community’s political inclinations but rather are looking for places with lots of space, as well as nearby manufacturing and construction capacity. All of those factors, he notes, tend to be most available in communities outside major metro areas that are now preponderantly represented by Republicans. Labor officials would add one other factor: In many cases, companies are locating their new EV facilities in Republican-leaning states with right-to-work laws that impede union organizing.

Deese also thinks it’s too soon to assume that Democratic voters will remain the prime market for EVs. Although polls today show such political polarization around EVs, “it’s pretty hard to think of a technology where there was a cheaper, better technology to solve a consumer need and consumers prioritized a cultural or political patina over lower costs and higher quality,” said Deese, who is now a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

The challenge for the EV industry is that the current mismatch between its makers and takers could doom the public policies promoting its growth before it can prove its value to consumers across the political spectrum.

The industry’s key firms, as Gore told me, began investing in EV facilities long before Biden signed the IRA and infrastructure bills, or finalized the Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring auto manufacturers to sell a growing number of zero-emission vehicles over the next decade. But companies, he added, are undoubtedly counting on both those carrots and sticks when calculating how much consumer demand will grow to support the EV-production facilities they are building.

Redwood itself typifies that dynamic. Alexis Georgeson, Redwood’s vice president of government relations and communications, pointed out that the company was formed in 2017, while Trump was president; even then, she told me, Straubel recognized that as the number of EVs on the road increased, recycling their batteries could provide an economic opportunity while also reducing U.S. reliance on foreign sources of lithium and other critical minerals the batteries require. “Our mission, our business proposition, has not changed as a result of what we have seen happening with this administration,” Georgeson said.

But Georgeson is quick to add that the policies approved under Biden have “been tremendously helpful to us.” Redwood has been approved for a $2 billion federal loan to fund further expansion of its Nevada site (although it has not received any of the money yet). It also will benefit from the IRA provisions that provide tax credits for producers and consumers in order to encourage domestic manufacture of EV batteries. Within a few years, Redwood expects to be producing enough of the recycled minerals, as well as superthin foil from recycled copper, to manufacture at least 1 million EV batteries a year.

Devon Reese, a Reno city-council member, told me that the EV industry’s rapid expansion in the area has come with “growing pains” mostly relating to ensuring reliable transportation to the isolated Storey County. But overall, he said, there’s no question that the industry’s growth “absolutely has been a net positive” for the community. There are “probably nearly 11,000 jobs that have been created in this region by the energy projects,” Reese told me. “That represents a lot of families, and homes that are owned, and apartments that are rented, and stores that are shopped in.”

Despite this enormous flow of investment into the Reno region from Redwood and Tesla’s “Gigafactory,” Mark Amodei, the area’s Republican U.S. representative, joined every other House Republican last year in voting to repeal all of the IRA’s incentives for EV production and clean energy. Every House and Senate Republican also voted against the initial passage of the IRA in 2022.

After his repeal vote, Amodei told me he questioned how many of the construction and production jobs would really go to Nevada residents. “The benefits I don’t think outweighed the negative stuff in terms of debt, inflation, and—oh, by the way—how much really came to Nevada,” Amodei said. He also said that the pace at which Biden is seeking to encourage a transition away from internal-combustion engines toward EVs “borders on suicidal” and “just makes no sense unless it’s all about a political agenda and not much about solving problems” (Amodei’s office did not respond to a question about whether his views have changed since then).

Environmentalists had hoped that the spread of clean-energy investments into Republican-held seats would politically safeguard the IRA the same way the diffusion of military projects across virtually every state and district ensures broad bipartisan congressional support for defense-spending bills. Groups, including Climate Power, are running ads in swing states this year touting the new jobs that EV manufacturers are creating, for instance in building fully electric school buses. “This is really about jobs in the United States,” Alex Glass, Climate Power’s managing director of communications, told me. “What Donald Trump has been saying is he would rather have these jobs—the jobs of the future—happen in China.”

But the willingness of all House Republicans to vote to repeal Biden’s EV incentives, even while their districts are receiving most of the investment flowing from them, challenged the traditional assumption that politicians fear voting against policies that are providing direct economic benefits to their voters.

[Read: Biden’s ‘big build’]

Now the hope among clean-energy advocates is that some Republicans whose districts are benefiting from these incentives voted to rescind them last year only because they knew that repeal could never become law with a Democratic Senate and president. If Trump wins, and Republicans seize unified control of Congress next year, a vote to repeal the IRA incentives would transform from a symbolic gesture into an actual threat to jobs in these districts. Even under a scenario of unified Republican control in Washington next year, “our perspective is that it would be quite challenging” for the GOP to assemble enough votes for repeal, Georgeson said.

As evidence, she pointed to the disconnect between Republican opposition to the IRA in Washington and the cooperation the company has received from GOP governors and other state officials in Nevada and South Carolina, where it is beginning work on an even larger recycling plant that will involve $3.5 billion in investment. “Both states have been incredibly supportive of us,” she told me, providing assistance not only in infrastructure but in forging partnerships with local colleges to train workers for the new jobs.

Gore told me that the electric-vehicle industry will mobilize to defend the federal tax and spending programs promoting its growth if Republicans try again to repeal them next year. The industry, he said, must do a better job of demonstrating how it is benefiting the Republican-leaning communities where it is primarily investing. But, he added, it can now marshal powerful evidence for that case in the form of new manufacturing plants and jobs. “No politician sees a vote against a popular growing factory in his or her district as a winning issue,” Gore told me.

As Trump and congressional Republicans escalate their threats against Biden’s environmental agenda, the best defense for the emerging clean-energy industry may be the growing number of red communities benefiting from the green of new paychecks.

The country is stuck in a protest feedback loop. In recent months, students opposed to the Israel-Gaza war have occupied lawns and buildings at college campuses across the country. Emulating climate activists who have stopped traffic on crucial roadways, pro-Palestine demonstrators have blocked access to major airports. For months, the protests intensified as university, U.S., and Israeli policies seemed unmoved. Frustrated by their inefficacy, the protesters redoubled their efforts and escalated their tactics.

[Read: Can protest be too peaceful?]

The lack of immediate outcomes from the Gaza protests is not at all unusual. In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School analyzed the effect of 14 social movements in the United States from 2017 to 2022. They varied in size: About 12,000 people marched against a potential war with Iran in January 2020; 4.2 million turned out for the first Women’s March. Pons told me that these large social movements succeeded in raising the general public’s awareness of their issues, something that he and Gethin measured through Google Trends and data from X.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

As the marginal cost of reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of potential protesters drops to zero, organizers have mastered the art of gaining attention through public demonstrations. Mass actions no longer require organized groups with members who pay dues, professional staffers who plan targeted actions, and designated leaders who can negotiate with public officials. They just need someone who can make a good Instagram graphic. But notwithstanding the clear benefits of social media for protest participants, the lure of racking up views on TikTok or X and getting on the homepage of major news sites can overwhelm other strategic goals. Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful—and that has consequences for our entire political system.

The contours of mass protest have evolved over time. Researchers have found that since roughly 2010—perhaps not coincidentally, when smartphone adoption spiked—political protests have become more frequent around the world, particularly in middle- and high-income countries. The “size and frequency of recent protests,” one analysis claims, “eclipse historical examples of eras of mass protest, such as the late-1960s, late-1980s, and early-1990s.”

Movements learn. Over the years, social movements have internalized the strategic superiority of nonviolence: More people are willing to join a peaceful march than are willing to join one that includes violent confrontations. The UC Berkeley professor Omar Wasow’s research bolsters the argument for strategic adoption of nonviolence by looking at Black-led protests from 1960 to 1972. Wasow found that violent protests increased Republican support in the electorate and may have even tipped the 1968 presidential election toward Richard Nixon and against Hubert Humphrey, the lead author of the Civil Rights Act.

Much of the academic literature on mass protest focuses on movements, in countries around the globe, seeking to topple a government or win independence. According to the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, violent insurgencies against state power have declined, while nonviolent movements have become more common. (Chenoweth defines violent resistance as including not just “bombings, shootings [and] kidnappings” but also “physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm of people and property.”)

Yet seeking change through peaceful persuasion has also become less effective. Since 2010, Chenoweth wrote in a 2020 essay in the Journal of Democracy, fewer than a third of nonviolent campaigns, and just 8 percent of violent ones, have been successful—down from about two-thirds of nonviolent insurgencies and one-quarter of violent ones in the 1990s.

Mass struggles have come to rely too much on street protests, Chenoweth observes, and to neglect the “quiet, behind-the-scenes planning and organizing that enable movements to mobilize in force over the long term, and to coordinate and sequence tactics in a way that builds participation, leverage, and power.” Past research by the sociologist Kenneth Andrews on the Mississippi civil-rights movement and the War on Poverty found that counties with “strong movement infrastructures” yielded greater funding for anti-poverty programs; activists in these areas had better access to decision-making bodies and more influence over how social programs worked. “Movements were most influential,” Andrews explained, “when they built local organizations that allowed for an oscillation between mass-based tactics and routine negotiation with agency officials.”

Even under the most favorable circumstances, public protest will never be perfectly orderly. As the prominent sociologist Charles Tilly once wrote, a social movement is not unitary. It’s a “cluster of performances,” a “loosely-choreographed dance,” or even a “jam session with changing players”—all of which, he says, “have well-defined structures and histories, but not one of them is ipso facto a group, or even the actions of a single group.”

Many critics of modern protests are fixated on a picturesque, Tocquevillian vision of democracy—an imaginary world where interest groups always argue respectfully and compromise amiably. This vision isn’t aspirational; it’s fundamentally at odds with how human beings normally behave. Real-life democracy is a marketplace of ideas and emotions and arguments bouncing off one another, scrabbling for purchase in the hearts of voters, the minds of the cultural elite, and the press clippings skimmed by harried politicians.

[Read: Do protests even work?]

The Gethin and Pons study about the inefficacy of modern American mass movements identified one glaring exception: the protests over George Floyd’s murder. In the summer of 2020, nearly 2 million people participated in more than 5,000 separate racial-justice protests in the United States. Gethin and Pons found that after the protests, Americans expressed “more liberal answers on racial issues.” They also appeared more likely to vote in the upcoming presidential election and less likely to vote for then-President Donald Trump. This finding about the effectiveness of the 2020 anti-racism protests on the American public is supported by other research.

Policy change did occur in the aftermath of these protests. The Brennan Center for Justice found that, in the year following Floyd’s death, half of American states enacted legislation regarding use-of-force standards, police-misconduct policies, or both.

The Black Lives Matter protests during that period were different in part because they defied the caricature of protesters as radical college students with nothing but time. According to a study led by the Johns Hopkins economist Nick Papageorge, on factors such as gender and race, the demographics of the protests were actually more representative of the American public than the 2020 presidential electorate was.

What’s more striking is that a full third of protest participants identified as Republicans. Underscoring the ideological diversity of the movement, 30 percent of summer 2020 protesters in the researchers’ survey sample had attended BLM rallies as well as demonstrations seeking less stringent pandemic precautions—even though the two causes were widely characterized as coming from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Another reason the BLM protests succeeded is that they were overwhelmingly peaceful—despite some high-profile outbreaks of violence in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. According to research by Chenoweth and the political scientist Jeremy Pressman, more than 96 percent of the 2020 racial-justice protests resulted in no property damage or police injury, while nearly 98 percent resulted in zero reports of injuries among participants, bystanders, and police.

The Floyd protests did not materialize out of nowhere. The intellectual foundation had been laid by years of previous protests that created some organizational infrastructure and steadily increased the public’s support for the BLM movement until it surged upward in June 2020. Perhaps the other movements in the Gethin and Pons sample will prepare the way for future actions when the circumstances are ripe.

Still, many movements seeking to capitalize on public attention find themselves trampled underneath its power. Media attention flocks to the most radical and provocative elements and emboldens the voices on the fringes. Movement leaders have lost their ability to promote an overall message. Not surprisingly, despite the full slate of potential reforms that could have gained traction after Floyd’s murder, the slogan that everyone remembers is “Defund the police”—a policy demand that represented just a minority of voters’ views even as the majority of Americans were calling for far-reaching reforms of police departments. Who can credibly claim to speak for the campus protesters who oppose the war in Gaza?

Even though nobody knows who the leaders are, some of the protesters’ positions do seem to resonate off campus: Morning Consult polling from late last month suggests that 60 percent of Americans support a cease-fire, 58 percent support humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and fewer than half of voters support military aid to Israel.

Still, other stances taken by protesters—such as pushing universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel or, in some cases, calling for an end to Israeli statehood—have scant support among the general public. And the college protests themselves are widely frowned upon: In another poll from May 2, when asked whether college administrators had responded too harshly to college protesters, just 16 percent of respondents said administrators had responded too harshly; 33 percent thought they weren’t harsh enough.

While even entirely nonviolent protests cannot count on public support, escalatory actions such as trespassing, vandalism, and property destruction undermine and distract from broadly shared goals. People in left-leaning movements know full well that some of their own supporters are undermining message discipline and strategic imperatives. Groups critical of Israel have tried to organize boycotts of a handful of companies that, in their view, have been complicit in harming Palestinians. But among sympathizers on social media, perhaps the most prominent boycott target has been Starbucks, which is not on the list.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

Yet even as the burden is on protest organizers to articulate clear, feasible policy and persuade their fellow citizens to go along, everyone should be concerned if protesters whose demands have substantial support fail time and again to register gains in Washington. Civil unrest is inherently delegitimizing to a government. Protests are in part a rejection of traditional methods of registering opinion. Their increasing regularity indicates that people believe voting and calling their representatives are insufficient. In fact, many people who participated in the 2020 protests—both the Floyd ones and the anti-lockdown ones—did not end up voting in the presidential election that year.

In remarks about the campus demonstrations last week, President Joe Biden offered a tepid defense of nonviolent protest, saying, “Peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.” Later on, he added that “dissent must never lead to disorder.”

But the disorder that Biden warned against is not just a matter of college students getting graduation canceled this year; it’s also a matter of some Americans deciding over time that voting may not be worthwhile. Polls suggest that the public is deeply dissatisfied with how the U.S. political system is working. A feedback loop in which demonstrations proliferate to little effect, while radicalized protesters become ever more disillusioned with democracy, is a dangerous one. If you’re worried about the disorder on college campuses now, imagine if Americans lose faith in the power of democratic voice altogether.

Yesterday afternoon, Columbia University’s campus felt like it would in the hours before a heat wave breaks. Student protesters, nearly all of whom had wrapped their faces in keffiyehs or surgical masks, ran back and forth across the hundred or so yards between their “liberated zone”—an encampment of about 80 tents—and Hamilton Hall, which they now claimed as their “liberated building.” At midnight yesterday morning, protesters had punched out door windows and barricaded themselves inside. As I walked around, four police helicopters and a drone hovered over the campus, the sound of the blades bathing the quad below in oppressive sound.

And rhetoric grew ever angrier. Columbia University, a protester proclaimed during a talk, was “guilty of abetting genocide” and might face its own Nuremberg trials. President Minouche Shafik, another protester claimed, had licked the boots of university benefactors. Leaflets taped to benches stated: Palestine Rises; Columbia falls.

[Will Creeley: Those who preach free speech need to practice it]

As night fell, the thunderclap came in the form of the New York Police Department, which closed off Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and filled the roads with trucks, vans, and squad cars. Many dozens of officers slipped on riot helmets and adjusted vests. On the campus, as the end loomed, a diminutive female student with a mighty voice stood before the locked university gates and led more than 100 protesters in chants.

“No peace on stolen land,” she intoned. “We want all the land. We want all of it!”

Hearing young people mouthing such merciless rhetoric is unsettling. The protester’s words go far beyond what the Palestinian Authority demands of Israel, which is a recognition that a two-state solution is possible—that two peoples have claims to the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It was striking to see protesters playfully tossing down ropes from the second floor to haul up baskets filled with pizza boxes and water, even as they faced the imminent risk of expulsion from the university for breaking into Hamilton.

No one won here. Student protesters took pride in their collective revolutionary power, and yet appeared to have few leaders worthy of the term and made maximalist claims and unrealistic demands. Their call for Columbia to divest from Israel would appear to take in not just companies based in that country but any with ties to Israel, including Google and Amazon.

The protesters confronted a university where leaders seemed alternately stern and panicked. Columbia left it to police to break a siege around 9 p.m. in a surge of force, arresting dozens of protesters and crashing their way into Hamilton Hall.

The denouement was a tragedy that came accompanied by moments of low comedy, as when a student protester seemed to suggest yesterday that bloody, genocidal Columbia University must supply the students of the liberated zone and liberated building with food. “We’re saying they’re obligated to provide food for students who pay for a meal plan here,” she explained. But moments of true menace were evident, such as when some protesters decided to break into and occupy Hamilton Hall.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

Rory Wilson, a senior majoring in history, had wandered over to the site early yesterday morning when he heard of the break-in. He and two friends were not fans of this protest, he told me, but they also understood the swirl of passions that led so many Arab and Muslim students to recoil at the terrible toll that Israeli bombings have inflicted on Gaza. To watch Hamilton Hall being smashed struck him as nihilistic. He and his friends stood in front of the doors.

Hundreds of protesters, masked, many dressed in black, surged around them. “They’re Zionists,” a protester said. “Run a circle around these three and move them out!.”

Dozens of masked students surrounded them and began to press and push. Were you scared?, I asked Wilson. No, he said. Then he thought about it a little more. “There was a moment when a man in a black mask grabbed my leg and tried to flip me over,” he said. “That scared me”

One more fact was striking: As a mob of hundreds of chanting students smashed windows and built a barricade by tossing dozens of chairs against the doors and reinforcing them with bicycle locks, as fights threatened to break out that could seriously harm students on either side, Wilson couldn’t see any guards or police officers anywhere around him. Two other students told me they had a similar impression. “I don’t get it,” Wilson said. “There were some legitimately bad actors. Where was the security? Where was the university?” (Columbia officials did not respond to my requests for comment.)

Less than 24 hours later university leaders would play their hand by bringing in police officers.

For more than a decade now, we’ve lived amid a highly specific form of activism, one that began with Occupy Wall Street, continued with the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and evolved into the “autonomous zones” that protesters subsequently carved out of Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Some of the protests against prejudice and civil-liberties violations have been moving, even inspired. But in this style of activism, the anger often comes with an air of presumption—an implication that one cannot challenge, much less debate, the protesters’ writ.

[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle Island

Yesterday in front of Hamilton Hall—which protesters had renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old girl who had been killed in Gaza—organizers of the Columbia demonstration called a press conference. But when reporters stepped forward to ask questions, they were met with stony stares and silence. At the liberated tent zone, minders—some of whom were sympathetic faculty members—kept out those seen as insufficiently sympathetic, and outright blocked reporters for Israeli outlets and Fox News.

All along, it has never been clear who speaks for the movement. Protesters claimed that those who took over Hamilton Hall were an “autonomous collective.” This elusiveness can all but neuter negotiations.

By 11 p.m., much of the work was done. The police had cleared Hamilton Hall and carted off protesters for booking. At 113th Street and Broadway, a mass of protesters, whose shouts echoed in the night, and a group of about 30 police officers peered at each other across metal barriers. One female protester harangued the cops—at least half of whom appeared to be Black, Asian-American, or Latino—by likening them to the Ku Klux Klan. Then the chants fired up again. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There was a pause, as if protesters were searching for something more cutting. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Zionism has got to go.”

As I left the area, I thought about how Rory Wilson responded earlier when I asked what life on campus has been like lately. The senior, who said he is Jewish on his mother’s side but not observant, had a  take that was not despairing. In polarized times, he told me, having so many Jewish and Israeli students living and attending class on a campus with Arab and Muslim students was a privilege. “Some have lost families and loved ones,” he said. “I understand their anger and suffering.”

After spending two days on the Columbia campuses during the protests, I was struck by how unusual that sentiment had become—how rarely I’d heard anyone talk of making an effort to understand the other. Maximal anger was all that lingered.