Just 50 days before his reelection, Donald Trump took the time to hawk a new crypto platform.

If the country does not build out its cryptocurrency ecosystem, “we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best,” Trump said on a livestream on X. “It’s very young and very growing. And if we don’t do it, China’s going to do it.” The livestream was sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which has given Trump the title “chief crypto advocate” and his sons, Barron, Eric, and Donald Jr., that of “Web3 ambassador.”

World Liberty Financial is the brainchild of Zak Folkman (the creator of an advisory firm called Date Hotter Girls LLC) and Chase Herro (an affiliate marketer who previously sold colon cleanses). It is a get-rich-quick scheme, and not one that seems designed to enrich its customers.

It is also an emblem of a financial world that Trump’s election seems set to supercharge, populated by young men who have seen their economic prospects stagnate, their faith in the United States falter, and a champion in a baggy business suit and a red baseball cap emerge. Think of it as the bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.

[Christopher Beam: The worst of crypto is yet to come]

Its first major market sector: day-trading. I don’t mean old-fashioned, small-dollar equity investing done at the kitchen table. I mean hyper-speculative betting done with borrowed money on mobile apps, as investors shitpost and infinite-scroll. Market-moving rumors come not from corporate conferences, but from sites like YouTube and the Subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). Users at times coordinate to buy up a certain stock with the explicit goal of screwing over a hedge fund that had bet the stock would go down.

That’s what happened four years ago with GameStop: Redditors helped to push the share price up 8,000 percent. Now so-called meme stocks are resurgent. GameStop spiked this spring. Tesla climbed when Trump won. (Tesla is both a blue-chip stock and a meme stock; Elon Musk, the company’s founder, is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest advisers, as well as being a storied internet troll and the owner of the social-media platform X.) “This rally seems unsustainable, even if you believe in the long-term growth story for the stock,” David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Bloomberg. “It makes no sense.”

As noted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, this trading behavior is in part driven by market democratization. A decade ago, the fintech firm Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, allowing individuals to buy stocks or other financial assets without paying any fees. Today’s apps also allow users to purchase fractions of a stock and do not set minimum balances, ushering in less wealthy investors.

The barriers to entry are low, yet the risks are high. Today’s young day-traders tend to make frequent transactions and gravitate toward exotic trades, when research shows that investors generate the best returns when they make simple investments infrequently. The apps encourage the piling-on of risk through push alerts, promotions, and other gamifications.

The second crucial market sector: sports betting. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning commercial sports betting outside of Nevada. That paved the way for more than three dozen states to okay the practice; 30 states also allow residents to make wagers online.

It would be hard to overstate how much this has changed pro sports and the fan experience over the past half decade. Commentators talk about fantasy leagues and prop bets as much as they talk about the game; advertisements for sportsbooks are ubiquitous; millions of spectators keep DraftKings and FanDuel up on their second screen. An estimated two in five American adults engage in sport betting. One in four online bettors has wagered more than $500 in a single day. Americans staked $120 billion last year, double what they did in 2021.

Many die-hard fans love the rise of sports betting: It’s entertaining, engaging, a way to support your favorite players and dunk on your friends. Still, in a survey, 37 percent of online bettors said they “felt bad or ashamed” for losing money. Nearly 40 percent said they bet more than they should; nearly 20 percent said they lied about the extent of their betting, and the same share said they lost cash that was meant for their day-to-day financial obligations. A strong majority supported the federal government “aggressively” regulating the market, “to specifically protect customers from compulsive gambling.”

Third and last is crypto, which boomed into the mainstream a decade ago. Today, roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto. Sites such as Robinhood and Coinbase make purchasing easy. (Buying bitcoin used to take significant know-how and days of waiting.) The most recent bust, in 2022, seems to have done little to deter crypto’s most ardent fans.

There might be more of them soon. For years, Trump was anti-crypto. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter five years ago. He added: “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

Today, he’s not just promoting shady crypto start-ups. He’s promising regulation that would allow banks to offer crypto assets to clients, making the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Industry-friendly rules would lead to a flood of cash entering the crypto markets, enriching anyone with assets already in their wallets, but also increasing volatility and exposing millions more Americans to scams, frauds, and swindles.

Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino. Many folks trade crypto and meme stocks on the same platform, thumbing over to a second app to keep their sports bets going, thumbing over again to post their wins and losses. Apps have made the experience social. They have also made staking money as frictionless as ordering Uber Eats.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]

The players in this casino are overwhelmingly young men, roughly 40 percent of whom are into sports betting and crypto. (A smaller minority is actively trading.) No surprise, Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me, when I called to ask about the bro-economy. “Risk skews male, period, for good and for ill,” he said. “There’s this greater willingness, appetite for, vulnerability to, tolerance of risk.” He appreciated how the activities gave guys something to do together and talk about with one another. He also noted how many young men felt shut out of traditional wealth-building strategies, such as homeownership.

Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.

Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

When I lived in China, a decade ago, I often saw propaganda billboards covered in words that supposedly expressed the country’s values: Patriotism. Harmony. Equality. And … Democracy. Indeed, China claims to consider itself a democratic country. So do Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on down the list of nations ranked by their level of commitment to rights and liberties. Even North Korea fancies itself part of the club. It’s right there in the official name: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I thought of those Chinese billboards recently, when a postelection poll showed that many American voters touted the importance of democracy while supporting a candidate who had tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election. According to a survey by the Associated Press, a full one-third of Trump voters said that democracy was their top issue. (Two-thirds of Harris voters said the same thing.) In a poll conducted before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, seven out of 10 uncommitted swing-state voters said they doubted that Donald Trump would accept the election results if he lost—but more people said they’d trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than said they’d trust Biden.

Almost all Americans say they support democracy. They even agree that it’s in trouble. But when researchers drill down, they find that different people have very different ideas about what democracy means and what threatens its survival, and that democracy is just one competing value among many. In the collective mind of U.S. voters, the concept of democracy appears to be so muddled, and their commitment to it so conditional, that it makes you wonder what, if anything, they’d do anything to stop its erosion—or whether they’d even notice that happening.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

Americans perceive democracy through an almost completely partisan lens. In recent polls, Democrats tend to cite Trump—in particular, the likelihood of him seeking to subvert elections—as the biggest threat to democracy. They also point to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Trump’s rhetoric about using the government to exact retribution as causes for concern. For Republicans, by contrast, threats to democracy take the form of mainstream media, voting by mail, immigration, and what they see as politically motivated prosecutions of Trump. Perhaps the best Rorschach test is voter-ID laws, which get characterized as “election integrity” or “voter suppression” depending on the perspective: Republicans see them as a commonsense way to make elections more accurate and accountable, while Democrats see them as a ploy to disenfranchise voters who don’t have state-issued identification. No surprise, then, that campaigning on a platform of preserving democracy didn’t work for Kamala Harris. Invoking the term to rally support assumes a shared understanding of what it means.

Even more troubling, American voters rarely prioritize democracy over other considerations. For the most part, we’re willing to overlook mischief that undermines democracy as long as our own team is the one doing it. A 2020 study in the American Political Science Review by Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik of Yale University found that only 3.5 percent of Americans would vote against a candidate whose policies they otherwise support if that candidate took antidemocratic actions, like gerrymandering or reducing the number of polling stations in an unfriendly district. Another survey found that when left-wing voters were presented with hypothetical undemocratic behavior by right-wing politicians—prohibiting protests, say, or giving private groups the ability to veto legislation—62 percent of them considered it undemocratic. But when the same behavior was attributed to left-wing politicians, only 36 percent saw it as undemocratic.

[Graeme Wood: Only about 3.5 percent of Americans care about democracy]

Some scholars have dubbed the phenomenon “democratic hypocrisy.” Others, however, argue that voters aren’t pretending that the antidemocratic behavior they’re supporting is democratic; they really feel that way. “People are pretty good at reasoning their way to believing that whatever they want to happen is the democratic outcome,” Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth, told me. That’s especially true if you can tell yourself that this could be your last chance before the other guy abolishes elections altogether. We just have to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of democracy, the thinking goes. Graham, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Temple University, has studied the reaction to the 2020 presidential election and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Our conclusion was that pretty much everyone who says in polls that the election was stolen actually believes it,” he told me.

The disturbing implication of the political-science research is that if the typical forms of incipient democratic backsliding did occur, at least half the country likely wouldn’t notice or care. Stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists, wielding law enforcement against political enemies, bullying critics into silence—these measures, all credibly threatened by President-Elect Trump, might not cut through the fog of partisan polarization. Short of tanks in the streets, most people might not perceive the destruction of democratic norms in their day-to-day life. And if Trump and his allies lose elections or fail to enact the most extreme pieces of their agenda, those data points will be held up as proof that anyone crying democratic erosion is a Chicken Little. “This is a debate that’s going to be very dumb,” Nyhan said.

You might think that, in a democracy, support for democracy itself would be nonnegotiable—that voters would reject any candidate or leader who didn’t clear that bar, because they would recognize that weakening democracy threatens their way of life. But that simple story isn’t always true. The job of genuinely pro-democracy politicians is to convince voters that democratic norms and institutions really are connected to more tangible issues that they care about—that an America with less democracy would most likely also be one with more economic inequality, for example, and fewer individual liberties.

The alternative to making and remaking the case for democracy is a descent into apathetic nihilism. Just look at the Chinese media’s coverage of the U.S. election. A video shared by China News Service said that whoever won would merely be “the face of the ruling elite, leaving ordinary people as mere spectators.” The state broadcaster China Central Television claimed that the election was plagued by “unprecedented chaos.” That kind of talk makes sense coming from democracy’s enemies. The danger is when democracies themselves start to believe it.