Passing judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never going to be simple for the International Criminal Court. Even harder than acting fairly and impartially would be appearing to have done so, in a conflict that stirs fierce passions the world over.

On top of that, equality before the law is a basic principle of justice, but until this point, the ICC has mainly prosecuted authoritarian and non-Western leaders. Almost all of the court’s top funders are Western democracies or their allies. Now, for the first time in its history, the ICC would be asked to assess the actions of a democratically elected government allied with the West, and to show that it could do so without special favor.

Last Thursday, the ICC rose to this challenge. A three-person panel at the court approved arrest-warrant requests for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The Israeli officials are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder and starvation of Palestinians.

[Eugene Kontorovich: The International Criminal Court’s folly]

Back in May, prosecutors also asked for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, who stand accused of extermination, murder, rape, and sexual assault against Israeli citizens during the attacks of October 7. Two of the three (Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar) have since been killed by Israel. The ICC issued the arrest warrant for the third, Mohammed Deif. Israel claims to have killed him too, but Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The three judges who made the decision hail from Benin, France, and Slovenia, but were elected by all 124 member states of the ICC and went through a rigorous vetting process. Their months-long deliberations included engaging with the Israeli government and assessing its claim that its own courts could handle the matter.

Since its foundation, in 2002, the ICC has investigated crimes all over the world. It is limited in both the types of crimes it can investigate (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression) and its territorial jurisdiction (restricted mostly to its member states, which include countries in the European Union, Latin America, the antipodes, and half of Africa). Yet it has managed to levy charges for crimes committed in 17 countries and issue arrest warrants for despots such as Vladimir Putin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Omar al-Bashir.

For years, however, many non-Western leaders have accused the court of having a pro-Western bias. The arrest warrants against Israeli leaders offer the ICC an opportunity to prove otherwise. But much will depend on how seriously countries allied with Israel take the court’s orders.

The court’s members include the majority of Western countries, which will now be obligated to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if either sets foot in their territory. Canada, one of the court’s biggest funders, was among the first to commit to doing so. Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Australia, Spain, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Slovenia have followed suit. Most other Western countries have treated the warrant with vagueness, generally agreeing that it is valid without committing specifically to arresting Netanyahu and Gallant.

Initially, only one EU member, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a self-described “illiberal democracy,” outright opposed the warrant and even asked Netanyahu to visit. But on November 27, France declared that it considered Netanyahu immune from the ICC’s order because Israel is not a member of the court. If this principle is to be applied elsewhere, Putin, too, should be considered immune, given Russia’s non-membership in the ICC. The United States is also not a member of the court and is in fact openly hostile to its operations. The Biden administration has declared its disagreement with the arrest warrants, and surrogates of President-Elect Donald Trump have accused the court of anti-Semitism, promising a much tougher approach when Trump comes into office.

Netanyahu, like many others wanted by the court, will probably never appear before it. But that doesn’t make the ruling meaningless. International law has always been aspirational, in part because the world lacks an international law-enforcement agency (Interpol serves only to coordinate among various national police forces). But international justice has more significance in the world today than at any previous time in human history. Dozens of treaties obligate countries around the world and are referenced every day in national and transnational courts, sometimes leading to real results for victims and perpetrators. Viewed from a long historical perspective, this is a grand achievement. And last week’s ruling, by demonstrating an equal application of international law to a Western country, advances that cause.

In Governing the World: The History of an Idea, the historian Mark Mazower writes that the quest for a global court began before the First World War, with an enthusiastic, international group of peace activists who hoped that arbitration could bring an end to war. President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of that movement, helped give tooth to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, founded in 1899 at The Hague. But advocates’ hopes soon crashed into the gory realities of the 20th century. The First World War killed millions. The League of Nations, created in its aftermath, was soon overtaken by events: Liberalism retreated behind fascism and communism in the 1930s, and a Second World War followed the first, culminating in atrocities with little precedent in human history.

[Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Still, the quest for international justice did not die. The defeat of Nazi Germany and of Japan, and the revelation of the extraordinary extent of their crimes, led to international trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo and the foundation of the United Nations.

Nearly a century later, the International Criminal Court was founded during the optimistic period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Democracy appeared ascendant, maybe even inevitable. The genocides in Rwanda and the territories of the former Yugoslavia tempered that period’s hopes—but they were met with international tribunals, which held out the promise that war criminals could no longer expect impunity. A United Nations conference in 1998, attended by representatives of 161 states, adopted the Rome Statute, which established the ICC four years later.

Many of the legal professionals who went to work for the ICC had been shaped by the experience of working for the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were relatively successful in delivering verdicts against human-rights offenders. For example, the Iranian Canadian lawyer Payam Akhavan served as a legal adviser at the tribunals for both Rwanda and Yugoslavia and then argued cases before the ICC, where he represented post-Qaddafi Libya as the country attempted to bring officials of the former regime to justice. In his book, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey, Akhavan describes the establishment of the ICC as the consummation of the idea of justice propounded at Nuremberg.

But the ICC has been bedeviled by controversy for much of its short life. In its early years, the court focused largely on African war criminals, because many of its member states were African. This led to allegations of bias. In the years since, it has expanded its operations across the world. And yet, most people live in countries where the court has no jurisdiction. Powerful nations such as China, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia never joined. The United States, Israel, and Russia signed the Rome Statute but then withdrew their signatures. The year the court was founded, the United States adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, in which it promised to take any necessary measures to release “any U.S. or allied personnel” detained by the court.

A far simpler way of denying the court’s authority is to ignore it. In 2015, South Africa refused to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an ICC warrant. Earlier this year, Mongolia all but rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ICC’s warrant for his arrest notwithstanding.

But none of this means that the court, or the quest for international justice more broadly, is ineffectual. Putin has had to skip many an international summit (he skipped the recent Group of 20 meeting in Brazil, just as he did last year’s BRICS meeting in South Africa). And the ICC’s legal work can be used by other courts to prosecute alleged perpetrators. In the case of Israel, Netanyahu and Gallant are unlikely to ever be tried in The Hague, but the world has become much smaller for them. The warrants also provide an opportunity for Israel’s judicial system to prove its mettle: The ICC has declared that if Israel chooses to prosecute the allegations in its national court system, the warrants will be dropped.

The quest to have human conflicts decided by men and women in robes and wigs, and not just those in berets and boots, should resonate deeply with Israel’s founding ideals. The state’s declaration of independence in 1948 promised that it was “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” But it anchored this right in international law, pointing to the newly formed United Nations, which is mentioned seven times in the declaration.

Israel’s first government was led by nationalists and socialists. But the country’s first justice minister, and the architect of its judicial system, was one of the few signatories of the declaration who defined himself primarily as a liberal. A Berlin-born lawyer, Pinchas Rosen had moved to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1926, at the age of 39, having earned law degrees in Germany before the country’s liberal traditions were destroyed by Nazism.

Israel was hardly a liberal paradise in its early years. It enforced a military rule over its Arab citizens until 1966. But Rosen did establish a robust court system and was adamant that the State of Israel was to be a state of law. The country joined the United Nations and, with such legendary diplomats as the British-educated Abba Eban, overcame the isolation of its early years to establish a seat for itself at the table of international law. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 has rightly called that commitment to the law into question; but it has also been the subject of contestation within the country.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Practically all of Israel’s political leaders have condemned the ICC’s decision. But some voices of dissent are audible. Naama Lazimi, a progressive member of the Knesset, called Thursday “a sad day for Israel” and put the blame for the decision on Netanyahu, not the court. “This was unnecessary,” she wrote on X, adding that it could have been avoided if the Israeli government had undertaken an independent inquiry and pursued a settlement to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas. “But Netanyahu chose and still chooses his own position and cynical and personal interests,” she concluded: “The Hague has come out against Netanyahu, Netanyahu against Israel.” The Israeli organization Peace Now has taken a similar position, blaming the country’s leadership.

The long-term interests of Israel and those of enthusiasts for international law need not diverge. As a small country with many ill-wishers, surrounded by militias that clamor for its destruction, Israel often feels itself under siege and classifies any action against it as an unforgivable betrayal. But the country owes much of its past success to its recognition under international law and its membership in the community of democratic nations. Illegally occupying the Palestinian territories, and disregarding competent international forums such as ICC, serve to undermine that status. A world where liberal democratic norms, such as respect for international legal institutions, are more prevalent will ultimately be a safer one for Israel, especially if it wishes to fulfill the dream of its founders to be a Jewish and democratic state.  

The call from The Hague should thus be seen as an urgent message that the country needs to correct its course and step back from the campaign it has pursued since October 2023. True friends of Israel are not those who attempt to shield it from international justice. They are those who remind it that as a sovereign nation, it has the right to defend itself—but not the right to be immune from legal judgment.

Mohamed Bin Salman was speaking at the opening of a summit of Muslim and Arab leaders in Riyadh.

As heads of Arab and Islamic states meet in Riyadh, Trump's victory raises questions for the region.

Throughout Vice President Kamala Harris’s abbreviated presidential run, she often emphasized one key principle that separated her campaign from that of former President Donald Trump. When Trump mocked her laughter, Harris pushed back by framing her propensity for exuberance as an invaluable strength: “I find joy in the American people,” she said in September. “I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it.” On Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the polls closed, Harris once again reminded the voting public of this core value. “To everyone who has worked hard and brought back the joy during this campaign—thank you,” she captioned a video posted to her X account.

But as election results came in, jubilation seemed limited to supporters of her opponent, who espoused a very different view of the fractured electorate. Early Wednesday morning, the media projected that Trump would win, affirming that American voters remain entranced—and energized—by his divisive rhetoric. In her concession speech that afternoon, Harris asked her supporters not to succumb to despair over this moment of darkness, and instead to “fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars—the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.” Harris’s loss is not an unequivocal indictment of joy as an organizing strategy, in electoral politics or otherwise. But it does illustrate the limits of peddling optimism as a change candidate without rigorously critiquing the status quo—especially when voters see you as part of maintaining it.

Hope is always a hard sell, and Harris inherited an unenviable candidacy: President Joe Biden didn’t step down from his reelection bid until a disastrous June debate performance (and some serious muscling within the party) forced his hand. Not only did Harris have less than four months to make her case to the American people, but as Biden’s VP, she was also saddled with the baggage of his administration—right as his approval rating hit a new low. To many voters, Harris represented an extension of the Biden policies that they (sometimes unfairly) blamed for inflation, low wages, and unemployment, a message that Trump hammered home with his slogan “Kamala broke it. Trump will fix it.” Whereas Trump was able to galvanize the GOP base by stoking economic resentments, Harris was tasked with gamely winning over frustrated voters without undermining her party’s sitting president.

Harris’s position in an unpopular White House made her a tricky messenger for idealistic visions of the future, amid both economic discontent and tremendous geopolitical instability. Her ties to the Biden administration also put Harris in a categorically different position than Barack Obama was in during his first presidential run, in 2008, when his sanguine campaign promises landed with voters in part because his call for unity offered a stark departure from hawkish, Bush-era partisan politics. As a presidential candidate, Obama was also a blank slate, having spent just part of his sole senatorial term in the national spotlight; he had more latitude to define himself because he was weighed by very little history.

When asked what she would have done differently from Biden during the past four years, Harris said last month, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind”—other than that she would have had a Republican in her Cabinet. For some voters in the Democrats’ base, that type of rhetoric just didn’t inspire excitement—moderate Democrats’ attempts at bipartisan collaboration, which Republican lawmakers have been less keen to initiate, have at times yielded disappointing results. Nor did it ameliorate concerns about the Biden administration’s continued support of Israel’s war in Gaza, which put the party at odds with some young voters, as well as many in the Black, Muslim, and Arab American communities. Harris, a supporter of Israel, often spoke more empathetically about the conflict in Gaza than Biden did, but she also skirted the issue; asked during a CNN town hall what she would say to someone who was considering supporting a third-party candidate because of her position on the conflict, she deflected by saying that voters “also care about bringing down the price of groceries.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Moments such as this undercut the Harris campaign’s cheerful aesthetics. Asking voters to look past humanitarian atrocities in the name of curbing inflation may be a strategy with precedent, but it’s not one that feels driven by a joyful service mandate. And during a year that’s been disastrous for incumbent politicians around the world, the Democratic Party failed to offer an energizing vision of doing things differently. Take The New York Times’ reporting on how Wall Street’s private-equity firms, investment banks, and wealthy corporate executives were influencing Harris’s economic-policy agenda. Giving “large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” as one executive put it, sounded to some voters a whole lot like business as usual.

For many Americans feeling the downstream pains of corporate greed, preserving the sanctity of a dysfunctional political system is not a motivating factor at the ballot box. But as in 2016, the Democrats focused heavily on how unfit Trump is for the presidency—an argument aimed at wooing suburban Republicans and independents—rather than offering their base exciting, practical solutions to the country’s problems. In 2016, substantial portions of the party’s base rallied around the populist senator Bernie Sanders, but the party instead backed the establishment figure Hillary Clinton (and, according to Sanders’s camp, ignored attempts to help keep his supporters engaged in crucial swing states). The following election cycle, the party again picked a more centrist candidate over Sanders, but Joe Biden heeded some of the lessons from Sanders’s popular campaigns—and forged a broader coalition by moving left on some issues.

Several years later, Harris could have used that enthusiasm—but Democratic leadership didn’t seem to give much thought to why those voters supported Sanders in the first place. Despite the fact that voters consistently identified the economy as the issue most important to them, Harris stopped criticizing Big Business abruptly during her campaign, and the party walked back an earlier proposal to lower everyday costs by combatting grocery price gouging. In the immediate run-up to the election, the campaign pivoted away from emphasizing other commonsense, populist ideas that have clear benefits for average working Americans. Paid family and medical leave, which Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, signed into Minnesota law as the state’s governor, is tremendously popular. So, too, is raising the minimum wage, as results on some state ballot measures show, even in red states such as Alaska.

The rich may insist that money can’t buy happiness, but anyone who has struggled to feed their children or afford rent knows that nothing is more thrilling than finally attaining a modicum of financial security. Addressing the barriers that many Americans face when trying to get there—and their frustrations that the Democratic political establishment doesn’t share their priorities—might just have inspired some lasting optimism this time around.  

Trump won the city of Dearborn, Michigan, which has the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the US.

We did not betray the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party betrayed us.

The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams once observed that alienation is not the loss of an old homeland, but the discovery of a new homeland that casts the former in a more dismal light. Today, the country indeed looks alien. The America many of us believed we knew now appears stranger in retrospect: The anger and resentment we may have thought was pitched at a simmer turned out to be at a rollicking boil. And one of liberals’ most cherished shibboleths from 2016—that Trumpism is a movement for aggrieved white men—unraveled in the face of a realignment that saw the GOP appear to give birth to a multiracial working-class movement. A second Trump presidency is the result of this misjudgment.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and much of it will be directed at Kamala Harris. Rightly so. Her campaign strategy was often confounding. Harris gambled on suburban-Republican support, which she tried to juice by touring with Liz Cheney and moving right on the border, a strategy that many warned was questionable. Meanwhile, in her quest to bring these new conservative voters into the Democratic fold, Harris neglected many of the voters the party has long relied on. She took far too long to reach out to Black men—despite a year’s worth of polling that said she was losing their support—and when she finally did, she had little to offer them but slapdash policies and half-baked promises. It was the same story for Hispanic men. Despite polling showing Donald Trump increasing his Hispanic support, Harris largely ignored the problem until a month before Election Day, when she stitched together a condescending last-minute “Hombres con Harris” push. As for Arab American voters, she and her surrogates couldn’t be bothered to do much more than lecture them.

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

The results speak for themselves: Trump won a stunning victory in a heavily Black county in North Carolina and carried the largest Arab-majority city, Dearborn, Michigan. Early exit polls suggest that he doubled his Black support in Wisconsin and won Hispanic men by 1o points. Meanwhile, Harris’s scheme to run up the score in the suburbs plainly failed to bear fruit: She underperformed Biden’s numbers with these voters. Simply put, almost nothing about the Harris game plan worked. But as easy as it is to play Monday-morning (or rather, Wednesday-morning) quarterback—and her dubious campaigning provides plenty of material to work with—the reality is that Harris was probably doomed from the jump.

The reason is that she had an 81-year-old albatross hanging around her neck: Joe Biden. When Biden got into the 2020 presidential race, he said he was motivated to defeat the man who blamed “both sides” for a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Five years later, Biden’s inability to see his own limitations handed that same man the White House once more. Nobody bears more responsibility for Trump’s reascension to the presidency than the current president. This failure lies at his feet.

Biden was supposed to be a one-term candidate. During his 2019 campaign, he heavily signaled that he would not run again if he won. “He is going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection,” one of his advisers declared. Biden himself promised to be a “transition” candidate, holding off Trump for four years while making room for a fresh Democratic challenger in 2024. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said at a Michigan campaign event with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of those promising younger Democrats Biden was ostensibly making room for.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years.

The idea that Americans would vote for a man who they overwhelmingly thought was too old and cognitively infirm stretched reason to its breaking point. And yet Biden and his enablers in the Democratic Party doubled down on magical thinking. This was a species of madness worthy of King Lear shaking his fist before the encroaching storm. And like Lear, what the current president ultimately raged against was nature itself—that final frailty, aging and decline—as he stubbornly clung to the delusion that he could outrun human biology.

[Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for fascism]

Nature won, as it always does. After flouting the will of his own voters, after his party did everything in its power to clear the runway for his reelection bid, and after benefiting from an army of commentators and superfans who insisted that mounting video evidence of his mental slips were “cheap fakes,” Biden crashed and burned at the debate in June. He hung on for another month, fueling the flames of scandal and intraparty revolt and robbing his successor of badly needed time to begin campaigning. And yet when he finally did stand down, Biden World immediately spun up the just-so story that the president is an honorable man who stepped aside for the good of the country.

He did not stand down soon enough. The cake was baked. The powers that be decided the hour was too late for a primary or contested convention, so an unpopular president was replaced with an unpopular vice president, who wasted no time in reminding America why her own presidential bid failed just a few years before. The limitations of Harris’s campaign are now laid bare for all to see, but her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.

Harris could not distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation and the southern border. She could not distance herself from his unpopular foreign policy in the Middle East. She could not break from him while she simultaneously served as his deputy. And she could not tell an obvious truth—that the sitting U.S. president is not fit for office—when asked by reporters, and so she was forced into Orwellian contortions. If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark.

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

Last month, the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, for “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” Don’t let the dry language fool you: The award generated more controversy than any other in recent memory. One critic wrote that “it exposes how the economics discipline fails to ask critical questions.” Another called the trio’s work “historically inaccurate, if not ideologized.” I confess to emailing a long rant to colleagues in my department.

Why so much drama? In the work that won the Nobel, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson—three highly respected economists almost universally referred to as “AJR” by their peers—argue that nations with democratic institutions have the most economic growth. It’s an appealing thesis that reaffirms the political systems of Western democracies. The problem—not just for the theory, but for the resilience of those political systems—is that it simply isn’t true.

According to AJR, certain kinds of economic institutions—private property, freedom of contract, a strong and impartial legal system, the freedom to form new businesses—are “inclusive,” meaning they allow most people to freely participate in the economy in a way that makes the best use of their skills. These institutions create modern, wealthy economies that are driven forward by technological innovation, not merely propped up by having won the natural-resources lottery.

Economic institutions do not just drop out of the sky. The laws and systems that make an economy run, such as market regulations, must be created and maintained by governments. AJR therefore argue that political institutions dictate economic outcomes. A nation’s political institutions are what determine who can rule, how these rulers are chosen, and how power is distributed across government. The institutions are enshrined in constitutions, electoral rules, and even traditions. In a dictatorship or monarchy, political power is narrowly distributed and relatively unconstrained. In such cases, AJR argue, a small ruling class will tend to use its power to restrict competition and extract wealth for itself. By contrast, if political power is widely distributed across diverse groups in a society, then their common interest in doing business, and competition among them, will result in prosperity-generating economic institutions.

In the United States, for instance, the oil industry would prefer not to have to compete with alternative energy. Old-stock citizens don’t want to compete with recent immigrants. But if the government is given the power to exclude my rivals, that same power could potentially be used against me. So, according to AJR’s thesis, our common desire to maximize our individual liberties and protect our property prevents us from ceding such power to the government. We’d rather keep the competition than risk getting shut out of the game. And that competition forces us to be ever more efficient.

In the end, AJR claim, decentralized democratic systems such as those found in the U.S., Germany, and Switzerland foster economic prosperity by improving a nation’s ability to innovate. Democracies with more centralized power are less productive. (Think of countries such as France, Portugal, and Greece, which have less separation of powers, fewer checks and balances, and relatively weak state and local governments.) Finally, one-party states and authoritarian regimes—those with even more centralized and less competitive political systems—breed stagnation.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Why does anyone care about the Nobel Prize?]

The most common critique of the AJR thesis hinges on methodological objections to the way in which they collected and analyzed the data. But you do not need a degree in economics or statistics to be skeptical of their argument. The real world simply provides too many counterexamples.

On the one hand, there are the nondemocratic systems whose economies have done quite well. To take the most obvious, China’s economy has grown fantastically since the late 1970s even as its political system has remained autocratic and repressive. It is now a global competitor or leader in electric vehicles, solar panels, quantum computing, biotechnology, mobile payment systems, artificial intelligence, 5G cellular, and nuclear-fusion research. South Korea and Taiwan are democracies now, but each grew from an agricultural backwater into a technological powerhouse from the ’60s to the ’90s, while they were relatively authoritarian states. The same goes for Japan. After World War II, Japan’s wealth grew dramatically as the country became a world leader in technology and manufacturing. At the time, it was a one-party state, with heavy government intervention in the economy. Elections were held regularly, but only the Liberal Democratic Party won. The party therefore controlled almost every major political institution throughout the country for nearly four decades, resulting in infamous, widespread corruption. Still, the economy flourished.

On the other hand, examples abound of decentralized democracies that don’t experience the kind of knowledge- and technology-driven growth that AJR celebrate. Canada is a relatively wealthy nation, but over the past several decades, without any change to its institutions, it has fallen into a prolonged productivity slump. AJR consider Australia, another decentralized democracy, to be an example of their theory in action, but its wealth comes overwhelmingly from natural resources; it is not particularly good at cutting-edge science and technology. Nor has decentralized democracy propelled Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and India into the economic stratosphere. Great Britain was the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced high-tech superpower during the 18th and 19th centuries, but it lost that position even as its political institutions became more democratic and distributed.

A particularly revealing example is Spain. Spain has been institutionally transformed since 1975. It went from 40 years of military dictatorship to a market-oriented, decentralized democracy. Despite this revolution, there has been little relative change in Spain’s national innovation rate. Its economic growth per capita has averaged less than 1.5 percent per year since the dictatorship ended. That’s far worse than Ireland (a unitary democracy), Singapore (a “partly free” one-party democracy, according to Freedom House), and Vietnam (a communist dictatorship), each of which leveled up its economic competitiveness during the same time period.

AJR have responded to these critiques, often in point-by-point fashion. They have argued, for example, that China’s growth will be unsustainable in the long term if its political institutions don’t change. India, meanwhile, might be a decentralized democracy, but it is “highly patrimonial,” which “militates against the provision of public goods.” Arguments such as these are unfalsifiable: One can always explain away seemingly inconsistent results by pointing to some overlooked characteristic of a given country. And if a culture of patrimony has defeated otherwise-healthy institutions in India, then maybe institutions aren’t so fundamental after all.

If political institutions don’t explain economic outcomes, what does? My colleagues who study innovation and economic growth point to many possible answers, including culture, ideology, individual leadership, and geography. In my own research, I have found that countries with technology-driven, high-growth economies share one thing in common: a powerful sense of external threat. Some fear invasion; others worry about being cut off from a vital economic input, such as energy, food, and investment capital. Taiwan’s very existence is threatened by China, as was Israel’s after the Arab states began to unite around it. These two countries needed to build high-tech defense industries at home and earn money to purchase advanced weapons systems produced abroad.

Stagnant economies, by contrast, tend to be more focused on internal divisions. They are less concerned about military attacks or imports of essential goods and suffer more from deep conflicts over class, race, geography, or religion. If a nation’s internal threats are perceived to outweigh its external threats, then its people will fear the costs, risks, and redistribution of building a competitive economy. The pie is safe, so they fight over the relative size of their slice. (If I’m right, then Donald Trump’s focus on persecuting “the enemy from within” bodes ill for America’s economic prospects should he be reelected this week.) But if a nation’s sense of external threat is greater than its sense of internal threat, then it tends to invest in innovation. The costs and risks are worth it. The pie is in danger, so people cooperate to defend it.The question of why some countries thrive and others stagnate isn’t just an academic one. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, under pressure from the West, Russia created a parliament and privatized state assets; the West declared victory. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, set up a parliament and a stock market, and then announced “Mission accomplished.” The promised economic miracles never materialized.

[Brian Klaas: The dictator myth that refuses to die]

Western democracies too often assume that setting up the right institutions will bring about the desired outcomes. It doesn’t. A society uses institutions to accomplish its goals. But the goals come first, and they are determined by fights over wealth, power, resources, ideas, identities, culture, history, race, religion, and status.

How did such a demonstrably incorrect thesis win the Nobel Prize? In part, I suspect, because it tells the story that many educated Westerners want to hear about democracy. We want to live in a world where democracy cures all. But if democratic nations overpromise what democracy can achieve, they risk delegitimizing it. In Russia, China, and much of the Middle East, democracy is widely seen as dysfunctional, partly because it has not delivered the promised economic prosperity.

Ambitious politicians recognize that institutions are tools, not causal forces. In different hands, the same tools will achieve different ends. Men such as Hitler and Mussolini understood this. They exploited fundamental political divides to undermine both democracy and markets. These lessons are not lost on modern leaders such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and even some here in the United States. We therefore ignore the more fundamental political forces at our peril. So do Nobel Prize winners.

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