A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

In his 2023 Netflix comedy special, Selective Outrage, Chris Rock identified one of the core contradictions of the social-justice era: “Everybody’s full of shit,” Rock said, including in the category of “everybody” people who type “woke” tweets “on a phone made by child slaves.”

I was reminded of that acerbic routine while reading Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, We Have Never Been Woke. Al-Gharbi, a 41-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, opens with the political disillusionment he experienced when he moved from Arizona to New York. He was immediately struck by the “racialized caste system” that everyone in the big liberal city seems to take “as natural”: “You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.” At the push of a button, people—mostly hugely underpaid immigrants and people of color—will do your shopping and drive you wherever you want to go.

He contrasts that with the “podunk” working-class environment he’d left behind, where “the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race—white—and the socioeconomic gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller.” He continues: “Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.” The Americans who take the most advantage of exploited workers, he argues, are the same Democratic-voting professionals in progressive bastions who most “conspicuously lament inequality.”

[Read: The blindness of elites]

Musa sees the reelection of Donald Trump as a reflection of Americans’ resentment toward elites and the “rapid shift in discourse and norms around ‘identity’ issues” that he refers to as the “Great Awokening.” To understand what’s happening to American politics, he told me, we shouldn’t look to the particulars of the election—“say, the attributes of Harris, how she ran her campaign, inflation worries, and so on,” but rather to this broader backlash. All of the signs were there for elites to see if only they’d bothered to look.

One question We Have Never Been Woke sets out to answer is why elites are so very blind, including to their own hypocrisy. The answer al-Gharbi proposes is at once devastatingly simple yet reaffirmed everywhere one turns: Fooled by superficial markers of their own identity differences—racial, sexual, and otherwise—elites fail to see themselves for what they truly are.

“When people say things about elites, they usually focus their attention on cisgender heterosexual white men” who are “able-bodied and neurotypical,” al-Gharbi told me, in one of our conversations this fall. Most elites are white, of course, but far from all. And elites today, he added, also “increasingly identify as something like disabled or neurodivergent, LGBTQ.” If you “exclude all of those people from analysis, then you’re just left with this really tiny and misleading picture of who the elites are, who benefits from the social order, how they benefit.”

Sociologists who have studied nonwhite elites in the past have tended to analyze them mainly in the contexts of the marginalized groups from which they came. E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 classic, Black Bourgeoisie, for example, spotlighted the hypocrisy and alienation of relatively prosperous Black Americans who found themselves doubly estranged: from the white upper classes they emulated as well as from the Black communities they’d left behind. By analyzing nonwhites and other minorities as elites among their peers, al-Gharbi is doing something different. “Elites from other groups are often passed over in silence or are explicitly exempted from critique (and even celebrated!),” he writes. And yet, “behaviors, lifestyles, and relationships that are exploitative, condescending, or exclusionary do not somehow become morally noble or neutral when performed by members of historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups.”

When al-Gharbi uses the word elite, he is talking about the group to which he belongs: the “symbolic capitalists”—broadly speaking, the various winners of the knowledge economy who do not work with their hands and who produce and manipulate “data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations.” These are the people who set the country’s norms through their dominance of the “symbolic economy,” which consists of media, academic, cultural, technological, legal, nonprofit, consulting, and financial institutions.  

Although symbolic capitalists are not exactly the same as capitalist capitalists, or the rest of the upper class that does not rely on income, neither are they—as graduate students at Columbia and Yale can be so eager to suggest—“the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” The theorist Richard Florida has written about a group he calls the “creative class,” which represents 30 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and which overlaps significantly with al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists. Using survey data from 2017, Florida calculated that members of that creative class earned twice as much over the course of the year as members of the working class—an average of $82,333 versus $41,776, respectively.

Symbolic capitalists aren’t a monolith, but it is no secret that their ruling ideology is the constellation of views and attitudes that have come to be known as “wokeness,” which al-Gharbi defines as beliefs about social justice that “inform how mainstream symbolic capitalists understand and pursue their interests—creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation.”

Al-Gharbi’s own path is emblematic of the randomness and possibility of membership in this class. The son of military families on both sides, one Black and one white, he attended community college for six years, “taking classes off and on while working,” he told me. There he was lucky to meet a talented professor, who “basically took me under his wing and helped me do something different,” al-Gharbi said. Together, they focused on private lessons in Latin, philosophy, and classics—subjects not always emphasized in community college.

Around that time he was also going on what he calls “this whole religious journey”: “I initially tried to be a Catholic priest, and then I became an atheist for a while, but I had this problem. I rationally convinced myself that religion was bullshit and there is no God, but I couldn’t make myself feel it.” Then he read the Quran and “became convinced that it was a prophetic work. And so I was like, Well, if I believe that Muhammad is a prophet and I believe in God, that’s the two big things. So maybe I am a Muslim.” Soon after, he changed his name. Then, just when he was getting ready to transfer out of community college, his twin brother, Christian, was killed on deployment in Afghanistan. He chose to go somewhere close to his grieving family, the University of Arizona, to finish his degree in Near-Eastern studies and philosophy.

The same dispassionate analysis that he applies to his own life’s progress he brings to bear on America’s trends, especially the Great Awokening. He traces that widespread and sudden movement in attitudes not to the death of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, nor to Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement, nor to the election of Donald Trump, but to September 2011 and the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged from the ashes of the financial crisis.

“In reality, Occupy was not class oriented,” he argues. By focusing its critique on the top 1 percent of households, which were overwhelmingly white, and ignoring the immense privilege of the more diverse symbolic capitalists just beneath them, the movement, “if anything, helped obscure important class differences and the actual causes of social stratification.” This paved the way for “elites who hail from historically underrepresented populations … to exempt themselves from responsibility for social problems and try to deflect blame onto others.”

[Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy]

Al-Gharbi is neither an adherent of wokeism nor an anti-woke scold. He would like to both stem the progressive excesses of the summer of 2020, a moment when white liberals “tended to perceive much more racism against minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing,” and see substantive social justice be achieved for everyone, irrespective of whether they hail from a historically disadvantaged identity group or not. The first step, he argues, is to dispel the notion that the Great Awokening was “some kind of unprecedented new thing.”

Awokenings, in al-Gharbi’s telling, are struggles for power and status in which symbolic capitalists, often instinctively and even subconsciously, leverage social-justice discourse not on behalf of the marginalized but in service of their own labor security, political influence, and social prestige. He does not see this as inherently nefarious—indeed, like Tocqueville and many others before him, he recognizes that motivated self-interest can be the most powerful engine for the common good. Al-Gharbi argues that our current Awokening, which peaked in 2021 and is now winding down, is really the fourth such movement in the history of the United States.

The first coincided with the Great Depression, when suddenly “many who had taken for granted a position among the elite, who had felt more or less entitled to a secure, respected, and well-paying professional job, found themselves facing deeply uncertain futures.”

The next would take place in the 1960s, once the radicals of the ’30s were firmly ensconced within the bourgeoisie. “The driver was not the Vietnam War itself,” al-Gharbi stresses. That had been going on for years without protest. Nor was the impetus the civil-rights movement, gay liberation, women’s liberation, or any such cause. “Instead, middle-class students became radical precisely when their plans to leave the fighting to minorities and the poor by enrolling in college and waiting things out began to fall through,” he argues. “It was at that point that college students suddenly embraced anti-war activism, the Black Power movement, feminism, postcolonial struggles, gay rights, and environmentalism in immense numbers,” appropriating those causes for their own gain.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The third Awokening was smaller and shorter than the others, stretching from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, and repurposing and popularizing the Marxist term political correctness. Its main legacy was to set the stage for the fourth—and present—Awokening, which has been fueled by what the scholar Peter Turchin has termed “elite overproduction”: Quite simply, America creates too many highly educated, highly aspirational young people, and not enough high-status, well-paid jobs for them to do. The result, al-Gharbi writes, is that “frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants [seek] to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” It is one of the better and more concise descriptions of the so-called cancel culture that has defined and bedeviled the past decade of American institutional life. (As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, political purges often serve as jobs programs.)  

The book is a necessary corrective to the hackneyed discourse around wealth and privilege that has obtained since 2008. At the same time, al-Gharbi’s focus on symbolic capitalists leaves many levers of power unexamined. Whenever I’m in the company of capitalist capitalists, I’m reminded of the stark limitations of the symbolic variety. Think of how easily Elon Musk purchased and then destroyed that vanity fair of knowledge workers formerly known as Twitter. While some self-important clusters of them disbanded to Threads or Bluesky to post their complaints, Musk helped Trump win the election. His PAC donated $200 million to the campaign, while Musk served as Trump’s hype man at rallies and on X. Trump has since announced that Musk will be part of the administration itself, co-leading the ominously named Department of Government Efficiency.

Al-Gharbi’s four Great Awokenings framework can sometimes feel too neat. In a review of We Have Never Been Woke in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Marks points out a small error in the book. Al-Gharbi relies on research by Richard Freeman to prove that a bust in the labor market for college graduates ignited the second Awokening. But al-Gharbi gets the date wrong: “Freeman’s comparison isn’t between 1958 and 1974. It’s between 1968 and 1974”—too late, Marks argued, to explain what al-Gharbi wants it to explain. (When I asked al-Gharbi about this, he acknowledged the mistake on the date but insisted the point still held: “The thing that precipitated the massive unrest in the 1960s was the changing of draft laws in 1965,” he said. “A subsequent financial crisis made it tough for elites to get jobs, ramping things up further.” He argued it was all the same crisis: an expanding elite “growing concerned that the lives and livelihoods they’d taken for granted are threatened and may, in fact, be out of reach.”)

Despite such quibbles, al-Gharbi’s framework remains a powerful one. By contrasting these periods, al-Gharbi stressed to me, we can not only understand what is happening now but also get a sense of the shape of wokenesses to come. As he sees it, “the way the conversation often unfolds is just basically saying wokeness is puritanism or religion,” he explained. “They think Puritanism sucks, or religion sucks,” he continued. But just saying that “wokeness is bad” is not “super useful.”

Indeed, one of the primary reasons such anti-woke reactions feel so unsatisfactory is that wokeness, not always but consistently, stems from the basic recognition of large-scale problems that really do exist. Occupy Wall Street addressed the staggering rise of inequality in 21st-century American life; Black Lives Matter emerged in response to a spate of reprehensible police and vigilante killings that rightfully shocked the nation’s conscience; #MeToo articulated an ambient sexism that degraded women’s professional lives and made us consider subtler forms of exploitation and abuse. The self-dealing, overreach, and folly that each of these movements begat does not absolve the injustices they emerged to address. On the contrary, they make it that much more urgent to deal effectively with these ills.

[Musa al-Gharbi: Police punish the ‘good apples’]

Any critique of progressive illiberalism that positions the latter as unprecedented or monocausal—downstream of the Civil Rights Act, as some conservatives like to argue—is bound not only to misdiagnose the problem but to produce ineffective or actively counterproductive solutions to it as well. Wokeness is, for al-Gharbi, simply the way in which a specific substratum of elites “engage in power struggles and struggles for status,” he said. “Repealing the Civil Rights Act or dismantling DEI or rolling back Title IX and all of that will not really eliminate wokeness.”

Neither will insisting that its adherents must necessarily operate from a place of bad faith. In fact, al-Gharbi believes it is the very sincerity of their belief in social justice that keeps symbolic capitalists from understanding their own behavior, and the counterproductive social role they often play. “It’s absolutely possible for someone to sincerely believe something,” al-Gharbi stressed, “but also use it in this instrumental way.”

Having been born into one minority group and converted to another as an adult, al-Gharbi has himself accrued academic pedigree and risen to prominence, in no small part, by critiquing his contemporaries who flourished during the last Great Awokening. He is attempting to outflank them, too, aligning himself even more fully with the have-nots. Yet his work is permeated by a refreshing awareness of these facts. “A core argument of this book is that wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists,” he concedes. “I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.”

The educated knowledge workers who populate the Democratic Party need more of this kind of clarity and introspection. Consider recent reports that the Harris campaign declined to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in part out of concerns that it would upset progressive staffers, who fussed over language and minuscule infractions while the country lurched toward authoritarianism.

Al-Gharbi’s book’s title is drawn from Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which famously argued for a “symmetrical anthropology” that would allow researchers to turn the lens of inquiry upon themselves, subjecting modern man to the same level of analytical rigor that his “primitive” and premodern counterparts received. What is crucial, al-Gharbi insists, “is not what’s in people’s hearts and minds.” Rather the question must always be: “How is society arranged?” To understand the inequality that plagues us—and then to actually do something about it—we are going to have to factor in ourselves, our allies, and our preferred narratives too. Until that day, as the saying about communism goes, real wokeness has never even been tried.

Although I came of age at a moment when politicians on both sides of the aisle were amenable to hearing each other’s ideas, we’re now at a juncture where each side seems more or less unpersuadable, unbudgeable, at least on the big stuff. The same goes for a substantial wedge of the public. We’re all rooted in our own media ecosystems, standing on different epistemological substrates, working with different understandings of what we think—know—is true.

The 2020 election was stolen; it wasn’t stolen. Immigrants are what make America great; immigrants are the problem. Inflation is going down; eggs cost too much. (They do cost too much, though for reasons that probably aren’t Joe Biden’s fault.) Abortion is an issue over which there really may be no compromise—this is life we’re arguing over. Life! What could be more fundamental than that?

I could go on.

And Democrats, just among themselves, are already arguing over why Tuesday night’s election turned out the way it did. How I loathe this part, all the gladiatorial intraparty bedlam: Racism was the main cause. Misogyny was the main cause. The intense estrangement and demoralization of the white working class, that’s what did them in—not only did they see their jobs slip away, but they were told that they were bad people when the words white supremacy entered the liberal lexicon, the mainstream media, and the vocabulary of many progressive politicians. All the talk about trans rights did them in—why do Democrats talk about gender-affirming care (and use that phrase) when parents have legitimate anxieties about their 18-year-olds who want top surgery? “Defund the police” did them in—don’t many people in dodgy or dangerous neighborhoods want cops? Elon Musk and Joe Rogan were the problem. The cultural conservatism of Hispanics was the problem. The failure to recognize illegal immigration and inflation and crime was the problem. Joe Biden’s mental decline was the problem; his not coming clean about it was the problem. The result was inevitable, because center-left parties are folding around the globe like beach chairs. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

So the question becomes: How do we move forward without venom, without looking at strangers—and people within our own party—as potential enemies? As people who, if given their druthers, would undo the American project and destroy its values and make this country profoundly unsafe? (Which is something, by the way, that both sides believe.)

My answer would be something pretty basic, but at least achievable—a step the media can least try to take, that local leaders can partially achieve, but that we, as citizens, can most easily do ourselves: We can focus on our vulnerabilities. We can choose to talk about and pass bills to address and continually emphasize the human hardships that bind us together. We all experience grief. We all have disabled relatives in our family whom we worry about. We all need friendship and mourn the relationships that have faded away. We all get cancer or some other disease that makes us reckon with our own mortality. We get chronic illnesses; our bodies fail.

These five subjects are exactly what I’ve written about since joining The Atlantic in 2021. Suddenly, in my 50s, I found myself unconsciously drifting toward existential matters, because they started looming like smoke. What gives life meaning—this is what matters to me now. If not now, in life’s final innings, then when?

And we share so many other common struggles. Worries about our kids, if we have them. The trials of eldercare. The comforts of religion, if you’re religious, or the values and belief systems and structures that guide you, if you’re not. We all want love. We all want fulfillment. Married people all know how hard marriage is, if they’re in one, and divorced people know how hard divorce is, if they’re in the midst of that.

Most people instinctively lean into these topics.

Last year, I wrote about my intellectually disabled aunt, who had the catastrophic misfortune of being institutionalized in 1953, when she wasn’t yet 2. Along the way, I met a woman, Grace Feist, whose child had the same condition but the good fortune to be born 60-plus years later, and therefore led a far better life, a good life. The times had changed, sure, but her mother was a roaring outboard motor of determination when it came to supporting her girl, learning sign language and building what amounted to a Montessori school in her own home.

She was a devoted Christian who told me repeatedly how much she loved God; I think of the universe as a big-bang-size, multidimensional expanse of indifference. Yet I am psychotically attached to her. In fact, I fell instantly in love—she is warm and generous and funny and partial to silver flip-flops even when it’s 20 degrees out, because she’s used to the cold, having spent years freezing her ass off working security at an oil field in North Dakota, where she got to see the northern lights.

When we came around to discussing politics, she mentioned that she’d voted for Trump in 2020. I had not. But her reaction, almost immediately, was to tell me that she thought Republicans had lost their heads about masks—Was it that big a deal to wear one? Really?—and that she herself always wore one, because her youngest child had immunological issues. And I responded by telling her that I thought the Democratic policy positions on trans issues were excessive and ignored the legitimate concerns of parents, who didn’t want their adolescents making precipitous and irreversible decisions about their body when other factors could so often be at play. (To my fellow Democrats: Yes, there are kids who absolutely know they’re trans—I think of Jan Morris, who realized this at 3 or 4 while sitting under a piano—but I worry about the teenagers who suddenly come to this same conclusion when they hadn’t previously felt this way.)

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Our impulse was to find consensus. Most people’s ideas about politics are pretty nuanced.

And that assumes they’re thinking about politics in the first place. Many people—27 percent, according to a 2023 Gallup poll—just don’t give that much of a shit. (And 41 percent follow national political news only “somewhat closely.”) It’s not part of their thinking in their everyday life. Grace and her husband, a lovely and quiet guy named Jerry, are far more preoccupied with other matters. I told them I’d just written a story about Steve Bannon, the one and only substantial feature I’ve written about planet Trump; neither had heard of the guy.

Grace and I were tied for life, in spite of our differences. Her child, my aunt, our love and  pained concern for them both—these were far deeper connections. And yes, I know:How hokey and Pollyannaish. Liberals will likely say: We have work to do. Trump is dangerous. We’re faltering on the precipice of catastrophe, if we haven’t already backwards-tumbled into the brink. And yes, I agree. We do have work to do; we should be terrified; we should be mourning the country that was. But more than half the nation doesn’t feel that way. And focusing on the shared things, the so-very-basic things, is the one thing within our control. They’re real. They matter. They’re the stuff of life.

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.