Richard Tikey builds coke-oven doors for U.S. Steel. He’s a union guy, through and through: He’s been a union member for 26 years, and is now the vice president of his local, the United Steelworkers 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his adult life voting for Democrats.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lobbied hard for votes like Tikey’s. The Biden administration increased tariffs on foreign steel and spent hundreds of billions on heavy infrastructure. It supported union drives, stocked the National Labor Relations Board with worker-friendly lawyers, banned noncompete clauses, expanded eligibility for overtime, cracked down on union busting, and extended protections for civil servants. Biden was the first president in history to walk a picket line.

In contrast, Donald Trump has supported “right to work” laws, attempted to gut federal worker protections, and named union busters to lead the Department of Labor and the NLRB. He has also supported firing workers on strike, stiffed contractors for his campaigns and businesses, described American wages as “too high,” and bragged that he denied his own workers overtime pay.

Even so, weeks before the election, Tikey appeared in a lime-green hard hat and a Steelworkers for Trump T-shirt, giving a thumbs-up for cameras alongside the once and future president. “Why would we support Democrats?” Tikey told me this month. “Every time we have a Republican in office, things are better.”

Millions of other union members feel the same way. Exit polls indicate that nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43 percent in 2016 and 37 percent in 2000. Other polling shows that Trump commanded a 26-point lead among white voters without a college degree in union homes, up nine points since 2020. Conversely, Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters.

These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class. In the past decade, it has also become less racially polarized, with Black, Asian, and Latino voters shifting red. And education has become a much stronger predictor of a person’s partisanship. Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.

The Republican coalition has become more diverse, while the Democrats have seen their working-class base—the working-class base that delivered them election after election in the 20th century—walk away. What would it take to get voters like Tikey to come back?

First, Democrats need to understand how they lost them. The commonly told story is an economic one, which I have heard from union leaders, the Bernie left, and blue-collar voters who have started voting Republican. The Democrats have more liberal economic policies than the GOP: They support higher taxes on the wealthy and more progressive spending. But this is not the same thing as being pro-worker. And the party has shed voters as it has become more corporatist, pro-globalization, and cosmopolitan.

A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the heartland and suppressed wages. A Democratic president, Barack Obama, failed to pass “card check,” which would have made forming unions radically easier. He also negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which unions argued would send American jobs overseas. More broadly, Democrats failed to prevent the collapse of the unionized workforce, two decades of stagnation in middle-income wages, and the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt. Their answer was to “compensate the losers,” rather than avoid policies that generated losers to begin with. This cost them votes, as well as credibility among many working-class voters.

“Beginning with Jimmy Carter, there was an increasing effort to see unions and labor as a special interest, rather than a foundational part of the party,” Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “There hasn’t been a political party in this country with working people at the table for decades. This is the bed the Democrats made for themselves, and it obviously has not paid off in the way they anticipated.”

At the same time, particularly in the past decade, Republicans have become more economically populist. The mainstream of the party now promotes restricting trade and running enormous deficits, even during economic expansions. They may threaten to make huge cuts to popular social programs, but rarely actually do so. The Affordable Care Act lives on; Medicare and Social Security remain untouched. Trump signed a stimulus bill twice as large as Obama’s.

Neither party delivered what it promised, economy-wise. It cost the Democrats and helped the GOP.

Political scientists and pollsters layer a cultural story onto this economic story. Since the 1970s, academics have noted that as societies have become wealthier, their voters have tended to care less about bread-and-butter financial issues and life-and-death defense ones. They begin voting on topics such as the environment, immigration, gender equity, and civil rights. (Academics call this “postmaterialism.”) People can “choose parties on the basis of their overall social and cultural views,” Matthew Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told me.

Voters on both the right and the left have become postmaterial. The college-educated have aligned with the Democrats, attracted by the party’s views on climate change and racial equality. Non-college-educated voters have shifted toward the Republicans on the basis of immigration, abortion, and race. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist, told me that Trump’s coalition might have been slightly lower-income than Harris’s during this election. If so, it would likely be the first time the Republican coalition was less wealthy than the Democratic coalition in decades. “You have the party of the working class versus the professional class,” he said, but it’s “cultural issues that are driving these changes.”

The greater emphasis on cultural issues has posed problems for both parties in their appeals to the American center, even as it has attracted votes too. In 2022, voters turned away from the GOP after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. (Some pollsters expected the same in 2024, but other issues predominated.) In the past three elections, the left’s position on immigration has alienated it from Latino voters it was desperately trying to hang on to. As my colleague Rogé Karma writes, these voters didn’t care about immigration as much as they cared about kitchen-table economics, and many had less liberal opinions about the border than professional Democrats.

The Democrats’ positions have proved the more alienating ones for the small-c conservative American public—something the party has been slow to acknowledge. “The Democratic Party is incredibly well educated and has incredibly liberal views on social issues, relative to the population as a whole,” Grossmann noted. “It is just not very easy to change that.”

For all that cultural issues help explain how Democrats lost the working class over the past two decades, the economy nevertheless seems to have been the decisive factor in Trump’s 2024 victory.

In polls, voters consistently named high prices as their top concern. They consistently said they trusted Trump to do better on the issue of inflation. Democrats pointed to the good headline numbers in terms of GDP growth, inequality, jobs, and wages, as well as the inflation-rate decline since 2022. Voters felt like the Democrats were ignoring or gaslighting them. Harris did not criticize the Biden administration for its role in stoking inflation. This cost her votes and perhaps the election, a pattern that has played out for incumbent parties around the world.

The Biden administration also fumbled in making the case for its policies to middle-income voters. Biden and Harris passed a tremendous amount of legislation but struggled to distill the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and thousands of finicky provisions into tangible policy deliverables that the public could grasp. “While voters across party lines strongly supported Biden’s populist economic policies, many were not aware that his administration had enacted them,” an election postmortem by the left-of-center polling group Data for Progress found.

When I talked with voters during the campaign, I would often ask them what they thought Harris and Trump would do once in office. People tended to give specific answers for Trump, whether they themselves were a Democrat or a Republican. He’d enact tariffs, close the border, fire civil servants, and deport undocumented criminals. Even motivated Democrats, I found, struggled to name Harris’s top priorities. Someone might respond with 10 answers or sometimes none.

The candidates the Democrats ran and the strategies their campaigns deployed were less-than-ideal too. Biden’s age and Harris’s lack of authentic connection with voters, something that’s hard to measure but not hard to see, were obstacles to victory. The Democrats’ character-based vilification of Trump failed to connect for many voters who liked the guy and supported his policies. “People underestimated the appeal of Trump’s message to nonwhite working-class audiences,” Ruffini told me. “They didn’t think it could cross over.”

History suggests that things will get easier for Democrats, in some ways. If past trends hold, the party will pick up five or more points in the midterms without doing anything. The Republicans will start passing policies and instantly become less popular in the eyes of voters, left and right. And in the next presidential campaign, the Democrats will benefit from being able to run unencumbered by incumbency, against Trumpism, if not Trump himself.

Still, pollsters and political scientists told me, the party needs to change. The “Brahmin left”—meaning the educated elite that now makes up the Democratic Party’s base—is not a big enough bloc to defeat Republicans going forward. Democrats have to get back at least some members of the middle class, the working poor, and the unions.

In terms of kitchen-table policies, well, the Democrats need to have some. Just a few. Big ones. Popular ones that are easy to understand. A bill that caps the price of all prescription drugs at $25 a month, say, rather than a 19-point policy white paper.

The content of such proposals matters too. The Brahmin left tends to be more supportive of redistribution than the working class, which tends to prefer something that economists call “predistribution”: high minimum wages rather than welfare payments, pro-union policies rather than refundable tax credits, antitrust measures rather than food stamps. Moderate families also give higher marks to social spending that feels like infrastructure: universal pre-K, guaranteed jobs programs, and public internet.

The cultural drift of the party will be harder to change, political analysts told me. Tacking to the center would mean repudiating activists on immigration, the environment, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and abortion—the same activists who have marched in the streets, raised money, and knocked on doors for Democrats, and have become its most loyal voters. It would mean ignoring many of Washington’s most powerful nonprofits and interest groups. “I’m a progressive,” Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, told me. “I’m not even sure it would work, because the reputation of the party is so set in.”

Indeed, Harris brought up that she was a gun owner and ran on her record as a prosecutor. She did not emphasize trans-rights issues, nor did she use the term Latinx in speeches. What did her relative centrism get her?

Still, pollsters noted that some politicians have had success with their cultural appeals to more conservative voters: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington. It might not take much more than loudly rejecting some far-left positions, Ruffini told me. “You have to have someone come out and say: ‘Here’s what I’m for and I’m against. And I don’t like some of this cultural stuff.’ Create a clear moment of contrast and differentiation.”

I asked Tikey which issues drew him to the Republicans. He made more money under Republicans, he told me (though union data show that workers got large profit-sharing payments under Biden). He thought Trump would do better on inflation, and he appreciated the GOP’s stance on abortion, gender, and guns. Plus, he said, “I don’t understand why unions endorse Democrats when they want to shut down” plants like the one he works in. He has a point. Democrats are not vowing to save coal plants, for instance. They’re promising to compensate the losers.

In the future, could a more centrist Democrat, in cultural and economic terms, win Tikey over? “The Democratic Party has changed,” he told me. It just isn’t the party that he and many of his neighbors supported back in the 1990s. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Far-right activists from Russia’s largest nationalist movement, Russkaya Obshchina, donned black camouflage and patrolled multiple cities last month hunting for “ethnic criminals.” They raided dormitories, parks, and construction sites in search of migrants from Central Asia, nabbing six on November 24. On social media, the activists celebrated their “joint raid with law-enforcement officials,” posting a video of themselves leading migrants in chains on their way to deportation.

Russkaya Obshchina is working in concert with the Russian state to carry out a radical new campaign against immigrants. In August, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill allowing migrants to be expelled without a court decision. Three months later, he amended the criminal code, introducing draconian sentencing guidelines for “countering illegal migration.” Deportations have skyrocketed. According to the Russian state news agency TASS, the government deported more than 60,000 immigrants this year as of November 1—twice more than in the first nine months of 2023. On November 8, the Russian interior ministry announced its decision to deport an additional 20,000 people.

Perhaps more striking than the campaign itself is the well of ethnic hatred it seems to have tapped. In rallies this fall, thousands of far-right and ultranationalist activists marched through Russian cities in support of Putin’s policies. They have the blessing, too, of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church. In September, priests in flowing gowns led a crowd of 75,000 people on a religious procession in St. Petersburg, where members of Russkaya Obshchina chanted “Russians, forward! We are Russians, God is with us!” Some carried the black flag of the mercenary Wagner Group, notorious for its brutality in Ukraine and Africa. Last month, more than 2,000 members of the nationalist “Double-Headed Eagle” and Tsargrad movements marched in Nizhny Novgorod bearing Russian imperial flags. Their founder, the Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, marched too.

In 2014, the United States sanctioned Malofeyev for sponsoring Russian separatist movements in Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions. He does not believe Ukraine has a right to exist; it belongs to the Russian empire he hopes to revive. In an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month, Malofeyev seemed to speak on Putin’s behalf when he denounced Donald Trump’s Ukraine-Russia peace offer—before negotiations had even started. “For the talks to be constructive,” he said, “we need to talk not about the future of Ukraine but the future of Europe and the world.”

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

How did radical nationalists so fully infiltrate Russia’s police and politics? Putin’s Kremlin has a long history of aiding far-right hate groups involved in violence against immigrants. In 2014, he effectively took over the nationalist agenda when he annexed Crimea and supported a militarized separatist movement in the Donbas. These maneuvers were meant to serve what Putin called the “Russian World”: anyone, he says, “who feels a spiritual connection with our Motherland, the bearers of Russian language, history, and culture.”

The full-scale invasion in 2022 accelerated the nationalist movement. “During the war in Ukraine, people we thought were marginalized became Russia’s mainstream figures,” Pavel Kanygin, a Russian investigative journalist, told me. “The nationalists’ clear-line ideology—the monarchy, reconstruction of the Russian empire, empowerment of the Church—resonates with the Russian security service and law-enforcement officers.”

Politicians too. Parliament members such as Mikhail Matveyev openly endorse Russkaya Obshchina. The spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, has posed for pictures with the group’s black flag in her hands. The pro-Kremlin newspaper Vzglyad describes the group as a “healthy power on the Russian nationalist field.” This political support has helped Russkaya Obshchina amass huge influence. On Telegram, the group has more than 600,000 followers. One of its posts shows a Russian fighter in Ukraine wearing a black sun on his uniform, a Nazi symbol. “We are giving our health away, our lives for the sake of our children, their future,” a soldier tells the camera. “Not for the sake of strangers who come to replace us in our cities.”

Another far-right group, the Russian Druzhina, dressed in balaclavas and armored vests and swept through the town of Mytishchi in August. Its masked leader reported that he and his vigilante gang worked “together with law-enforcement organs to identify persons illegally staying on the Russian territory.” Judging by how the group describes its mission, the round-up was meant to “revive the true Russian spirit.” The same month, an association called Northern Man reportedly detained more than 240 immigrants in a joint operation with police.

Northern Man became famous last year for organizing a mass street protest opposing the construction of a large mosque near Moscow. Days later, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, announced that the mosque would be moved to a much smaller site. “Russian authorities adjust policies under the nationalists’ pressure,” Alexander Verkhovsky, the founder of the SOVA Center, a Moscow-based group that monitors xenophobia and far-right movements, told me.

“Trump and his administration should understand that the Russian mainstream has shifted to the right,” Verkhovsky added. For Russia’s growing ultranationalist faction, he said, Trump’s “plan to let Kyiv stay independent would not be acceptable.”

Russia’s nationalist movement has taken off amid rising immigration. The country has long attracted immigrants from the Central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. These populations are largely non-Slavic and include many Muslims. Last year, Russia registered the arrivals of more than 8.5 million migrant workers, including more than a million from Tajikistan. One advocate for migrants’ rights told me that at least a million migrants in Russia are undocumented.

Hate toward these immigrants flooded Russia after a Moscow concert hall was attacked by terrorists associated with an Islamic State branch active in Central Asia. The massacre, which took place in March, killed at least 145 people and wounded more than 500. Police stopped and interrogated migrant workers from Central Asia in the metro and on the streets. Several months later, the Russian interior ministry announced that its “main task is to lighten up the Moscow region, so that it is not blackened by foreign citizens.” This terminology has become commonplace among Russian officials and police officers who associate criminality with non-Slavic-looking migrants.

[Graeme Wood: Conspiracy theories about the Moscow attack are unnecessary]

Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the Civic Assistance Committee, a charitable organization in Moscow that provides legal support for migrants, told me that public transport has become particularly dangerous for those of Central Asian descent. But the attacks can happen anywhere. “Two Uzbek men recently appealed for our help after they were violently beaten by a group of young ultranationalists” at a store, she said. “One of our attorneys took the case, but it turned out that one of the nationalists had influential connections, so the two victims went to jail.”

Gannushkina is 82 and has been defending refugees, displaced people, and immigrants in Russia since 1990. In 2022, a human-rights group that she co-founded, Memorial, won the Nobel Peace Prize. She told me that she sees a connection between the rise in ethnic hatred and the broader campaign of repression that Putin has imposed on Russian society. People may be angry with the authorities, she notes, but they are not permitted to criticize them; the Kremlin has redirected their hatred toward migrants and non-Slavs.

Verkhovsky told me that state news agencies have made a point of using the word migrant more often this year. A study conducted by the Levada Center, a sociological research agency in Moscow, found that 68 percent of Russians say that their country must limit the influx of migrant labor. “The highest level of hostility is recorded towards Roma, people from the Central Asian republics of the former USSR and, in the last two years, towards Ukrainians,” the report said. Verkhovsky believes that the Kremlin is juicing this anxiety. “We have never seen Russians feeling so ‘concerned’” about migrants, he told me.

The onslaught against migrants that the Russian nationalist movement has unleashed, in concert with the police, has become so virulent that even some of Putin’s erstwhile defenders can’t stomach it. Despite being a member of Russia’s military alliance, the government of Tajikistan recently called for its citizens to stop visiting Russia amid the roundups. The leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, slammed the Kremlin for its campaign of “persecution based on nationality or religion,” which he called a “messy inquisition of citizens of foreign countries.”

Kadyrov is hardly a Kremlin critic. Back in 2010, he told me of Putin, “I love him very much, as a man can love a man.” But there comes a time when enough is enough.

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2024” coverage here.

Throughout 2024, podcast creators asked us to think twice about our preconceptions: They followed stories that were supposed to be over, engaged with people who tend to get dismissed, and toyed with emerging technologies that make some people fear for humanity’s future. They explored city sewers, an historic baseball stadium, momentary fame, everyday household objects. This list represents the 20 best podcasts I heard this year, with a lean toward either new shows, or shows that have a renewed focus. Virtually all of them, even the most entertaining and quirky ones, suggested an underlying preoccupation with the power of narrative to shape our sense of reality. (As with every year, The Atlantic’s podcasts are exempt from consideration.) These series added depth and vitality to the audio landscape—they also packed an emotional wallop, inviting listeners to view the world with more scrutiny and empathy alike.

Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

The comedian Jamie Loftus’s previous podcasts have ranged wildly in subject matter—Mensa meetings, Floridian spiritualists, the comic-strip character Cathy—but benefited equally from her attention to detail. With her newest series, Loftus trains her eye on the internet’s “main characters”: people who became short-lived viral sensations. She contextualizes their notoriety within the broader cultural moment that allowed for it, then invites these figures, who included Ken Bone, William Hung, and “Left Shark,” onto the show to reflect on their brushes with this very particular version of fame. By speaking directly with folks who were once known as internet punch lines, Loftus offers listeners a nuanced understanding of their experiences. Sixteenth Minute is a funny, fascinating series that starts by schooling us on memes and ends up displaying a deeply felt empathy.

Start with “Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife Pt. 1.”

Backed Up

As the co-hosts of Backed Up, the Cincinnati Public Radio reporters Becca Costello and Ella Rowen began by investigating a local story—why is sewage seeping into Cincinnati residents’ basements when it rains?—and ended up creating a podcast with wider appeal. This series demonstrates how national access to functional plumbing infrastructure is complicated by bureaucracy and climate change. Costello and Rowen approach the project with humorous gusto as they bring listeners along on a whirlwind six-part journey through city sewers and the local government. Their efforts involve pop-culture references, helpful plumbing metaphors, and a playful bid to discover the “real villain” behind the sewage crisis. But the fun never undermines their more serious aim of detangling the modern marvel of the metropolitan water system, a utility that residents might stop to think about only when it fails.

Start with “Episode 1: Sewers Gonna Sue.”

Finally! A Show

The series’s drawn-out name—Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare—brings to mind modern society’s frequent celebration of generic, superficial girlbossery. Jane Marie and Joanna Solotaroff are the stewards of this production, but they’re not its hosts, per se; each episode is an audio diary of a different woman’s day. Listeners hear from a former missionary turned middle-school teacher, a new mother reflecting on growing up with abusive parents, the owner of a plus-size boutique helping clients shop, and many more. Marie and Solotaroff’s complete lack of narrative framing feels fresh: Hosts rarely cut in to set up the who-what-where or to propel the story forward. Instead, the narrator recounts her day as it unfolds, and in unvarnished detail.

Start with “Finally! A Show About a 20-Something Chess Master.”

Fur & Loathing

The 2014 chemical-weapon attack at the Hyatt Regency in Rosemont, Illinois, had what some may consider an unconventional target—the attendees of Midwest FurFest, a convention of self-identifying “furries” who recreationally dress in anthropomorphic animal costumes. The media roundly mocked the incident, which left 19 people hospitalized, an attitude reflecting prejudicial views of the event-goers’ lifestyle. But the journalist Nicky Woolf and his team of reporters offer this true-crime story the serious consideration it deserves: They lay out the facts of the 10-year-old cold case, explain the failures of the initial police investigation, and seek clarity on the details of the day through conversations with convention-goers. In the process, Fur & Loathing also illuminates a subculture that is often derided but that provides joy and fulfillment for its members.

Start with “Broken Glass.”

The Sicilian Inheritance

The Italian American writer Jo Piazza created this companion podcast for her novel of the same name, investigating the real-life mystery that inspired the book. She had always been told that her great-great-grandmother Lorenza died under peculiar circumstances more than 100 years ago. But in Piazza’s phone calls with aunts, uncles, and cousins, everyone remembers the story a little differently. The most popular theory is that Lorenza was killed by the Mafia, and Piazza regales listeners with her trip to find the truth in the Sicilian countryside. Part of the charm of The Sicilian Inheritance is its portrait of the chaos of living in a big, passionate family, one that’s full of multicourse lunches and gossipy second cousins. A family’s legends lend color and dimension to its history, and Piazza’s offers plenty of both.

Start with “Lorenza.”

Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust

Long Shadow’s previous seasons investigated the circumstances surrounding September 11 and the rise of the American far right. Season 3, In Guns We Trust, explores how guns came to be such a central part of our national culture. The host and journalist Garrett Graff, himself a gun owner, contextualizes the past quarter century of mass shootings by laying out the political and legislative maneuvers that have eroded gun-control laws over the previous 50 years. These sometimes esoteric actions had palpable effects: The so-called gun-show loophole, for example, allowed the private sale of firearms without a background check—which enabled the Columbine High School shooters to indirectly obtain their guns. Listeners who are all too familiar with Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde might nonetheless find illuminating Long Shadow’s examination of the political backdrop to these tragedies.

Start with “A Uniquely American Problem.”

Strangers on a Bench

This podcast’s simple premise—the host, Tom Rosenthal, approaches someone he’s never met in a London park and invites them for a chat—creates a surprising level of intimacy. Within minutes, listeners hear a man explain what it was like to lose his father, or a woman reveal how she feels stifled by her family even though they live several countries away. The key to the show’s appeal is Rosenthal’s interviewing style, which keeps him present in the conversation rather than gesturing toward its eventual audience; in other words, his interest appears genuine rather than performative. Strangers on a Bench demonstrates how ready people are to connect with those around them if given the opening, and how we might reach outward to find these conversations for ourselves.

Start with “Episode 1: A Fight.”

Ripple

This series aims to investigate “the stories we were told were over,” and its inaugural topic, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is a fitting choice. The host, Dan Leone, begins by traveling the Gulf Coast by boat with Louisiana residents as they remember the 11 workers killed in the initial oil-platform explosion; the scene sets up the show’s emphasis on the disaster’s human impact. Leone recounts the various decisions—or lack thereof—made by BP that led to cleanup workers’ later allegations of severe respiratory illness, among other devastating aftereffects. Interviews with chemists about BP’s gross mismanagement of the spill are shocking and edifying to hear, but Ripple’s most compelling feature is how it balances the disaster’s scientific and emotional aspects: It spends ample time, for example, on wide-ranging health issues that some exposed workers and locals have faced for nearly 15 years.

Start with “1. Company Canal.”

Inheriting

In the premiere installment of NPR’s Inheriting, the host, Emily Kwong, makes a bold promise: “On this show, we’re going to break apart the AAPI monolith.” Kwong sets about this mission by offering Asian American and Pacific Islander families in the United States opportunities to reflect on how living through particular moments in history—such as the Japanese incarceration during World War II, the Cambodian genocide, and the Vietnam War—can leave lasting generational effects. Both Kwong and the subjects themselves conduct the interviews, as loved ones open up to one another about operating a business amidst the 1992 Los Angeles uprising or living under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Kwong also offers suggestions to listeners interested in starting these conversations with their own family members.

Start with “Carol & the Los Angeles Uprising: Part 1.”

The Wonder of Stevie

This limited series celebrates what’s considered Stevie Wonder’s classic period (1972–76), when he released his most famed work. Hosted by the cultural critic Wesley Morris, the series layers musical analysis of Wonder’s songs and insightful interviews with industry colleagues and acolytes. Morris, following a conversation with the music critic Robert Christgau, dissects how contemporary (and largely white) critics glossed over the fusion of pop and gospel that made Wonder’s art so revelatory. Musicians such as Janelle Monáe and Smokey Robinson, along with the former president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama, share stories about how Wonder has inspired them. (The Obamas’ company, Higher Ground, co-produced the series.) A bonus episode even features an interview with the artist himself. But the show feels complete without it, following Morris’s own thorough, hours-long evaluation of Wonder’s musical output.

Start with “Music of My Mind | 1972.”

Serial: Guantánamo

Sarah Koenig and the Serial team may never replicate the precise alchemy that made its inaugural season a phenomenon 10 years ago. To their credit, they aren’t trying to. Rather than scout out similarly disputed murder cases to investigate, Koenig and this season’s co-host, Dana Chivvis, have instead chosen to experiment with form and scale. Serial: Guantánamo (the series’ fourth installment) uses a wide lens to explore the history of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, from 2002 to the present day. The hosts track down more than 100 people, including both detainees and guards; their accounts of the scandals, interrogations, and protests within the prison provide riveting audio, the kind made possible by waiting on a story until it’s able to be told in full. The narrative further benefits from Serial’s signature flair, as Koenig includes her own uncertainty about and emotional reactions to what we’re all learning.

Start with “Ep. 1: Poor Baby Raul.”

Never Post

This independently produced podcast covers a range of topics aimed at internet-addled listeners, such as the rise of the “influencer voice” and the emotional experience of abandoning a social-media platform. But its atmospheric sound design differentiates it from similar tech-focused shows. The host, Mike Rugnetta, is a professional audio designer who wants to strip conventional podcast expectations—pithy observations set over marimba music, say—down to the form’s technical studs. A segment about why teens are obsessed with the popular online game Roblox, for example, is bookended by a field recording of someone “touching grass”—that is, experiencing the analog world. Never Post also works as an intriguing exercise in free-associative storytelling: Audio from the Minnesota State Fair horse barn follows a segment about the history of the “Laser Eyes” meme, leaving listeners to interpret the connection between the two.

Start with “To BRB or Not to BRB.”

Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD

Empire City reckons with the modern state of policing through the lens of the New York City Police Department. The NYU journalism professor Chenjerai Kumanyika hosts this nine-episode series, which presents nearly 200 years of history—dating back to the mid-19th century, when an assemblage of constables, watchmen, and kidnappers laid the groundwork for the NYPD—as an immersive listening experience. The podcast conjures the sounds of the city during and after the Civil War, as Kumanyika describes how the department began to adopt the structure and aesthetics of a standing army. Weaving in stories of his own entanglements with police officers, and his young daughter’s budding understanding of law enforcement’s role in their daily life, the host argues that if the NYPD too often fails to protect the vulnerable, it’s because that wasn’t what the force was formed to do; its initial goal, he contends, was to uphold wealthy and influential citizens’ definition of “law and order.”

Start with “They Keep People Safe.”

Shell Game

The tech journalist Evan Ratliff confronts society’s anxieties about artificial intelligence head-on with this limited-run series, in which he uses language-learning models such as ChatGPT to replicate his own voice. Ratliff sets up the affectless “clone”—cultivated from his publicly available personal data and vocal clips—to field incoming phone calls from telemarketers, family, and friends alike; the outcome is a series of uncanny conversations that reveal the surprising capabilities (and limitations) of this fast-developing technology. Particularly riveting moments include Ratliff’s daughter chatting with the voice clone, and the AI Ratliff seeking counsel for the real Ratliff’s private concerns in a session with an AI therapist. These experiments use both humor and real insight to envision how we may manipulate the technology we fear could take over our lives.

Start with “Episode 1: Quality Assurance.”

Road to Rickwood

Baseball devotees and non-fans alike have something to gain from listening to this series, about the historic Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Co-produced by Baton Rouge’s and New Orleans’s NPR affiliates and hosted by the comedian Roy Wood Jr., the podcast details the 114-year-old baseball stadium’s tenure as the home of the Negro Leagues’ Birmingham Black Barons. Bolstered by both new interviews—with retired teammates and current local baseball coaches—and archival broadcast clips, it successfully portrays Rickwood as a microcosm of the racism, resistance, and revolution that were happening off the field. Wood himself grew up playing baseball in the city including at Rickwood Field, and his personal connection to the material enlivens the show’s recounting—one that, in a rare move, is defined not just by the main players, but also by the communities surrounding them.

Start with “The Holy Grail of Baseball.”

In the Dark

In the Dark returned after a six-year break with both a new production company—The New Yorker, which acquired the show in 2023—and a greatly expanded scope. The journalist Madeleine Baran and her fellow investigators spent more than four years researching what became Season 3: the continent- and calendar-year-spanning story of the 2005 Haditha massacre, in which members of the U.S. Marine Corps allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians. Although eight Marines were charged for their alleged role in the killings, only one was convicted of a crime. Eyewitnesses in Haditha provide gripping accounts of what they experienced, while the hosts attempt to clarify inconsistencies in various military personnel’s accounts; we even hear one of them chase the producer Natalie Jablonski off his front porch with profanity and threats. In probing this decades-old event, In the Dark makes a powerful case for pursuing a story as far as you can.

Start with “Episode 1: The Green Grass.”

Second Sunday

Second Sunday’s first season premiered late last year and was an intriguing proof of concept; 2024’s more expansive, affecting follow-up is a testament to the value of giving a series time to hit its stride. The co-hosts Darren Calhoun and Esther Ikoro invite guests—focusing on queer Black people—to examine their connection to their religious beliefs, whether they be tenuous, tempestuous, or deeply rooted in family tradition. The subjects detail how, in the process of exploring their multifaceted identities, they have often redefined what God means to them. Each conversation comes across as a sort of sermon, setting interviewees’ responses against rich musical backdrops. Regardless of whether they have a personal relationship with faith, listeners may empathize with the desire to seek, as one guest puts it, “spirituality that is unbound by people’s bullshit.”

Start with “Mark Miller Plays With the Spirit.”

Tested

The writer Rose Eveleth has spent more than a decade researching this timely entry of NPR’s Embedded, whose release coincided with the 2024 Olympic Games. Eveleth interviews athletes such as the sprinters Christine Mboma and Maximila Imali about finding their naturally high testosterone levels—and thus “true” sex—scrutinized by governing bodies such as World Athletics. Their stories provide a personal touch and help illustrate the more harrowing aspects of their experiences, such as the fact that they have had to consider taking body-altering drugs to maintain their competitive eligibility. Beyond stressing the complexities of our biology, Tested questions the notion of “fairness” in sports: Why are some natural genetic variations considered more acceptable than others, and who gets to set the terms? Sex testing is an example of “how we try and impose order on a messy, confusing world,” Eveleth says, and these six episodes highlight the damage that can be wrought by that impulse.

Start with “Tested: The Choice.”

The Curious History of Your Home

This podcast explores the creation of genius household inventions that people have long taken for granted, such as clocks, toilets, and wallpaper. Its host, the historian Ruth Goodman, has an infectious interest in domestic history, a focus that’s likely more relevant to the listener than, say, the Napoleonic Wars. Goodman’s animated narration is paired with evocative music and soundscapes that enliven descriptions of modest homesteads; with these flourishes, information as seemingly banal as the evolution of dishwashing becomes mesmerizing. Listeners might come to question the way they wash dishes once they learn that wood ash was once preferred over soap, and that the former can actually have some distinct advantages over the latter. Though it is far from the first “quirky history” podcast, this series’ self-contained concept allows the listener to view the mundanities of daily life with newfound interest.

Start with “Wallpaper.”

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast

Hearing four comedians get technical about their work is equal parts hilarious and enlightening, especially when they’re all Saturday Night Live alums. The Lonely Island—a.k.a. Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone—chat with the host of Late Night, Seth Meyers, about the trio’s best-known contribution to the long-running sketch show: their “digital shorts.” Those include such memorable shorts as “Lazy Sunday” (a self-serious rap about The Chronicles of Narnia), “Dick in a Box” (an R&B tune about the perfect Christmas gift, featuring Justin Timberlake), and the more recent “Sushi Glory Hole” (whose title is self-explanatory). The group discusses each video’s development and reception, while speculating as to why viewers connected so much with, say, Natalie Portman rapping obscenities. As a former head writer on SNL, Meyers deftly guides the conversation toward craft, while Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone reflect on their work’s legacy with humility.

Start with “The Lonely Island Beginnings.”

Thousands flock to East Asian country for cosmetic surgeries each year, often relying on unregulated forums for advice.

A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.

But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.

The beginning and end of any cultural moment is difficult to pin down. But the period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. None of the terms or habits will disappear completely; after all, anti-Communist paranoia continued to circulate on the right for decades even after the era of McCarthyism ended in 1954. Nonetheless, the hallmarks of this latest period—the social-media mobbings, the whispered conversations among liberal onlookers too frightened to object—have disappeared from everyday life. The era lasted almost exactly 10 years. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.

The illiberal norms that took hold a decade ago have gone by many terms, including political correctness, callout culture, cancel culture, and wokeness—each of which has been co-opted by the right as an all-purpose epithet for liberalism, forcing left-of-center critics of the trend to search for a new, uncontaminated phrase. The norms combined an almost infinitely expansive definition of what constituted racism or sexism—any accusation of bigotry was considered almost definitionally correct—with a hyperbolic understanding of the harm created by encountering offensive ideas or terms.

Whatever you want to call it, two main forces seem to have set this movement in motion. The political precondition was the giddy atmosphere that followed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which appeared, based on exit polls—although these were later found to have been misleading—to reveal a rising cohort of young, socially liberal nonwhite voters whose influence would continue to grow indefinitely. The rapid progression of causes like gay marriage seemed to confirm a one-way ratchet of egalitarian social norms.

The technological precondition was the rapid adoption of iPhones and social media, which allowed the memetic spread of new ideas and terms. Twitter in particular was the perfect forum for political correctness to flourish. It favored morally uncomplicated positions. It encouraged activists and clout-seekers to gain audience share and political influence by mustering braying crowds to render summary judgment on the basis of some fragment of video or text. The instant consensus that formed on Twitter felt like reality to those absorbed inside of it, an illusion that would take years to dispel.

Numerous analyses have identified 2014 as the year when the trend achieved exit velocity. It was in December 2013 that Justine Sacco, a publicist with only 170 Twitter followers at the time, dashed off a clumsy tweet attempting to make light of her white privilege before getting on a flight to South Africa. By the time she landed, a social-media mob was calling for her to lose her job, a request that her employer soon obliged. That same year, #cancelcolbert swept through social media, in response to a tweet by The Colbert Report that used cartoonishly over-the-top Asian stereotypes to make fun of the obvious racism of the Washington Redskins. Stephen Colbert wasn’t canceled, but the premise that one misplaced joke could be punished with a firing was now taken seriously. (Both cases also demonstrated social-media mobs’ difficulty distinguishing irony from sincerity.) That spring, Michelle Goldberg wrote possibly the first column diagnosing the rise of what she called “the return of the anti-liberal left” for The Nation.

The censorious elements of the new culture could be hard to acknowledge at a time when many of the same energies were being directed at deserving targets—most notably, police mistreatment of Black Americans (#handsupdontshoot) and sexual harassment and assault of women in the workplace (#MeToo). Partly for that reason, or out of a general discomfort with criticizing their allies, some progressives insisted either that nothing new was afoot in the culture and that reactionaries were manufacturing a moral panic out of thin air, or alternatively that there was something new, but it merely involved overdue accountability (or “consequence culture”) for racist and sexist behavior.

Over time, both defenses grew untenable. Student protesters began routinely demanding that figures they disapproved of be prohibited from speaking on campus or, when that failed, shouting down their remarks. Seemingly innocent comments could generate wild controversy. In 2015, for example, Yale erupted in protest after a lecturer suggested that a school-wide email cautioning students about offensive Halloween costumes was infantilizing.  

[Jennifer Miller: What college students really think about cancel culture]

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 accelerated the dynamic. Everything about Trump’s persona seemed to confirm the left’s most dire warnings. He gleefully objectified women and had boasted about groping them. He made statements deemed racist even by fellow Republicans and inspired active support from white nationalists. And yet, at the same time, his victory seemed tenuous and reversible. He had squeaked into office on the tailwinds of a hyperventilated email scandal, and still lost the national vote by two percentage points.

The prevailing interpretation among Democrats was that Hillary Clinton had lost because she had failed to turn out enough nonwhite voters. The key to energizing those constituencies, many liberals believed, was to ramp up identity-based appeals to drive home the stakes of Trump’s racism and misogyny. The retrograde behaviors Trump exhibited were simultaneously threatening enough to present a crisis, yet vulnerable enough to be defeated if the opposition could summon enough energy.

That energy took many forms, not all of them equally productive. Protesters tried to shut down campus appearances by right-wing speakers such as the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and the conservative race-science theorist Charles Murray. These tactics ignored the possibility that any charge of racism might be erroneous, or that it might be possible to overreact to its scale, and had no limiting principle.

Inevitably, the scope of targets widened. Harvard fired the first Black faculty dean in its history after students protested his work for Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense, establishing a new norm that the sins of misogynists and racists would now attach to the defense lawyers who represent them. Censoriousness also applied retroactively. In 2019, the comedian Sarah Silverman said she was fired from a movie over a resurfaced 2007 photo from a sketch in which her oblivious character wore ludicrously offensive blackface in an effort to see whether Black or Jewish people faced worse treatment. (The whole joke was that she mistook angry reactions to her racist getup for anti-Black discrimination; once again, a satirical take on racism was treated as racism itself.) A NASCAR driver lost a sponsorship over a report that his father had used the N-word—in the 1980s.  

This is just a tiny sample of the kinds of events that had become routine. If you think we are still living in that world today, you have forgotten how crazy things got.

The mania peaked in 2020. By this point, Twitter’s influence had reached a level where large swaths of reporting in major newspapers were simply accounts of what Twitter was talking about. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, social media almost totally eclipsed real life—especially for liberals, who were much likelier than conservatives to stick with social distancing. This gave the summary judgments delivered by online crowds a new, inescapable force. George Floyd’s murder seemed to confirm the starkest indictment of systemic racism. Progressive Americans, many of them white and newly aware of the extent of racism in American life, set out to eradicate it. Much of that energy, however, was trained not outward, at racist police officers or residential segregation patterns, but inward, at the places where those progressives lived and worked.

Many of the most famous and consequential cancellations played out during this period. A New York Times op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for deploying the National Guard to stop riots was deemed “dangerous” by Times staffers, leading to the ouster of James Bennet, the editorial-page editor. Bennet’s critics insisted that Cotton’s argument would pave the way for attacks on peaceful protesters, but even criticizing violence became risky behavior in progressive circles. The Democratic data analyst David Shor lost his job after retweeting a study by a Black academic suggesting that violent demonstrations had helped Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968.

In classic witch-hunt logic, the guilt often spread to those who failed to join in the condemnations of others. In June 2020, The Washington Post published a surreal story about how its cartoonist, Tom Toles, had hosted a Halloween Party two years earlier in which one attendee had shown up dressed as “Megyn Kelly in blackface.” (The costume, intended to lampoon Kelly for her comments defending blackface, did not go over well at the time, and the designer apologized shortly afterward.) The article, which resulted in Toles’s guest being fired from her job as a graphic designer, implied that Toles was guilty of secondhand racism for not confronting her. The next summer, a contestant on The Bachelor was found to have attended an antebellum-themed fraternity party during college, and when the show’s longtime host defended her as having been caught up in rapidly changing social norms, the ensuing uproar forced him out of his job. (Again, these cases reflect just a tiny sample.)

But by late 2021, with COVID in abeyance and Joe Biden occupying the presidency, things began calming down quickly. Trump’s (temporary) disappearance from the political scene deescalated the sense of crisis that had fueled the hysteria. And Elon Musk’s disastrous 2022 Twitter takeover accelerated the decline. By driving away much of Twitter’s audience and suppressing the virality of news reports and left-leaning posts, Musk inadvertently shattered the platform’s monopolistic hold on the political attention economy, negating the most important arena for identifying and punishing dissidents.

The aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel further chipped away at the foundations of left-wing illiberalism by showing how easily its premises could be co-opted by the other side. Many Jews who had previously supported the left’s approach to racial issues began to apprehend that their allies considered them oppressors, rather than the oppressed. Meanwhile, the response from supporters of Israel turned the cancel-culture debate on its head. In the face of anti-Israel protests, congressional Republicans hauled several university presidents into hearings, where they were berated and urged to adopt sweeping policies not only against anti-Semitic conduct, but against any speech that made Jewish students feel threatened. Suddenly, the rhetoric of safety and harm that had been used by the left was being deployed against it, and principled free-speech defenders were sticking up for the right of protestors to chant “Death to Israel.” This put even more strain on the already unraveling consensus that allegations of racial discrimination must be treated with total deference.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech Culture]

In the end, progressive illiberalism may have died because the arguments against it simply won out. Although a handful of post-liberal thinkers on the left made an earnest case against the value of free-speech norms, deflections were much more common. It was just the antics of college undergraduates. When it began happening regularly in workplaces, the real problem was at-will employment. And, above all, why focus on problems with the left when Republicans are worse? None of these evasions supplied any concrete defense for sustaining dramatic, widely unpopular culture change. Eventually, reason prevailed.

Much of blue America is now experiencing a determined reaction against the excesses of that bygone period. Many important organizations that had cooperated with mob-driven cancellations came to experience regret, installing new leaders or standards in an explicit attempt to avoid a recurrence. The New York Times, perhaps liberal America’s most influential institution, has made a series of moves reflecting implicit regret at its treatment of figures like Bennet and the science writer Donald McNeil, including publishing a pro-free-speech editorial and defying demands by activists and writers that it stop skeptically covering youth gender treatment.

Corporations have pulled back on the surge in spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that began in 2020, and some universities may follow. Many elite universities have stopped requiring job applicants to submit DEI statements, which have been widely criticized as a de facto ideological screening device. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has found that the upsurge in attention by scholars and journalists to race and gender bias peaked a few years ago, as did reports of cancellations.

One interpretation of these shifts, suggested by the conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat, is that the trend has merely settled in at an elevated plateau. The repressive machinery might be less fearsome than it was a few years ago, but it is still far more terrifying than in, say, 2010.

I believe that the illiberal-left movement has not merely declined. It is dead, or at least barely breathing. When was the last time you saw a social-media mob have any effect outside social media? Who is the last person to be publicly shamed and unjustly driven out of their high-status job over some misunderstood joke or stray comment? Indeed, the roster of cancellation victims has not only stopped growing, but begun ticking downward. Five years ago, Saturday Night Live fired the comedian Shane Gillis before his first appearance on the show in response to outrage over offensive jokes he had made on a podcast. This past February, he was brought back as a guest host. David Shor, who lost his job in 2020 for suggesting that violence is politically counterproductive, helped direct advertising by the Democratic Party’s most powerful super PAC this year.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab?]

Douthat and other critics of left-wing illiberalism suggest that bureaucratized diversity represents a kind of consolidated machinery of the social revolution. But this misses the sheer hysteria that was the hallmark of the cancellation era. What made social-media mobs so fearsome was the randomness of their actions, and the panicked submission that often followed. Bureaucracy, however annoying it can be, inherently involves process. A corporate department is unlikely to terminate an employee simply because he was guilty of a “bad look” or failed to “read the room,” or any other buzzword that once swiftly turned people into nonpersons.

One reason the demise of political correctness has failed to register fully is that critics have redefined it as “wokeness.” And wokeness can mean a lot of things, some of them noble, some of them silly. Land acknowledgments are woke. Hate Has No Place Here yard signs are woke. But those forms of wokeness are not illiberal or coercive.

The left-wing ideas about race and gender that spawned the recent era of progressive illiberalism remain in circulation, but this fact should not be confused for the phenomenon itself. The repressive effect of political correctness may spring from ideological soil, but it requires other elements in order to grow and spread. And the political atmosphere that fostered the conditions of 2014–24 has grown chilly.

Many anti–political correctness moderates feared that another Trump victory would revive left-wing illiberalism, just as it had in 2016. Instead, the immediate response on the left has been almost diametrically opposite. Rather than confirming the most sweeping condemnations of American social hierarchy, Trump’s second election has confounded them.

This time around, Trump managed to win the popular vote, making his victory seem less flukish. More important, he won specifically thanks to higher support among nonwhite voters. This result upended the premise that undergirded political correctness, which treated left-wing positions about social issues as objectively representing the interests of people of color. Now that the election had confirmed that those positions alienated many minority voters themselves, doubts that had only been whispered before could be shouted in public more easily. On Morning Joe, for example, Mika Brzezinski read aloud a Maureen Dowd column blaming the defeat on “a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation” that featured “diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC.’”

Establishment Democrats were not alone in reaching such conclusions. “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, told The New York Times. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Cassie Pritchard, a labor activist in Los Angeles, conceded on X that the left had miscalculated. “I think there was a time where it felt like the liberal-left coalition had essentially won the culture war, and now it was simply a matter of enforcement,” she wrote. “But that’s clearly wrong. We didn’t, and a lot of us overestimated our power to enforce our preferred norms.”

Once political correctness had expanded to the point where it could affect candidates for office at a national scale, it would inevitably begin to self-destruct. A small group of committed activists can dominate a larger organization by intimidating a majority of its members into silence, but that tactic doesn’t work when people can vote by secret ballot.

Trump’s success reveals the limits of a political strategy that was designed to impose control over progressive spaces on the implicit assumption that controlling progressive spaces was enough to bring about political change. What will come after the era of political correctness within the left is, hopefully, a serious effort to engage with political reality. While the illiberal left is in retreat, the illiberal right is about to attain the height of its powers—and, alarmingly, some of the institutions that once gave in too easily to left-wing mobs are now racing to appease the MAGA movement. A new era of open discourse in progressive America cannot begin soon enough.

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was about much more than a backlash to left-identity politics. Inflation, among other matters, loomed larger. Still, Trump gained significant ground with Latino, Black, Asian, Arab, Gen Z, and big-city voters. And that, as much as Kamala Harris’s loss, has spurred Democrats to reconsider the role that identity politics plays in their coalition. “Identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Elissa Slotkin, who just won a Senate race in Michigan, said in a meeting of fellow Democrats. “Identity politics did not work electorally, and it failed miserably strategically,” Rahm Emanuel told Politico. “Some Democrats are finally waking up,” the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “and realizing that woke is broke.”

This is a significant shift. At the height of the “Great Awokening,” as white liberals moved to the left of the typical Black voter on questions of race and racism, a faction of progressive intellectuals persuaded themselves that identity politics was the future of liberalism. They had noble intentions: They saw persistent inequalities in society, felt frustrated that change wasn’t happening faster, and so advocated for more and more radical measures to fix what they perceived as injustices. And they changed the Democratic Party. Harris was one of the politicians who appeared to embrace their narrative, in ways that would haunt her later run for the presidency.

[Jon Favreau: The conversation Democrats need to have]

Most Americans agree with progressives that racism and sexism are still problems. But supporters of identity politics were mistaken in assuming that the same majority would sign on to pursuing equity instead of equality. So there is promise in a reckoning: It is necessary to get the Democratic Party back in sync with everyday voters. And America will benefit if either of its major parties rejects politics that treat race, sex, and other identities as the most important things about a person.

But there is peril too: Identity politics is vague and rarely defined. When pressed to say what they’re objecting to, most critics of identity politics can cite examples. But mocking specific excesses––unpopular neologisms such as Latinx, racial litmus tests, the push to shift from LGBTQ to the comically untenable LGBTQIA2S+––doesn’t clarify how to stop them without giving up on worthy political efforts to help identity groups.

“There’s a real risk of overcorrecting,” the Illinois State Representative Kam Buckner warned in a recent opinion article. “Without a thorough critique of what went wrong and a thoughtful path forward, we could end up discarding an essential tool for connection and understanding.” Democrats need a guiding principle. The most promising is equal treatment. Majorities of every racial group value it, likely because they see how much good the civil-rights movement did by rooting itself in this ideal, and how abandoning the ideal could hurt everyone. Violating equal treatment should be out of bounds.

The progressive identitarian attack on equal treatment is explicit and radical in its implications. In a 2020 Vox essay that championed identity politics, Zack Beauchamp favorably quoted the late philosopher Iris Marion Young. She argued that “the specificity of each group requires a specific set of rights for each, and for some a more comprehensive system than for others.” In Beauchamp’s retelling, identity politics was both the savior and the future of American liberalism, and “true equality demands treating groups differently rather than the same.”

But “treating groups differently” is politically unsustainable––try telling a diverse group of Americans who gets the best treatment, who gets middling treatment, and who will be treated worst.

Most Americans prefer a universalist vision: True equality demands treating people the same regardless of their identity group. So no segregated diners, no firing an employee for being gay, no stop-and-frisks that racially profile Black pedestrians, and no college-admissions officers who malign Asian American applicants. When progressive identitarians make the case for “good” discrimination against members of groups that they deem privileged, they sever their coalition’s historic connection to equal treatment and civil-rights law. They also weaken vital, hard-won norms and invite bigoted excesses.

[Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?]

A useful reckoning would reaffirm equal treatment and its basic corollaries. For example: Stop maligning whole identity groups. And treat all group discrimination as both irrational and wrong.

During Donald Trump’s first run for president, ideologically diverse critics denounced him for saying that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The backlash was fueled partly by Americans like me who believe that attacks on groups mislead, divide, and weaken the country.

But even as the populist right ramped up its corrosive rhetoric, the identitarian left was violating similar norms against multiple groups. During Trump’s first term, Harvard was caught assigning lower personality scores to Asian American applicants. Joe Biden declared in 2020 that Black Americans unsure about voting for him “ain’t Black.” In a secretly recorded 2022 meeting, Los Angeles City Council members denigrated Oaxacans and Black people while discussing how to shore up Latino political power at the expense of Black Angelenos. After the October 7 attacks, some Jewish college students and faith-based organizations were targets of anti-Israel activists simply because of their Jewishness. White women are an especially frequent target of left identitarians––these headlines all appeared in mainstream news outlets in the past five years: “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror” (The New York Times); “White Women, Come Get Your People” (The New York Times); “I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry” (The Washington Post); “How White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats—Again” (The New Republic); “I Broke Up With Her Because She’s White” (The New York Times); “White Women’s Role in White Supremacy, Explained” (Vox).

Much as Republicans once paid a price when Rush Limbaugh made offensive statements about women, Democrats pay a price when prominent individuals and institutions associated with its coalition heap scorn on a large group of voters. And regardless of the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, trafficking in sweeping negative stereotypes about any identity group is wrong and contagious.

Embracing “equal treatment for all” will also mean repudiating racially discriminatory practices. Some supporters of identity politics favor crossing the line into discrimination––arguing, for example, that scarce, life-saving vaccines should be given to members of “structurally and historically disadvantaged” groups first, “even if this means that overall life years gained may be lower.”

[Read: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

Other examples include: a big-city Democratic mayor announcing that she will not grant interviews to white journalists; a first-time-homebuyer program in Washington State excluding applicants on the basis of race; guidelines for access to COVID-19 treatments in New York that included race as a consideration; faculty search committees where the race of applicants is openly and unlawfully discussed as a factor in hiring; progressive activists organizing a day when they tell white people to absent themselves from a public university campus; a large medical institution penalizing a doctor of Filipina descent for “internalized whiteness” after she objected to racially segregated care; subjecting a professor at a state university in Pennsylvania to a racially hostile climate in training sessions.

This trend isn’t Jim Crow or even stop-and-frisk, but it is a concerning step backward. And politically speaking, “equality demands treating groups differently” is a losing message. In California, one of the most progressive states in the country, voters decided that college admissions should be race-blind in 1996. Progressives tried to bring back differential treatment in 2020, and California voters rejected racial preferences again by an even wider margin than before. In 2019, Pew Research Center asked if employers should consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity in hiring and promotions, or consider their qualifications exclusively, even if it results in less diversity. Seventy-four percent of respondents favored considering qualifications alone. Majorities of white, Black, Hispanic, and Democratic Party respondents all agreed on that conclusion.

To do good for the country––and to perform better in upcoming elections––Democrats don’t need to abandon identity politics entirely. Their coalition can celebrate Pride and Black History Month, object to Muslim bans, urge corporations to recruit from racially and ethnically diverse applicant pools, and more, so long as it also rejects the party’s least popular, most harmful identity-politics excesses. If Democrats renounce identitarian stereotyping and discrimination, their coalition will benefit, and America will too.

Not long ago, immigration was a winning issue for Democrats. When Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, his defeat was blamed, in part, on his hard-line stance in favor of “self-deportation”—making life so hard for immigrants that they would choose to return to their home country. Obama had backed a more popular approach, which balanced strong enforcement at the border and the workplace with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and an expansion of legal immigration. That policy, called comprehensive immigration reform, was supported by the immigrant-advocacy movement and by 77 percent of the public.

In the election’s aftermath, leading conservatives—including Sean Hannity (who said he’d “evolved” on immigration and supported a “pathway to citizenship”), Rupert Murdoch (“Give them a path to citizenship. They pay taxes. They are hard-working people”), and Charles Krauthammer (the GOP “requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty.”)—announced their support for reform. A bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” was approved by a resounding 68–32.

In the end, however, the bill was never taken up by House Republicans. Obama pivoted to a series of executive actions to shield some 5 million of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, but Republican state attorneys general sued to stop the largest from going forward. The pro-immigrant movement began to splinter; advocates, frustrated with the failure of a coalition that had included unions, business, law enforcement, and churches, moved swiftly left.

[Rogé Karma: Why democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

Much has changed since then. This year, Donald Trump ran on the border issue to victory. He blamed housing costs, wage pressures, and crime on a migrant “invasion”; branded Democrats the party of “open borders”; and promised extreme deportation measures. Voters didn’t care that it was Republicans who had tanked another border bill early in 2024, or that, after executive actions on border security, crossings this fall were down from the end of Trump’s presidency. Few noticed when Harris gave a major policy speech promising more action at the border. According to a postelection Navigator poll, Trump’s promise “to secure the border and fight illegal immigration” was the top reason to vote for him. Even among voters of color, opposition to immigration drove support for Trump. The GOP had successfully tattooed the “Biden border crisis” on Kamala Harris’s forehead.

How did Democrats fall so far and so quickly on immigration? It’s easy to blame Trump, and the lure of his xenophobic rhetoric. But we believe that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left, beyond the political space available to them. Voters, feeling unheard and frustrated, may have squirmed at Trump’s racism and radicalism, but they also saw him as someone who took the problem seriously and was trying to address it.

One of us, Cecilia, spent two decades at the National Council of La Raza, America’s biggest Latino advocacy group, and later advised Obama on immigration issues as head of his White House Domestic Policy Council. The other, Frank, ran pro-immigrant organizations for more than three decades, and advised the Harris campaign on immigration. This is a heartfelt critique, informed by our decades of experience as immigrant advocates who also understand the realities of governing. Unless something changes, Republicans will continue exploiting the situation at the border, more immigrants will suffer, and Democrats will continue to lose the trust of voters—damaging their chances of unseating the authoritarians now returning to power.

Activists weren’t always happy with the model of comprehensive immigration reform, feeling that it focused too much on enforcement. But the promise of congressional action encouraged many to compromise. This changed in 2013, when John Boehner, as speaker of the House, refused to bring for a vote the reform bill that had passed the Senate. After that, many activists gave up on federal legislation and began making more militant demands. They also adopted more confrontational tactics—mostly directed at Democrats.

Grassroots activists routinely interrupted speeches by Obama to call for an end to deportations. Some targeted then-Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, who was in a tight race. Hagan had voted for comprehensive immigration reform but had joined other vulnerable Senate Democrats in asking Obama to delay announcing executive actions until after the midterm election. The week before Election Day, activists interrupted Hagan and Hillary Clinton during a joint appearance, expressing disgust at both for not pressing Obama to act immediately. This increased the salience of immigration—an issue that was already hurting Hagan. She lost to Thom Tillis, clinching the Senate majority for the Republicans.

When Clinton ran for president in 2016, activists pushed her to the left on immigration, imploring her to break with Obama and commit to a dramatic rollback of enforcement. In an interview with Jorge Ramos of Univision, Clinton did just that, promising to focus on deporting “violent criminals” and “people planning terrorist attacks.” Her platform made only a cursory mention of enforcement. Activists had assured her that she’d see an increase in Latino and Asian turnout in response, but the votes never materialized, and Trump won.

The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg was blunt in his comparison of Clinton’s approach with Obama’s. “Pro-immigration advocates won majority support for comprehensive immigration reform only after the public became confident that leaders wanted to manage immigration and that they took borders and citizenship seriously,” he wrote in The American Prospect. In contrast, many white working-class voters concluded that Clinton “wanted ‘open borders.’” The pro-immigrant movement convened no postmortem to reflect on the role it might have played in Trump’s rise.

The movement did come back together in response to the cruelty, chaos, and overreach of Trump’s approach to immigration. Activists were particularly willing to work with Democrats in Congress following revelations that Trump was intentionally separating children from their parents at the border. Family separation failed as a deterrence measure and became a political liability for Trump, thanks to skillful organizing, a massive public-opinion backlash, and a Republican-appointed federal judge who called the policy “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”

[From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of family separation]

We pragmatists hoped that the existential threat posed by Trump might lead to moderation in the movement, with the unity forged in resistance creating political space to identify solutions that enjoy majority public support. It was not to be. Four years fighting Trump seemed only to further radicalize the left.

This became evident when, in the run-up to the 2020 election, some movement leaders decided to discard and discredit comprehensive immigration reform. Calling it “an outdated and flawed strategy” that criminalized and punished some immigrants in exchange for legal status for others, these leaders demanded a “bold, new vision for our immigration system, one that rivals the boldness of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.”

This call had its intended effect. Virtually overnight, most of the movement shelved the concept of comprehensive reform—despite the fact that this approach enjoyed strong public support, had put Democrats on the offense for nearly a decade, had the support of prominent Republicans, and was backed by Democratic senators including Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin.

Emboldened, self-described “abolitionists” pilloried mentions of border enforcement, deportations, or immigration limits as legitimizing Trumpian extremism. Activist groups rolled out their bold new vision in a platform called “Free to Move, Free to Stay,” which called for “freedom from deportation” and “freedom from the enforcement machine.” The platform, perhaps understandably, focused on condemning Trump’s harshest measures, but it opened the door to criticism that advocates were less focused on U.S. interests than on the right to migrate in a borderless world. It also revealed the extent to which progressives had stopped worrying about persuasion. In an analysis in The New York Times, the writer Jason DeParle described their stance as lacking an “affirmative case for immigration—an argument for how it strengthens the economy, invigorates the culture and deepens ties to the world.”

Candidates sought to connect with the progressive shift. In one early debate during the Democratic primary, eight out of 10 candidates raised their hand when asked if they favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But decriminalization was deeply unpopular. A poll at the time found that just 27 percent of people surveyed supported decriminalizing it. (Harris was among those who raised her hand. Her progressive posturing in 2019 would come back to haunt her 2024 candidacy, drawing brutal and relentless attack ads.)

For its first three years, Joe Biden’s administration was hit by the right for being too soft, by the left for being too tough, and by congressional Democrats for having no clear plan. Border encounters averaged 2 million a year; under Trump, they never exceeded 1 million. Many news reports amplified the right-wing narrative. Certainly, smuggling networks exploited the new administration’s change in tone and policy in their recruitment efforts. But blaming the increase on Biden ignored the fact that immigration numbers had begun to rise significantly while Trump was still president, and that the phenomenon was a global one. The postwar era of refugees and displacement is being overtaken by a new age of global migration, challenging policy makers just about everywhere.  

Finally, with border numbers sky high and the bipartisan border bill thwarted by Trump and his supporters early this year, Biden took additional executive actions to address the situation. The administration invoked emergency authority to make it easier to remove those without a legal right to stay; secured help from Mexico to crack down on smuggling networks; increased the number of removals and deportation flights; expanded legal pathways for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans by soliciting U.S. sponsors and granting humanitarian visas, resulting in a 99 percent decline in illegal crossings for people from these countries; increased refugee admissions; and encouraged migrants to apply for admission through new Safe Mobility Offices in Latin America, and through an app.

These policies send a message: Wait your turn, apply through an orderly process, and you have a chance; come to the border and cross illegally and you won’t. In fact, you will be barred for reentry for five years, and if you are a repeat violator, you can be charged with a felony and imprisoned for two years. Better to apply away from the border than risk it all with an illegal entry. The combination of discouraging illegal immigration and encouraging legal immigration is working. Monthly crossings are down 77 percent from the all-time high last December.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the shift came too late to persuade skeptical voters. Meanwhile, the gap between activists and Democrats grows. Take the bipartisan border bill: Biden endorsed it; Harris promised to sign it if elected; 85 percent of Senate Democrats voted for it; and the public solidly supported it. With only a few exceptions, pro-immigration advocacy groups opposed it.

Now that Trump is preparing to take office again, Democrats and immigration advocates share the same priority: to fight his radical mass-deportation plans. He promises to deploy the military; conduct raids; target schools and churches; rip family members from jobs, homes, and communities; set up open-air camps as staging areas for deportation flights; and invoke obscure laws to justify it all. Standing up to this cruelty is essential, and will be difficult and consuming.   

But this defense must be supplemented by an aggressive offense, particularly for Democrats in office. They need to brand themselves, once again, as the party of balanced solutions. The message should be: “Illegal immigration is a problem, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with it. The right way is by imposing order on the border, removing public-safety threats and those found ineligible for asylum, creating pathways to legal status and citizenship for those with deep roots, and making sure our legal-immigration system addresses labor shortages and reunites close families—as long as American workers aren’t undercut by unscrupulous employers in the process. The wrong way is by ripping families apart, especially those that have been contributing to their communities for decades.”

[David Leonhardt: The hard truth about immigration]

Democrats need to insist on more control and more compassion; more order and more immigration; strict limits and wider legal pathways. This stands in stark contrast to both right and left. The right argues to kick out and keep out all immigrants. The left argues to let all comers stay. Both amount to overreaches that will eventually backfire. Voters want a middle way, but if they’re forced to choose between those who promise control and those who seem indifferent to chaos, they will choose the former.

Democrats have to win the argument, regardless of whether the advocacy groups come along. Immigration is a defining feature of our past, present, and future. We don’t have to choose between being a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. The best way to be either is to be both.

In the weeks since the election, I’ve been thinking about the woman who told me she’d heard that Kamala Harris “let in all the illegals who killed all those cops.”

I met her when a few of us from Pod Save America were knocking doors in Las Vegas the Sunday before the election. She was listed in the voter file as a 72-year-old registered Democrat who hadn’t voted yet, so we rang the doorbell and were greeted by a small Asian woman and a very large dog. Her broken English wasn’t easy to understand, and the barking didn’t help, but her concern about the cop-killing immigrants was clear.

We skipped the fact-check and assured the woman that Vice President Harris promised to crack down on illegal immigration and close the border if it got out of control. She seemed mildly encouraged, but not sold. We told her that Harris also wanted to make prescriptions cheaper for her and cut her taxes. Then she pointed to a photo of the vice president on the campaign literature we were holding: “Is that her?” We nodded. The woman gave us a thumbs-up and a promise that she’d vote for Harris.

This wasn’t the type of exchange we’d expected, but only because the outcome was successful. Most interactions with voters aren’t as satisfying as you hope, and some are just bizarre. When I was conducting focus groups for a podcast I host called The Wilderness, a Latino voter in Vegas told me that his two favorite political leaders were Governor Ron DeSantis and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because they were both “outsiders” who were willing to “take on the establishment.” An older Milwaukee voter said that he had voted for Barack Obama and then Donald Trump because “they both felt like change.” A young Black man in Atlanta said that because of crime and inflation, he regretted his vote for Joe Biden, and that “at least Trump is an honest liar.”

[Rogé Karma: Why the Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

The show would sometimes get harsh reviews from Democrats, whose reactions to these focus groups I’d charitably describe as frustrated disbelief: “Infuriating.” “Depressing.” “Couldn’t listen.” “Why didn’t you correct them?” “How did you not just walk out?”

I understand why people would feel this way. Well, I understand why people like us would feel this way. If you care enough about politics to read The Atlantic or listen to Pod Save America or scroll through an infinite feed of strangers’ opinions, you mostly encounter broadly cohesive political identities. Even if we don’t agree with the views of leftists or liberals or Never Trumpers or MAGA Republicans, we understand them (or at least we think we do). The people whose views we don’t understand tend to be the people who simply don’t follow politics that closely.

And yet, that’s most Americans.

This majority still votes, but not in every election. They typically vote for the same party, but not always. Their political beliefs can be all over the map: left on some issues, right on others; willing compromise on some issues, not on others. They tend to be less partisan (which doesn’t mean they’re centrist), less ideological (which doesn’t mean they’re moderate), and less likely to see politics as a black-and-white, life-and-death struggle with clear heroes and villains (which doesn’t mean they don’t care). They’re also less likely to have a four-year college degree, which is now the best predictor of how Americans vote and the central divide in American politics—a divide that continues to grow.

The Democratic Party is currently on the wrong side of an unforgiving math problem. Fewer than four in 10 Americans have graduated college, and that number is even smaller in the battleground states that decide the presidency and control of Congress. In each of the past three elections, Trump has picked up millions of new votes from Americans without a degree who had previously supported Democrats. And every time, Democrats have taken comfort in explanations that, although plausible, absolve us from the hard work of winning back these voters.

In 2016, we told ourselves that the only reason white, working-class Obama voters could possibly choose Trump over Hillary Clinton was misogyny, racism, or misinformation. In 2020, Trump’s gains with working-class Latinos were blamed on Cubans in Florida and COVID-19 lockdowns. In 2024, Trump won even more support from working-class Latino voters and Asian voters and Black voters. He won new votes from working-class Gen Z and Millennial voters. He made huge gains in working-class border communities and the immigrant neighborhoods of big cities.

Democrats can choose again to take comfort in an explanation that requires very little of us: If the party lost in 2024 because people were fed up with high costs and an old incumbent, maybe we can win in 2028 if people are still fed up with high costs and an old incumbent. Or maybe Democrats can just crank up the economic populism. Or sand down the edges of identity politics. Or create better ads, or hire smarter operatives, or run younger candidates, or find a Joe Rogan but without any of the stuff that makes liberals mad and Rogan popular. Surely, someone on Bluesky has the answer.

The truth is, 2024 should be a clarifying moment for those of us who have spent the past decade trying to keep Trump out of power. Half of the country just took another flier on the guy who attempted a coup—a convicted felon who somehow won 16 million more votes than he did in 2016. Democrats are about to have less power than at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.

Democrats need to get back into the persuasion business. Interactions with voters, frustrating as they often are, are always a good reminder of how different it feels to talk politics with a person you’re genuinely trying to persuade. You don’t speak in phrases from a candidate’s overly polished speech or carefully worded interview answers. You don’t talk like an ad that supposedly tests well but somehow sounds like every other Democratic ad you’ve ever heard. And the conversations certainly don’t sound at all like people talk and argue about politics online. Imagine if the woman we met in Las Vegas had posted her cop-killing-immigrants question on social media. Does anyone think the resulting discourse would’ve won her vote—or any votes? I can’t say I would’ve responded the same way I did in person.

[Read: The coming Democratic revolution]

Persuading voters is primarily the job of politicians and political professionals. But we now live in an era when the typical voter’s occasional glimpse at the spectacle of American politics is less likely to be a candidate’s speech or a campaign ad than an algorithmic assortment of takes and arguments from media figures, activists, and anyone with an opinion and a social-media account. This means that, whether we like it or not, the small minority of us who obsessively follow and talk and post about politics play a role in shaping the views of the majority of Americans who don’t: a multiracial, working-class majority that has come to believe politics is largely irrelevant to their lives.

And can we really blame them?

Trump has been the main character of American politics for nearly a decade, so that certainly hasn’t helped, but neither has the exhausting drama he’s pulled us into, over and over again. He acts, we react, and sometimes overreact. Political obsessives see a debate in which the stakes are total and the right side is obvious. But more often than not, the person who’s just checking in sees a fight that sounds both silly and sanctimonious, trivial and hyperbolic, inaccessible and exhausting—all of which feeds into the autocrat’s empty promise that he can liberate us from the messier parts of a system in which everyone gets a say and nothing seems to get done.

Democrats can no longer just assert that this path is wrong; we have to show that a better way exists—yes, in the policies we propose and in the facts we present, but also in how we approach the essential work of politics in a democracy.

When someone expresses a view we find immoral or offensive, it’s not that they never deserve to be scolded or shamed. It’s that making people feel unwelcome or unwanted is self-defeating and antithetical to the project of democratic governance—a radical belief that everyone has equal worth and deserves an equal voice in organizing a society where dissenting views are tolerated, minority rights are protected, and progress happens only when minds are changed.

The last time Democrats suffered a defeat of this year’s magnitude was in 2004, when George W. Bush was elected to a second term and Republicans controlled Congress. Some people have pointed out that, at the time, the smart money was on Democrats nominating a swing-state moderate in 2008. A Black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama who had broken with his party on the Iraq War wasn’t really in the cards. The suggestion is that maybe Democrats should worry less about where our next candidates fall on the political spectrum and more about whether they can rally the party faithful.

But that is based on a misconception about why Obama was the last Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win an electoral majority. For all the attention on his charisma and ability to inspire, an underrated aspect of Obama’s appeal was how hard he tried to empathize with the people he was trying to lead. Even if they weren’t for him, he made it clear that he was for them. Part of that capacity came from navigating so many different worlds as he grew up. But part of it was his background as a community organizer.

Organizers understand better than just about anyone else in politics what it takes to change minds, because they spend their days talking with people who aren’t like them, don’t know them, and don’t think like them. I spend way too much of my life arguing about politics online and on mic, but the disagreements I appreciate the most—the conversations that make me think differently—are almost always with people who have a background in organizing for a cause or campaign. Whether the person’s politics are to the left or the right of my own, their experience tends to make them more patient, understanding, and compelling than 95 percent of social-media interactions. That’s because organizers aren’t looking to perform for the people who already agree with them. They’re looking to persuade the people who don’t. They don’t just want to be right. They want to win.

South Asian rapper Sliime has seen his new track Bengali make its way on to the 1Xtra playlist.

In his first major address as president, Harry Truman urged Americans to use their enormous power “to serve and not to dominate.”

The date was April 16, 1945. Adolf Hitler was still alive in his bunker in Berlin. Americans were readying themselves for a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. The atomic bomb remained a secret.

Yet Truman’s thoughts were already shifting to the postwar future. “We must now learn to live with other nations for our mutual good. We must learn to trade more with other nations so that there may be, for our mutual advantage, increased production, increased employment, and better standards of living throughout the world.”

Truman’s vision inspired American world leadership for the better part of a century. From the Marshall Plan of the 1940s to the Trans-Pacific Partnership of the 2010s, Americans sought to achieve security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States became the center of a network of international cooperation—not only on trade and defense, but on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues.

By enriching and empowering fellow democracies, Americans enriched and empowered themselves too. The United States has led and sustained a liberal world order in part because Americans are a generous people—and even more so because the liberal world order is a great deal for Americans.

Open international trade is nearly always mutually beneficial. Yet there is more to the case than economics. Trade, mutual-protection pacts, and cooperation against corruption and terrorism also make democracies more secure against authoritarian adversaries. Other great powers—China, India, Russia—face suspicious and even hostile coalitions of powerful enemies. The United States is backed by powerful friends. These friendships reinforce U.S. power. By working with the European Central Bank, for instance, the U.S. was able to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian assets after the attack on Kyiv in 2022. Russia imagined those assets beyond American reach; they were not domiciled in the United States. Yet when necessary, the U.S. could reach them thanks to its friends.

Americans who lived through the great tumult of Truman’s era understood that the isolationist slogan “America First” meant America alone. America alone meant America weakened. That lesson was taught by harsh experience: a depression that was deepened and prolonged by destructive tariff wars, by each afflicted country’s hopeless attempt to rescue itself at the expense of its neighbors; a world war that was enabled because democratic powers would not act together in time against a common threat. The lesson was reinforced by positive postwar experience: the creation of global institutions to expand trade and preserve the peace; the U.S.-led defeat of Soviet Communism and the triumphant end of the Cold War.

But in the years since, the harsh experience has faded into half-forgotten history; the positive experience has curdled into regrets and doubts.

[Read: What Europe fears]

Donald Trump is the first U.S. president since 1945 to reject the worldview formed by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War.

Trump’s vision has no place for “mutual good” or “mutual advantage.” To him, every trade has a winner and a loser. One side’s success is the other side’s defeat. “We don’t beat China in trade,” he complained in the first Republican presidential-primary debate of 2015. “We don’t beat Japan … We can’t beat Mexico.” His deepest policy grievance is against those foreigners who sell desirable goods and services at an attractive price to willing American buyers.

Trump regularly disparages U.S. allies, and threatens to abandon them. “We’re being taken advantage of by every country all over the world, including our allies—and in many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies,” he said at a rally this November. But unlike the “America First” movement before World War II, Trump’s “America First” vision is not exactly isolationist. Trump’s version of “America First” is predatory.

[Read: A good country’s bad choice]

In a midsummer interview, Trump demanded that Taiwan pay the United States directly for defense. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy,” he said. When the podcaster Joe Rogan asked Trump in October about protecting Taiwan, Trump answered in a more revealing way: “They want us to protect, and they want protection. They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?”

American allies in fact make large contributions to collective security. Total assistance to Ukraine from the European Union nearly matches that of the United States. South Korea pays for the construction and maintenance of U.S. facilities in Korea—and for the salaries of Koreans who support U.S. forces. But Trump wants direct cash payments. In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in October, he called for an annual levy of $10 billion from South Korea as the price of protection against North Korea.

Trump seems to have his eye on other payments too; in his first term, he collected benefits for himself and members of his family. Countries that wanted favorable treatment knew to book space at his Washington, D.C., hotel or, it seemed, to dispense business favors to his children. According to a 2024 report by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s properties collected at least $7.8 million from foreign sources during his first term.

In his second term, the stream of payments may surge into a torrent. Trump owes more than half a billion dollars in civil penalties for defamation and fraud. How will he pay? Who will help him pay? Trump’s need for funds may sway U.S. foreign policy more than any strategy consideration. One of his largest donors in 2024, Elon Musk, stands to benefit hugely from U.S. help with government regulators in China and the EU. Musk is also a major government contractor—and one with strong views about U.S. foreign policy. Over the past few years, he has emerged as one of the fiercest critics of American support for Ukraine. On November 6, Musk joined Trump’s first postelection call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Those who invest in Trump—be they foreign agents or mercurial billionaires—may, over the next four years, annex U.S. power to reshape the world to their liking and their profit.

In 2019, Trump delivered a Fourth of July address on the National Mall. The speech exulted in the fearsome lethality of the U.S. military, but Trump had little to say about American ideals or democratic institutions. Trump has never accepted that the United States is strengthened by its values and principles, by a reputation for trustworthiness and fair dealing. The U.S., to him, should command respect because it is the biggest and strongest bully on the block. When his friend Bill O’Reilly asked him in a 2017 interview about Vladimir Putin, Trump scoffed at the idea that there might be any moral difference between the U.S. and Russia. “You think our country’s so innocent?”

Open trade and defensive alliances were already bumping into domestic resistance even before Trump first declared himself a candidate for the presidency. The U.S. has not entered into a new trade-liberalizing agreement since the free-trade agreements with Colombia and Panama negotiated by the George W. Bush administration and signed by President Barack Obama. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was rejected by a Republican Senate during Obama’s last year in office. The Biden administration maintained most of the protectionist measures it inherited from Trump, then added more of its own.

But Trump uniquely accelerated America’s retreat from world markets, and will continue to do so. His first-term revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement preserved existing access to U.S. markets for Canada and Mexico in return for raising higher barriers around all three North American economies. He has nominated Jamieson Greer, who he said “played a key role during my First Term in imposing Tariffs on China and others,” as U.S. trade representative. The tariffs Trump desires, the protection money he seeks, and his undisguised affinity for Putin and other global predators will weaken America’s standing with traditional allies and new partners. How will the United States entice Asian and Pacific partners to support U.S. security policy against China if they are themselves treated as threats and rivals by the makers of U.S. trade policy?

Trump supporters tell a story about Trump’s leadership. They describe him as a figure of strength who will preserve world peace by force of personality. Potential aggressors will be intimidated by his fierce unpredictability.

This story is a fantasy. Trump was no more successful than his predecessors at stopping China from converting atolls and sandbars in the South China Sea into military bases. Chinese warships menaced maritime neighbors on Trump’s watch. In September 2018, one passed within 45 yards of a U.S. destroyer in international waters. In January 2020, Iran fired a missile barrage against U.S. forces in Iraq, inflicting 109 traumatic brain injuries. During Trump’s first presidency, the United States continued to fight two shooting wars, one in Afghanistan and one against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Over those same four years, the Russian forces that invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 inflicted more than 500 civilian casualties.

Every president puts a face on the abstraction that is the American nation, and gives words to the American creed. Few spoke more eloquently than Ronald Reagan, who famously compared the United States to a “shining city on a hill.” In his farewell address, Reagan asked, “And how stands the city on this winter night?” Reagan could answer his own question in a way that made his country proud.

The “city on a hill” image ultimately traces back to the New Testament: “A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid.” The visible hilltop location imposed extra moral responsibility on the city dwellers. Now the hilltop will become a height from which to exercise arrogant control over those who occupy the lower slopes and valleys—the dominance against which Truman warned. Under Trump, America will act more proudly, yet have less to be proud of. Its leaders will pocket corrupt emoluments; the nation will cower behind tariff walls, demanding tribute instead of earning partnership. Some of its citizens will delude themselves that the country has become great again, while in reality it will have become more isolated and less secure.

Americans have tried these narrow and selfish methods before. They ended in catastrophe. History does not repeat itself: The same mistakes don’t always carry the same consequences. But the turn from protector nation to predator nation will carry consequences bad enough.

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “Marauding Nation.” It has been updated to reflect the fact that, after the article went to press, Donald Trump nominated Jamieson Greer as U.S. trade representative.