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Earlier this week, almost overnight, the American tech industry entered a full-on panic. The latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese start-up of the same name, appeared to equal OpenAI’s most advanced program, o1. On Monday, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States.

So far, China has lagged the U.S. in the AI race. DeepSeek suggests that the country has gained significant ground: The chatbot was built more quickly and with less money than analogous models in the U.S., and also appears to use less computing power. Software developers using DeepSeek pay roughly 95 percent less per word than they do with OpenAI’s top model. One prominent AI executive wrote that DeepSeek was a “wake up call for America.” Because DeepSeek appears to be cheaper and more efficient than similarly capable American AI models, the tech industry’s enormous investments in computer chips and data centers have been thrown into doubt—so much that the top AI chipmaker, Nvidia, lost $600 billion in market value on Monday, the largest single-day drop in U.S. history. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that it was “invigorating to have a new competitor” and that, in response, the company would move up some new software announcements. (Yesterday morning, OpenAI said that it is investigating whether DeepSeek used ChatGPT outputs to train its own model.)

But many prominent American researchers and tech executives celebrated DeepSeek, as well. That’s because “the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open,” I wrote on Monday. Whereas the top American AI labs at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have kept their technology top-secret, DeepSeek published an in-depth technical report and is allowing anybody to download and modify the program’s code. “Being democratic—in the sense of vesting power in software developers and users—is precisely what has made DeepSeek a success,” I wrote. Start-ups and researchers love this relative transparency. In theory, competitors can use DeepSeek’s code and research to rapidly catch up to OpenAI with far fewer resources—you might not need colossal data centers to get to the front of the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) However, there’s substantial uncertainty about just how much cheaper DeepSeek was to build, based on reports about the start-up’s hardware acquisitions and uncertainty about how the model was trained.

Meanwhile, for national-security hawks, the fear is that an open-source program that won’t answer questions about the Tiananmen Square protests could become a global technological touchpoint. DeepSeek could face similar privacy concerns as TikTok: Already, the U.S. Navy has banned its use, citing security concerns.

Any predictions, for now, are highly speculative. The global AI race is far from over, and forthcoming products from Silicon Valley could leap ahead once again. At the very least, U.S. tech companies may have to reconsider whether the best way to build AI is by keeping their models a secret.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

China’s DeepSeek Surprise

By Matteo Wong

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The GPT era is already ending: “The release of o1, in particular, has provided the clearest glimpse yet at what sort of synthetic ‘intelligence’ the start-up and companies following its lead believe they are building,” I wrote in December. The new AI panic: “The obsession with frontier models has now collided with mounting panic about China, fully intertwining ideas for the models’ regulation with national-security concerns,” Karen Hao wrote in 2023.

P.S.

After several major tech executives announced their support for Donald Trump, many liberal internet users are now alleging that they are being censored on certain social-media platforms. “To some, this pattern was as unmistakable as it was malicious,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. “Social media was turning against Democrats.” And they are panicking.

— Matteo

Buried within one of the dozens of executive orders that President Donald Trump issued in his first days in office is a section titled “Terminating the Green New Deal.” As presidential directives go, this one initially seemed like a joke. The Green New Deal exists mostly in the dreams of climate activists; it has never been fully enacted into law.

The next line of Trump’s order, however, made clear he is quite serious: “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” The president is apparently using “the Green New Deal” as a shorthand for any federal spending on climate change. But the two laws he targets address much more than that: The $900 billion IRA not only funds clean-energy programs but also lowers prescription-drug prices, while the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law represents the biggest investment in roads, bridges, airports, and public transportation in decades. And the government has spent only a portion of each.

In one sentence, Trump appears to have cut off hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that Congress has already approved, torching Joe Biden’s two most significant legislative accomplishments. The order stunned even some Republicans, many of whom supported the infrastructure law and have taken credit for its investments.

And Trump didn’t stop there. Yesterday, the White House ordered a pause on all federal grants and loans—a move that could put on hold an additional tens of billions of dollars already approved by Congress, touching many corners of American life. Democrats and government watchdogs see the directives as an opening salvo in a fight over the separation of powers, launched by a president bent on defying Congress’s will. “It’s an illegal executive order, and it’s stealing,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me, referring to the order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law.

Withholding money approved by Congress “undermines the entire architecture of the Constitution,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told me. “It essentially makes the president into a king.” Last night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans “blatantly disobeys the law.”

The Constitution gives Congress the so-called power of the purse—that is, the House and the Senate decide how much money the government spends and where it goes. Since 1974, a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act has prohibited the executive branch from spending less than the amount of money that Congress appropriates for a given program or purpose. During Trump’s first term, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated that law by holding up aid to Ukraine—a move that became central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

Trump has argued that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, and so has his nominee for budget director, Russell Vought, who had the same job at the end of the president’s first term. Vought also helped write Project 2025, the conservative-governing blueprint that attracted so many attacks from Democrats that Trump disavowed it during the campaign.

In his Senate confirmation hearings this month, Vought repeatedly refused to commit to abiding by the impoundment act even as he acknowledged that it is “the law of the land.” “For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could do it for less,” he told senators at his first hearing. During his second appearance, when Van Hollen asked him whether he would comply with the law, Vought did not answer directly. “Senator, the president ran against the Impoundment Control Act,” he replied. His defiance astonished Democrats. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” Van Hollen told me.

The pause on funds for the Biden-signed laws did not draw as much attention as other moves Trump made on his first day back in the White House, especially his blanket pardons for January 6 defendants. Nor was it the only one that appeared to test the limits of his authority. A separate executive order froze nearly all foreign aid for 90 days, while others targeted birthright citizenship and civil-service protections for federal employees.

But the order cutting off spending for the IRA and the infrastructure law could have far-reaching implications. State and municipal governments in both Democratic and Republican jurisdictions worry that they may not be able to use investments and grants that the federal government promised them. “It’s creating chaos,” DeLauro said. “I honestly don’t think the people who are dealing with this know what they are doing.” She listed a range of popular and economically significant programs that appear to be on pause, including assistance for home-energy bills and money to replace lead pipes that contaminate drinking water.

“It was alarming,” Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told me. Bacon, a Republican who narrowly won reelection in a district Trump lost, called the White House after reading the text of last week’s executive order to seek assurance that money he’d secured for Nebraska—including $73 million to upgrade Omaha’s airport—wouldn’t be stopped.

The immediate confusion became so intense that a day after Trump signed the order, the White House issued a memo seeking to clarify its scope that seemed to slightly narrow its impact and open the door for some spending to continue. Bacon told me that he was assured the directive applied mostly to Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate, which Trump railed against on the campaign trail and is part of the IRA. DeLauro, however, said the memo offered little clarity: “Everything is at risk.”

Yesterday’s memo extending the funding pause to all federal grant and loan programs set off another frenzy. The directive sought to exempt Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as other direct aid to individuals. But according to a copy of the memo published by The Washington Post, it explicitly targets “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Whether the funding pause constitutes an illegal impoundment is unclear. The executive branch does have some latitude in how it spends money. And yesterday’s memo instructs federal agencies to halt funding only “to the extent permissible under applicable law.” Describing last week’s order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law, Vought told senators that it was merely a “programmatic delay,” a term that arguably falls within what federal departments are allowed to do.

More broadly, executive orders are frequently less consequential than they appear, Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and occasional Atlantic contributor, told me about last week’s directive. “It’s one thing to try to get a really nice headline for cutting back on government spending. It’s another thing altogether to decline to spend money that people are expecting you to spend,” Bagley said. “I would not be surprised if rhetoric does not match reality.”

To Charlie Ellsworth, a senior adviser with the nonprofit watchdog Congressional Integrity Project, Trump’s executive order on clean energy unmistakably oversteps the law. “They could have done this legally, but they didn’t,” Ellsworth, a former Schumer aide, told me. A new administration, for example, could have justified a pause in spending to ensure that a program was being funded in accordance with the law. But the order instead instructs agencies to ensure that the spending aligns with new policies set by the Trump administration. Ellsworth said that the order is “self-evidently” illegal.

The fight is almost certain to wind up in the courts, which have repeatedly ruled against the president’s ability to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. Indeed, Vought’s Senate testimony seemed to invite a legal challenge that could lead the Supreme Court, now with a 6–3 conservative majority and three Trump-appointed justices, to reconsider the question. “That seems to be their game plan,” Ellsworth said. “They want to get sued. They want to go to the Supreme Court.”

Van Hollen told me that he believes the Court would rule against Trump but that preferably the dispute won’t get that far. “You would hope that Republicans in Congress recognize they have an institutional interest in protecting Article I [of the Constitution] and the power of the purse, which is clearly congressional,” Van Hollen said.

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Beyond the question of legality, Van Hollen warned that Trump’s orders would jeopardize virtually all negotiations over spending on Capitol Hill, because Democrats would not be able to trust the administration to keep its end of any agreement. Although Republicans have majorities in both the House and the Senate, they will need to strike deals with Democrats to avert government shutdowns and a catastrophic default on U.S. debt.

There were early signs of GOP pushback on last week’s spending freeze, but it fell well short of a revolt. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee, said at one of Vought’s hearings that he disagreed with the administration’s view on spending and impoundments. “I think if we appropriate something for a cause, that’s where it’s supposed to go, and that will still be my position,” Paul said. And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chair of the Budget Committee, said at a second Vought hearing that he, too, had “concerns” about impoundment. But neither of them planned to stand in the way of the nominee who has argued for the president to wrest control of spending from Congress. “When you win, you get to pick people,” Graham told Vought. “And I’m glad he picked you.”

On the Republican side, the fight might be left to lawmakers such as Bacon, who has some protection from presidential retribution because he represents a purple district where voters might reward him for standing up to Trump. The GOP, he said, should go after policies it opposes through legislation, not executive order. “You just can’t determine what laws you want to execute and what you don’t,” Bacon said of Trump. Executive orders, he added, “have gotten out of hand” from presidents in both parties. “You can’t change the law,” Bacon said. “I think Republicans should stay true to that notion.”

The full impact of the pause is not yet clear, although the memo specifies that Medicaid and Social Security benefits are not affected.

Social media platforms have a 'moral responsibility' to remove violent content, home secretary says.

No one would blame you for thinking that we’re in the midst of an unprecedented global loneliness emergency. The United Kingdom and Japan have named “loneliness ministers” to tackle the problem. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a pressing public-health concern, and then-President Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory warning about an “epidemic of loneliness.” American commentators have painted a bleak portrait of a nation collapsing into ever more distant and despairing silos. And polls do suggest that a lot of people are lonely—some of the time, at least.  

But a close look at the data indicates that loneliness may not be any worse now than it has been for much of history. It’s tough to track: Not many surveys look at the trends over time, and those that do don’t date back very far. Some measure the time that people spend alone or the number of close friends they have, but these metrics are proxies for isolation, which isn’t the same as loneliness (as my colleague Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month) and doesn’t always predict it. Comparing social habits across historical periods is tricky, too, because the context—what friendship means to people, what emotional needs they have, how much fulfillment they expect their relationships to give them—keeps shifting. A 2022 review of research on changes in loneliness concluded that existing studies “are inconsistent and therefore do not support sweeping claims of a global loneliness epidemic.”

The greatest difficulty with measuring loneliness—and deciding how much to focus on ending it—may be that we don’t really know what loneliness is. Different people, researchers told me, seem to mean different things when they say they’re lonely: Some want more time with friends; some yearn to be seen for who they are; some feel disconnected from a collective identity or sense of purpose. What those experiences tell us about society’s ills—or whether they tell any coherent story at all—remains unclear. And if nations are going to devote precious resources to solving loneliness, they should know what it is they’re trying to fix.        

This is not America’s first loneliness panic. For much of the country’s history, concern about loneliness has cycled through the national conversation, Claude S. Fischer, a UC Berkeley sociologist, told me. Often, those fears have been spurred by urbanization or technological development: In Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a 1929 examination of Muncie, Indiana, two sociologists suggested that the telephone was keeping people from visiting their neighbors. Vance Packard’s 1972 book, A Nation of Strangers, described a country fractured by people traveling for jobs. Throughout the 20th century, writers and researchers worried about loneliness induced by the introduction of radio, of TV, of cars; now they fret about smartphones. The warnings sometimes have merit, but they also align with a popular kind of folk wisdom, Fischer said: “That once upon a time there was a lot of tight-knit community and everybody was happy and social relations were, quote, unquote, authentic.”

[Read: Why you should want to be alone]

That golden period may never have existed. Social interaction has changed; that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gotten worse. In preindustrial farming communities, people usually had to depend on whoever was around them—mostly family or neighbors—for support. That lack of choice was perhaps comforting but also “very restrictive,” Fay Bound Alberti, a historian of emotions and the author of A Biography of Loneliness, told me. After more people started moving to cities, it became common to make friends who provide distinct benefits—what Keith Hampton, a Michigan State University sociologist, calls “specialized” relationships. Pure friendship, the kind of relationship that’s just about having fun and bonding, blossomed. In fact, the greater cultural value now placed on friendship, Fischer has written, might be one reason people are so worried about loneliness; perhaps we expect deeper fulfillment from our friends than we once did.

Of course, the worry could be warranted this time. From all the distressing headlines, you’d probably think so. But the story of loneliness in contemporary America isn’t so straightforward.

Many of those alarming articles, for starters, cite studies whose results have since been called into question. One 2006 paper reviewed findings from two decades of the General Social Survey, a national poll that asks people about, among other questions, those with whom they discuss “important matters”—and found that from 1985 to 2004, the number of names that participants listed shrank by about a third. Even more shocking, the percentage of respondents who listed zero confidants nearly tripled. But several researchers have highlighted methodological flaws, including errors in coding cases and possible interviewer and respondent fatigue (the later in the survey this question was asked, the more likely interviewers or subjects were to skip it, and the 2004 version posed it near the end).

Hampton told me, too, that the average person might well have fewer people with whom they discuss all kinds of “important matters”; rather, they talk about specific issues with specific people. In one study, he asked about particular topics—with whom, for instance, participants discussed their career, or their health, or their “happiness and life goals”—and found that “almost everyone gets a near-full range of social support,” he told me. In 2011, one of the 2006 study’s authors published a “reexamination” of that initial paper, finding that “social isolation has not become more prevalent.” Other oft-cited socializing studies have suffered from similar oversights.

In recent years, some seemingly solid studies have suggested that Americans are spending more time alone. According to the American Time Use Survey, leisure time spent with other people declined by more than 20 percent from 2003 to 2023. Yet it’s worth noting that the poll considered only the time people spent with others in person. It doesn’t account for the virtual connections that are crucial for so many: those with disabilities; older adults; ostracized queer teens; recent immigrants alone in a new country; anyone who enjoys texting random thoughts to family group chats or old friends throughout the day, or who likes to keep in touch with far-away loved ones. When a book club decides to meet on Zoom because more members can attend, Fischer pointed out, the result is interaction among more people. Even if you think that time spent physically together is superior, discounting remote hangs entirely might give you a picture of American life that sounds more profoundly isolated than it is.        

[Read: The new age of endless parenting]

Perhaps most important, measuring isolation isn’t a good way to track loneliness. Someone with lots of unsatisfying friendships, or in an unhappy marriage, could easily be lonelier than, say, an introvert who lives alone and has a few close confidants. Some polls do ask participants to report how lonely they feel, or use a measure called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which asks subjects to rate, for instance, how often they feel excluded, or how often it seems as if “people are around you but not with you.” But according to Fischer, that scale is used in experiments with small samples more often than it is employed systematically in large-scale longitudinal studies meant to track trends over time. And comparing data from various polls taken at disparate points in history isn’t a good solution, because each might use entirely different questions, scales, or thresholds at which someone is considered lonely.

Of course, given the dearth of reliable data, it’s also difficult to argue with certainty that loneliness hasn’t gotten worse. Findings vary depending on what period you’re looking at and what population you’re talking about. Young adults, as I’ve written, do seem to be reporting more loneliness than in the past. That might be related to something as prosaic as housing costs, which have driven many people to move in with their parents—and away from where their friends live. But even the coronavirus pandemic didn’t seem to spur a clear increase in reported loneliness, perhaps because hunkering down in early 2020 felt like being part of a communal experience, or because so many started reaching out to loved ones virtually. People are resilient. And in general, across groups and over time, the “idea that there is evidence of large-scale upheaval,” Hampton said, “is really not supported by any kind of data.”

It’s hard to square a finding like that with all the dire warnings—warnings that have become so common as to feel unimpeachable. Thompson argued in his Atlantic cover story that the lack of a loneliness surge suggests that Americans have become so comfortable in their solitude that they’re no longer feeling an instinct to seek out social time. That’s possible. It’s also possible that many Americans are getting the social time they need—and that the ways they interact are, as always, simply evolving.       

If substantial numbers of people report feeling lonely, that’s a problem regardless of how rates stack up against those from other points in time. Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me he was alarmed by the results of a survey of 1,500 American adults he conducted last year: 21 percent of respondents said that in the past 30 days, they’d felt lonely either frequently or almost all of the time. “There are a lot of people who are suffering,” he told me. “We have to do something about it.”

The trouble is that it’s not clear exactly what needs to be addressed. Weissbourd’s survey took the extra step of asking participants why they’re lonely and got all kinds of answers. Some people described an existential loneliness: They don’t feel connected to their country, or they don’t feel that their place in the world is important. Some said they can’t be their authentic self with others. Some said they don’t feel good about who they are. “Are people looking for a name for a sort of amorphous stew of feelings they’re having right now?” Weissbourd wondered. Or perhaps they’re experiencing depression or anxiety, both conditions alongside which loneliness commonly occurs, he noted. Fischer mentioned that after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11, researchers recorded spikes in reported loneliness—even though these events were unlikely to suddenly reduce people’s social ties. Maybe the respondents were just expressing distress.

[Read: How much alone time do kids need?]

This might all seem like splitting hairs, but it is possible—essential, even—to be precise about shaggy concepts. Take happiness, Fischer said: Researchers have studied what people mean when they say they’re happy or unhappy, how the wording of the question can affect survey answers, and the conditions under which people are likely to answer one way or the other; those empirical inquiries have led us to a deeper understanding of a sprawling, multifaceted experience. Given the cultural moment that loneliness is having, Fischer told me he wouldn’t be surprised if we have many more studies—and hopefully more nuanced ones—to draw on in 10 years. But for now, we don’t. We have no idea whether the loneliness of a high-school student feeling excluded is the same as the loneliness felt by a 30-year-old lacking a sense of purpose, or a 50-year-old in a bad marriage, or an 85-year-old recent widower.  

Pulling apart these varied hardships might matter a great deal for finding tailored solutions. If people aren’t seeing their friends often enough, maybe we need more social infrastructure so they can easily meet pals in public spaces. If Americans are hungering for a collective sense of meaning, Weissbourd told me, the best approach might be to get people involved in volunteer opportunities. For those who socialize plenty but still feel alone—well, some of them might benefit from more solitude, to take a breather and reflect on who and what gives them real fulfillment.

More than one of these challenges can be taken seriously at once, but the time and resources required to tackle all of them are limited: Only so many policy initiatives can be dreamed up, fought for, and funded. Loneliness might even be the wrong priority altogether. Fischer pointed out that the country has other, very real public-health issues that need attention: preparing for the next pandemic, addressing gun violence, reversing the shortening of the average American lifespan. None of that is to say that our social lives are perfect; as patterns of socializing shift, something is almost always lost. But when it comes to identifying what’s ailing the nation, “loneliness” may no longer be a sufficient answer.

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Social Care Minister Maree Todd is to update the Scottish Parliament on the government's flagship policy.

Social media delights in snowball fights and sledding across Texas and the Gulf Coast

If there was any place in America where President Joe Biden’s economic agenda ought to have won him votes, it would have been Lordstown, Ohio. A September CNN article noted that, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “a gleaming new 2.8 million-square-foot manufacturing plant symbolizes something that has been fleeting in recent years: hope.” Biden was bringing well-paid union jobs in the cutting-edge battery industry to a struggling region long written off as the Rust Belt.

But if Biden was expecting the community to reward his efforts, he was sorely disappointed. In 2024, the county in which Lordstown is located shifted toward Trump by six percentage points compared with 2020, the second-highest swing to Trump of any county in the state.

Lordstown offers a test case of a political theory that has not only guided the Biden administration’s economic policy but also sought to explain the past several decades of American politics. The theory holds that Donald Trump’s 2016 election represented a voter backlash against “neoliberal” economic policies that had impoverished people in the heartland, who in their desperation turned to a populist outsider promising to smash the system that had betrayed them.

From this analysis, it naturally followed that if Democrats abandoned neoliberalism, they could win back the working class and become competitive in more of the country. A post-neoliberal party would curtail free trade, ratchet up enforcement of antitrust and other regulations, run a high-pressure economy with rising wages even at the risk of higher inflation, support labor unions categorically, and subsidize manufacturing employment to reindustrialize hollowed-out areas left behind by globalization—all of which Biden ended up doing.

On the substance, Biden’s economic agenda has registered some meaningful successes. The hot labor market raised wages; union organizers at a handful of companies, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have made breakthroughs; and the administration’s public investments in chip production and green energy have built up strategic domestic industries. As a political strategy, however, post-neoliberalism has clearly failed. Biden’s popularity dropped to catastrophic levels in his first year and never recovered, leaving his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, unable to escape his gravitational pull. If rejecting neoliberalism for four years did nothing to pull working-class voters away from Trump, perhaps Trumpism was never a revolt against neoliberalism in the first place.

Some Democrats have responded to the disaster of 2024 by insisting that the way forward for the party is to keep doing what Biden did, but louder and more insistently. In fact, Trump’s reelection ought to call into question the whole foundation upon which the strategy was constructed.

People tend to believe that events with profound consequences must have profound sources. The shock of Trump’s 2016 victory led many Democrats to search for an origin story that matched the scope of such a traumatic outcome. A belief took hold, especially on the party’s economic left wing, that working-class voters had revolted against an economic order perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this telling, every president since at least Ronald Reagan had governed in the service of corporations and wealthy elites, at the expense of ordinary Americans and “left behind” places. After all, Trump had pulled off his surprise Rust Belt sweep while denouncing free-trade deals and intermittently posing as an enemy of Wall Street. Defeating him would consequently require reestablishing a full-fledged populist program rather than the warmed-over variety of the Clinton and Obama years.

This theory always contained fatal flaws. The Democrats had maintained a coalition divided between business and labor since Franklin D. Roosevelt—who also established the modern free-trade order. The recent versions of the two parties did narrowly agree on a handful of policies, including the virtues of globalization, but starting with the Reagan era, they had grown more divided, not more united, on economics. Barack Obama had bailed out the auto industry, regulated Wall Street, and redistributed hundreds of billions of dollars from the rich to the poor. Even Bill Clinton had engaged in bitter showdowns over taxes and spending. The notion that Clinton and Newt Gingrich, or Obama and Paul Ryan, were partners with a shared ideology that could be usefully defined by a single term ignores almost everything that happened during these years. It is a measure of the incoherence of “neoliberalism” that the term can be, and has been, applied as an epithet to almost anything: Paul Krugman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, public-employee unions, Beatles fandom.

[John McWhorter: When people were proud to call themselves ‘neoliberal’]

What’s more, the 2016 election’s shocking outcome can be adequately explained by any one of a number of perfectly mundane causes: Hillary Clinton’s drawbacks as a politician, Democrats’ leftward moves on social policy, the difficulty that incumbent parties have winning a third straight term, the mainstream media’s fixation with the email scandal, James Comey’s last-minute intervention to reopen the FBI investigation into it.

Still, the narrative that neoliberalism was to blame took hold widely—including, most fatefully, during the Biden administration. Even though Biden had served as Obama’s vice president, and won the nomination in large part because Democratic voters looked back on that partnership with fondness, he filled his administration with staffers who believed that Obama and Bill Clinton had failed the working class. The administration’s policies accordingly departed in ways that those post-neoliberal theorists deemed especially important. Biden supported organized labor almost unconditionally, even in policy areas that conflicted with other liberal priorities; pulled back on unfettered free trade; gave policy-making roles to lawyers over economists; and appointed crusading reformers to the top antitrust-enforcement positions. Perhaps most important, the administration saw its subsidies for green energy and chip manufacturing not merely as targeted responses to market failures but as the core of a new industrial policy that would restore prosperity to large swaths of America.

Triumphant headlines such as “Biden Is Getting Ready to Bury Neoliberalism” and “Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out” celebrated the populist left’s newfound influence. “The Biden administration has explicitly disavowed all aspects of neoliberalism, including the assumptions about free trade and the alleged efficiency of outsourcing, the lack of support for trade unions, and the bipartisan contempt for industrial policy,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect in 2023.

As recently as this past fall, the Biden administration and many of its supporters continued to insist that his post-neoliberal policies constituted a genuine revolution in American politics and economic life—a return to the Democratic Party’s New Deal–era identity as the champion of the working class.

That conviction helps explain why Biden felt entitled to a second term and why, once he finally abandoned his candidacy, he chose to pass the baton to his vice president rather than an outsider who could more credibly distance themselves from his politically toxic record. “I think one of the arguments that get made, you have the most successful presidency of any president in modern history, maybe since Franklin Roosevelt,” he said last July, by way of explaining his reluctance to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate performance.

This belief also explains why much of the party’s left wing—including Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna—lined up behind him, even as members of the party’s centrist wing fought to replace him as the candidate. “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back,” Omar told The Washington Post. One of Biden’s final gambits to retain the nomination was a vow, apparently influenced by Sanders, to expand Social Security benefits and eliminate medical debt during the first 100 days of his second term—as if pushing the “Populist” button even harder would finally cause the public to wake up and realize all the positive change that Biden had wrought.

In reality, Biden presided over the most unpopular Democratic presidency since Jimmy Carter’s. In November, working-class voters of all races, the very constituency that Biden’s anti-neoliberal turn was supposed to court, deserted the party. Perhaps hoping for Roosevelt-size majorities was a bit ambitious, but Biden’s sweeping, historic changes ought to have had at least some positive directional impact for the party. Unless, that is, the post-neoliberal theory of politics was wrong all along.

Rather than considering that possibility, however, many of the post-neoliberals have strained to explain why the theory is still sound despite its apparent real-world failure. These explanations fall into a few main categories. Some leftists have tried to pin the blame for the election result on Harris’s decision to run toward the center once she became the nominee. Harris did embrace a more overtly moderate message than Biden, and gave less attention to his populist economic themes. But Harris performed better in swing states, where voters were inundated with her campaign messages, than she did in the rest of the country. This strongly suggests that Biden’s record was pulling her down, and that her centrist campaign themes made her more popular, not less.

Another defense holds that Biden’s successful policies simply haven’t produced political rewards yet. “The 40-year damage of neoliberalism to the living standards and life horizons of working Americans was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation,” Kuttner argued in a postelection Prospect essay. “Many of Biden’s initiatives will take many years to bear fruit.” The outgoing president has sounded a similar note. “It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen,” he recently argued in a Prospect essay under his name.

It’s true that most of the spending in Biden’s major infrastructure laws is still in the pipeline. But these delays are themselves a result of Biden’s post-neoliberal ideology, which insisted on attaching a long list of social criteria to its projects, while failing to enact legislation to speed up the permitting process. In any case, industrial policy is just one piece of Biden’s allegedly transformational agenda. Other elements—including on trade, labor, and fiscal policy—have taken immediate effect. None of these actions has shown any sign of helping Biden politically. The president’s stream of actions to forgive student debt did not produce higher support among young voters, his unwavering deference to labor unions did not yield more support among union members, and so on.

[Rogé Karma: Reaganomics is on its last legs]

And although many of the administration’s infrastructure investments remain stuck in the planning stage, some of them, such as the new Lordstown factory, have come online, bringing jobs with them. These projects offer localized mini tests of the hypothesis that delivering concrete benefits will lead to political support.

In an October story for The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann described visits to five places on the receiving end of Biden-enabled investment: Fort Valley, Georgia; Menominee, Michigan; Kokomo; Indiana, and Manitowoc and Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. “If you squint, you can see the outlines of a new post-neoliberal Democratic coalition,” he wrote. “Fast-growing clean-energy industries—wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, electric vehicles—could join Hollywood and Silicon Valley in supporting the Democratic Party.”

In fact, every one of the counties Lemann visited wound up voting for Trump at a higher level in 2024 than it had four years earlier.

The pro-Trump swings were small, ranging from 0.1 percent to 3.5 percent—well below the national average. One could spin this as evidence that Biden’s domestic build-out had brought some marginal benefits—fractional gains concentrated in areas that were chosen as the staging grounds for gigantic national expenditures. But we are talking about small local shifts, obtained via many billions of dollars of federal investment. That is not a scalable national strategy.

Biden’s defenders also insist that his otherwise winning policies were simply overwhelmed by the headwinds of inflation, which felled incumbent parties around the world last year. But letting down your guard against inflation is, in fact, a key tenet of post-neoliberal doctrine. A 2020 strategy memo from the Hewlett Foundation, a major proponent and funder of post-neoliberal thinking, argued, “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation,” and that the task was to focus on bringing down unemployment “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”

Supporters of Biden’s ambitious spending—I was one of them—were clear that events would prove out this doctrine’s soundness, or lack thereof. “If there were any doubt that Joe Biden’s economic proposals represent a big break with the policies of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, the debate about Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan dispelled it,” The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote in February 2021. “The only definitive way to find out whether the inflation threat is real or chimerical is to pass the $1.9 trillion package and see what happens.”

Inflation was always going to be a problem that Biden had to deal with. He dealt with it less effectively because the post-neoliberal argument that inflation either wouldn’t rise, wouldn’t last, or wouldn’t matter politically carried the day. Ignoring fears about inflation was a sound policy choice before the pandemic-induced price spike, but a dogmatic one after it. Biden’s inability to alter his course was a direct consequence of the ideological rigidity that his advisers embraced.

Finally, there’s the excuse that Biden’s policies would have been popular if only he hadn’t been too old and inarticulate to sell them properly to the public. “Biden wasn’t up to the kind of explanatory duties that the presidency requires—much less a presidency that was advancing landmark economic policies to benefit workers and consumers,” The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has made a similar argument. “One of my frustrations is that President Biden and Vice-President Harris didn’t lead their economic messaging by talking about their break with neoliberalism,” he told New York magazine shortly after the election. “So the policy was really good. I just don’t think the rhetoric always matched the policy.”

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

A great deal of evidence from political science suggests that presidential rhetoric has little ability to change public opinion, so the expectation that better speeches would have led to dramatically different outcomes is far-fetched. Even if that were not the case, the emphasis from post-neoliberals on rhetoric as a driving force of history is deeply strange. The whole point of their theory was to explain Trump’s rise as a proletarian revolt against neoliberal immiseration. Now that neoliberalism has supposedly been overthrown, we’re told that the crucial dialectical stage was for the president to deliver West Wing–quality inspirational speeches? What kind of materialism is this?

The theory that Trump’s popularity was a reaction against neoliberalism had an irresistible attraction to progressive elites. For the labor movement and other parts of the economic left, it supplied a political rationale for policies they’d long supported. For social-issue progressives, it implied that they had no need to compromise with the socially conservative positions held by working-class voters; all Democrats needed to do was address people’s “real” material concerns.

Public policy, of course, is not just about winning elections; it’s about improving people’s lives. Some of the policies Biden implemented are worth preserving on the merits. The blue-collar workers of Lordstown may well be in a better position than they were four years ago. But the electorate’s diffidence in the face of these measures is bracing. The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried, and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed. It turns out there’s more to popularity than populism.

In Los Angeles, we live with fire. There is even a season—fire season, which does not end until the rains come. This winter, the rains have not come. What has come is fire. And Angelenos have been caught off guard, myself included.

Tuesday mid-morning, a windstorm hit L.A. In the Palisades, a neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, a blaze broke out. Over the past two days, it has burned more than 17,234 acres and destroyed at least 1,000 structures. The Palisades Fire will almost certainly end up being the most expensive in California history. It is currently not at all contained.

By Tuesday night, another fire had sparked—this time in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Altadena, where winds had been clocked at 100 miles an hour and sent embers flying miles deep into residential and commercial stretches of the city. By mid-morning yesterday, the Eaton Fire had consumed 1,000 structures and more than 10,600 acres. It, too, is zero percent contained. Together, the fires have taken at least five lives.

Last night, just before 6 p.m., another fire erupted in Runyon Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills. Like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, the Sunset Fire seems to have first broken out in the dry chaparral scrub whipped by the roaring winds. The hillside there is particularly dense with homes, and the neighborhood is jammed up against the even denser, urban L.A., where apartment buildings quickly give way to commercial blocks. One of this city’s many charms is its easy access to nature, but nature is also the cause of its current apocalypse.

Living through these fires, I’ve struggled to understand the scale of the event; to see the threat for what it is and respond appropriately. My family lives in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood 20 miles from the Palisades with a whole mountain range in between. On Tuesday, while driving on the freeway, I saw the colossal thunderhead of gray smoke of the Palisades Fire erupting from the Santa Monica Mountains and decided: This is fine. I finished my errand. I went on with my day.

When I got home, I turned on KTLA, which was broadcasting live from Palisades Drive, where dozens of cars, trapped in evacuation traffic, had been abandoned by their fleeing owners. A man ran up to the reporter, removed his face mask, and spoke into the microphone. Looking directly at the camera, he implored viewers to leave their keys in their car if they were going to flee, so that the fire crews could get to the fire unimpeded. The guy looked familiar. The reporter asked him to identify himself. It was Steve Guttenberg. Mahoney from Police Academy! Only in L.A.

The wind was making a constant low, terrible moan through the trees. Every few minutes, a violent gust would blast through and rattle the house. That afternoon, I went to pick up my kids, who had been kept inside their school all day. At home, I let them run around outside, but everyone’s eyes got itchy. There was so much dust in the air. Still, the only fire I knew of was all the way across town, so I went out again that evening to see a movie.  

At intermission, a friend returned from the restroom and told me that my wife had been trying to reach me. I turned my phone off airplane mode and called her; when she picked up, she told me a neighbor had just knocked on our door to tell her that a brush fire was burning nearby. It was close, she said. How close? I asked.

Across the street, she said. Like, can you see it? From our house? She said no. I’m coming home, I told her.

Driving back, I saw a huge, glowing gash in the San Gabriel Mountains—the Eaton Fire. I thought about what needed to happen when I got home: the go bags we should pack, the box of birth certificates and Social Security cards. A photo album or two. I’d park the car facing out, for a quicker exit. I’d move some potentially long-burning objects (trash cans) as far from the house as possible.

I knew what to do. I knew the procedure. I’d reported on fires before. Hell, the home I’d grown up in was nearly burned down by wildfires twice in 2017, and my aunt and uncle had lost their home in Santa Rosa that same year. I’d interviewed firefighters about days just like this one—when the Santa Anas howl and it hasn’t rained for eight months or longer, the chaparral is a tinderbox, and fires begin popping up everywhere.

And yet, I hadn’t thought that it could happen down the street. I hadn’t considered that it could happen to me and my family.

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

I arrived home just after 9 p.m. First neighbors with hoses, then the fire department, had doused the blaze nearby. I worked through my checklist, packed the kids a bag of clothes, then my wife and I packed small bags of our own. A thought nagged at me: All day, I’d been looking at fire—why hadn’t I seen the immediacy of the threat? I pulled out a book called Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry, which I find extremely calming in intense moments because it presents an extended argument for the benefits of thought and practice during emergency situations. “CPR is knowable; one can learn it if one chooses,” Scarry writes. “But one cannot know who will one day be the recipient of that embodied knowledge … It is available to every person whose path crosses one’s own.”

What we do during emergencies, when the habits of the everyday (getting out of your car, keys in hand) come face-to-face with the extraordinary (a fire by the side of the road), requires extraordinary thinking. And we would be wise to insert these acts of thinking into our everyday habits. We perform a version of this constantly: We call it “deliberation.” Mostly, we spend very little time between deliberation and action. But emergency-style deliberation is difficult, because true emergencies are rare. It is hard for us to conceive of them happening until they are.

The drivers who locked their car doors and left with their keys were not thinking within the framework of the fire as a threat. A fire doesn’t steal one’s car; it burns it down. I had been no different in my thinking that day. Maybe I was worse: I had the knowledge of what to do in a fire, but I hadn’t even considered the realistic possibility that the fire presented a threat to my family.

I spent most of Tuesday night awake. The wind remained terrible. The smell of smoke began to fill the house. I rolled up towels and stuck them at the foot of the doors. Yesterday morning, just after 7 a.m., our phones buzzed with an alert: an evacuation warning for our corner of the neighborhood and much of nearby Pasadena. We hustled our kids through breakfast, packed up, and got out. Our going was optional, but at least 100,000 other Angelenos are under mandatory evacuation, a number that is surely growing higher as all of these fires continue to burn.

We left with the little we’d packed in our go bags, which was clarifying. I felt a weight lift. This was everything that truly mattered. Rereading Scarry had reminded me: I did not learn to perform CPR until I was about to be a father, until the possibility of having to perform it seemed a bit more real. I still, thankfully, have never had to. But will I retrain myself? Should I be practicing? We motored on through traffic. After a while, the smoke began to clear, just enough to see patches of sky. I will schedule that CPR retraining, I thought. That’s something I should do. When we can get home and catch our breath.

A politically powerful opponent of birthright citizenship railed that the United States cannot “give up the right” to “expel” dangerous “trespassers” who “invade [our] borders,” “wander in gangs,” and “infest society.”

Was this Donald Trump speaking in 2024? No, the quote is from an 1866 speech on the Senate floor by Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, a leading opponent of adding a provision to the U.S. Constitution granting citizenship based solely on birth on U.S. soil. Who were the “invaders” that Senator Cowan so feared? “I mean the Gypsies,” Cowan explained, despite offering no evidence that Roma migration posed a risk to the United States.

Senator Cowan lost the fight. In 1868, the nation ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the first sentence of which guarantees birthright citizenship. The amendment invalidated the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that no Black person could ever be a U.S. citizen. Equally important, the Constitution now guaranteed citizenship to the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil, “no matter from what quarter of the globe he or his ancestors may have come,” as one senator later put it in a speech to his constituents.

[Martha S. Jones: Birthright citizenship was won by freed slaves]

More than 150 years later, Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship on “day one” of his new administration for children without at least one parent who is a citizen or green-card holder. He made that announcement in a three-minute video prominently posted on his campaign website, which he repeated in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last month.

In 2025, the end of birthright citizenship is more than just an applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It has a genuine, if slim, chance of making its way into law. If it does, it will upend the lives of millions, and create a caste system in which a new set of people—native-born non-Americans—can never work or live in the open.

This prospect ought to be taken seriously. How would President Trump implement such a plan? Is it constitutional? And would the U.S. Supreme Court back him up?

The first question is easy, because Trump has told us exactly how he intends to proceed. In the video, the president-elect commits to issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025, that would deny citizenship not only to the children of undocumented immigrants but also to those born to parents who both are legally in the United States on a temporary visa for study or work. (Trump’s order as proposed would apply only to children born after it is issued.)

The consequences would be immediate. Trump says he will order government officials to deny these children passports and Social Security numbers. They will be prohibited from enrolling in federal programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and likely state benefits as well.

As adults, if all goes according to Trump’s plan, they will be barred from voting, holding elected office, and serving on juries. States could deny them a driver’s license and block them from attending state universities. They would be prohibited from working in the United States, and any U.S. citizen who employs them could be fined or even jailed under federal immigration laws. Many would be rendered stateless. Perhaps worst of all, they would live in perpetual fear of being deported from the only country in which they have ever lived.

[Read: Trump’s murky plan to end birthright citizenship]

Ending birthright citizenship for these children would affect everyone in America. Everyone would now have to provide proof of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status on the date of their birth to qualify for the rights and benefits of citizenship. The new law would necessitate an expanded government bureaucracy to scrutinize hospital records, birth certificates, naturalization oaths, and green-card applications.

Lawsuits are sure to follow, which leads to the second question: Will Trump have the constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants?

Per the text of the Constitution, the answer is a hard no. Some constitutional provisions are fuzzy, but the citizenship clause is not one of them. It states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Even the deeply racist Supreme Court back in 1898 couldn’t find any wiggle room in that language. Just two years before, in 1896, the Court had somehow read the Constitution’s equal-protection clause to permit “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, ushering in the Jim Crow era. But when the U.S. government argued in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the children of Chinese immigrants were not birthright citizens, the justices balked. The language granting citizenship to “all persons born” in the United States was “universal,” the Court explained, restricted “only by place and jurisdiction.” More recently, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that point, stating as an aside in a 1982 opinion addressing the rights of undocumented children to attend school: “No plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

Despite the clear text and long-standing judicial precedent, Trump claims that undocumented immigrants and their children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and so fall within the exception to universal birthright citizenship.

That is nonsense. Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed. They are required to pay their taxes and renew their driver’s license, just like everyone else. Trump certainly agrees that undocumented parents of native-born children can be deported for violating immigration laws at any time. So in what way are these immigrants and their children not subject to U.S. jurisdiction?

The citizenship clause’s exception for those not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States applies only to children born to members of American Indian tribes and the children of diplomats, as Congress explained when drafting that language in 1866. In contrast with undocumented immigrants, both groups owe allegiance to a separate sovereign, and both are immune from certain state and federal laws. (Native Americans were granted birthright citizenship by federal statute in 1924.)

As nonsensical as they are in an American context, Trump’s ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1985, the law professor Peter Schuck and the political scientist Rogers Smith wrote an influential book, Citizenship Without Consent, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants. These scholars asserted that “immigration to the United States was entirely unregulated” before the 1870s, and so there was no such thing as an “illegal immigrant” and likewise no intent to grant birthright citizenship to their children. Many scholars and commentators, including some members of Congress, have repeated that same claim. In 2015, the law professor Lino Graglia testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “there were no illegal aliens in 1868 because there were no restrictions on immigration.” Then-Representative Raúl Labrador repeated the same point at that hearing, asserting as fact that there was “no illegal immigration when the Fourteenth Amendment came into being.” In an op-ed in June 2023, a former Department of Homeland Security policy adviser declared, “There were no immigrant parents living unlawfully in the United States” in the 19th century.

These critics have their facts wrong. In a recent law-review article, the legal scholars Gabriel Chin and Paul Finkelman explained that for decades, Africans were illegally brought to the United States as slaves even after Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, making them the “illegal aliens” of their day. The nation was well aware of that problem. Government efforts to shut down the slave trade and deport illegally imported enslaved people were widely reported throughout the years leading up to the Civil War. Yet no one credible, then or now, would argue that the children of those slaves were to be excluded from the citizenship clause—a constitutional provision intended to overrule Dred Scott v. Sandford by giving U.S. citizenship to the 4.5 million Black people then living in the United States.

[Read: Birthright citizenship wasn’t born in America]

Even so, these ideas have gained traction in the right-wing legal community—a group that will be empowered in Trump’s next term. The Fifth Circuit judge James C. Ho, who is regularly floated as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court, recently said in an interview that children of “invading aliens” are not citizens, because “birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion”—a reversal of his previous position on this issue. (This is the judicial equivalent of shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!”) Never mind that undocumented immigrants—a majority of whom entered the United States legally and then overstayed their visa—don’t qualify as invaders under any definition of the word. And never mind that there is no support for that idea in either the Constitution’s text or its history. In 1866, Senator Cowan opposed granting citizenship to the children of the “flood” of Chinese immigrants into California, as well as to Gypsy “invaders” of his own state. His colleagues pointed out that the only invasion of Pennsylvania was by Confederate soldiers a few years before. Birthright citizenship, they explained, would ensure that the United States would never revert back to the slave society that the Confederates invaded Pennsylvania to preserve.

In truth, all of these baseless arguments are window dressing for the real goal. The Fourteenth Amendment’s overarching purpose was to end a caste system in which some people had more rights under the law than others. To be sure, that ideal has always been a work in progress. But many opponents of birthright citizenship don’t even hold out that ideal as a goal; they would rather bring caste back, and enshrine it in our laws.

If birthright citizenship were to end tomorrow for children without at least one parent who was a citizen or lawful permanent resident, it would bar from citizenship hundreds of thousands of people each year. These people wouldn’t be eligible to participate in our democracy, and they would be forced to live and work in the shadows, as would their children and their children’s children. The end of birthright citizenship would create a caste of millions of un-Americans, locked in perpetuity into an inferior, exploitable status. Ironically, if Trump were to succeed in ending birthright citizenship, he would preside over the most dramatic increase of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history.

That brings us to the third question: Would five members of the Supreme Court uphold Trump’s proposed executive order?

No sitting justice has addressed this question directly. At his confirmation hearing in 2006, Justice Samuel Alito was asked whether he thought the children of undocumented immigrants qualified for birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. He refused to answer on the grounds that a future case might come before him, but he also observed: “It may turn out to be a very simple question. It may turn out to be a complicated question. Without studying the question, I don’t know.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to respond to the same question for the same reason. (These two justices also dodged questions about whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade on those grounds.)  

The Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court, believes that, at most, “two” or “maybe … even three justices” on the current Court would vote to end birthright citizenship. But all it takes is five, and the Court’s composition may well change. Trump appointed three justices during his first term in office, and he could appoint a few more before the end of his second. It is they who will have the last word.