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I’ve been on trial half my life. Yesterday, my 18-year legal drama finally came to an end when the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, definitively convicted me of criminal slander. Many people are familiar with my wrongful conviction for Meredith Kercher’s murder, but this lesser charge, arising from statements I signed during my interrogation, is the one that has continued to haunt me. The charge resulted from a lie invented by the police: that I was present when my roommate Meredith was sexually assaulted and murdered at our apartment in Perugia in 2007. Everything that subsequently went wrong in the investigation and prosecution—the tunnel vision, junk science, biased witnesses—flowed from that lie.

The interrogation I was subjected to remains the most terrifying experience of my life—more terrifying than that first crushing guilty verdict and 26-year sentence; more terrifying than prison itself. I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak. The night of Meredith’s murder, I had stayed with Raffaele Sollecito, a young man I’d just started dating. But no matter how many times I said that, the police refused to believe me. I was berated, threatened, lied to, and slapped, and eventually my sanity broke—I began to believe the lies the police were telling me, and I agreed to sign statements placing myself and another innocent man in the house when the crime had occurred. I recanted only a few hours later, but it didn’t matter. I was coerced into signing the statements and then charged with criminal slander for doing so. (The police, who did not record the interrogation as they were supposed to, deny that I was hit or pressured into making these statements.)

This conviction branded me a malicious liar, and cast suspicion over me even after I was acquitted of murder and freed from prison. And it allowed the Italian authorities to scapegoat me for leading the investigation astray, instead of owning up to their failures. Now I have to live with this wrongful conviction for the rest of my life.

In the first few days of the investigation, the police found what appeared to be black hairs on Meredith’s body that they seem to have believed belonged to someone of African descent. A young man who lived in the flat below ours told the police that a Black man known as “the baron” had visited his apartment in the past. With fingerprints and DNA yet to return from the lab, these were their big leads.

But the police were also suspicious of me. Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who led the investigation, was convinced that the perpetrator had not broken into our home, as it appeared—a window was shattered, a rock was found inside. On a hunch, Mignini decided that the break-in had been staged, and therefore, that someone with access to our flat was involved in the murder and covering it up. Of Meredith’s three roommates, I stood out as the youngest and most immature. I was also the lone foreigner—the others were Italians working in law offices. One had been out of town, and the other had screamed and wept after seeing the grisly scene in Meredith’s bedroom. I never saw inside the room, nor did I understand much of the rapid-fire Italian being shouted back and forth. It took me longer to comprehend what had actually happened, and I came off as cold and unmoved in comparison.

One of my roommates also asked me to lie—to deny to the police that we smoked marijuana. She said that they would lose their jobs if anyone found out. So I covered for them. But the police found marijuana plants in the apartment below ours—something I was unaware of—and began to wonder if I was keeping more from them.

When the police interrogate you, the first thing they do is isolate you. Isolation is not just about the room you’re in (one with no windows and no clocks). It’s about making you feel that the police themselves are your only support system. This was easy for the Perugia police; I was in a foreign country thousands of miles from my family, and I often didn’t understand what was being asked of me. I assumed that the police’s unwillingness to believe me was the fault of my own inadequate Italian. The police had also tapped my phone, and knew that my mother was flying to Italy to help me, and that soon I’d no longer be alone. And so, hours before her arrival, they broke me in that final interrogation.

They had discovered a text message on my phone that I’d written to my friend Patrick Lumumba the day of Meredith’s murder. I had been working for Patrick part-time as a hostess at his pub, Le Chic. He’d given me the night off, and I’d replied: “Certo. Ci vediamo più tardi, buona serata.” This was my attempt at translating the English idiom see you later, but to the Italian police, it read as if I’d made a literal appointment to meet Patrick later that night. Bingo.

Patrick was a Congolese immigrant. Here was their African—the source, they assumed, of those hairs. The police were convinced that I’d invited Patrick over, that he had assaulted and murdered Meredith, and that I’d staged a break-in to cover for him.

The interrogation became a relentless pursuit of a confession. I now know that the tactics the police used on me were a version of the Reid Technique, the most widely used interrogation tactic in the world. Police-reform advocates argue that the approach increases the stress associated with denial, while reducing the stress associated with confession. The problem is that it works against the guilty and innocent alike, and studies have shown that police are no better than a coin flip at predicting whether a suspect is lying—though they are, unfortunately, confident in their judgments. (The Reid company denies that the technique increases the risk of false confessions, which they say happen when investigators don’t follow its guidelines.)

They began by contradicting me relentlessly. Countless times, I denied meeting Patrick or knowing anything about the murder. But they would not hear it. They nitpicked every detail of my testimony about my night at Raffaele’s—Did you have dinner at 9:30 or at 10? Did you have sex before or after, and how long did it last? With a guilty suspect, this technique is effective at poking holes in their lies. But with me, an innocent suspect, it degraded my trust in my memories.

Then they lied to me: We have hard evidence placing you at the scene of the crime that night. We know you were there. Like many people, I had assumed that the police were bound by some code of ethics to tell the truth. I could not fathom that they would, or even could, lie to me.

All of this—compounded by the bullying, exhaustion, promises, and threats—reshaped my sense of reality, and made it hard to know what was true and what wasn’t. It was here that my interrogators suggested a reason I couldn’t remember being present when the crime had occurred: I must have witnessed something so traumatic that I’d blocked it out.

This was a minimizing tactic to position me as a witness, not a suspect. And after hours of being accused of lying, it was almost a relief to think that I really was suffering from trauma-induced amnesia. But I still couldn’t remember anything other than spending the night at Raffaele’s. So the police led me to add more details: We know you met with Patrick that night. Where did you meet him? Was Meredith home when you let him inside? I tried my best to imagine what they demanded I remember. I strung together fragments of real memories—Patrick’s brown jacket, a basketball court on the way to my house, our kitchen. But even as I was threatened with 30 years in prison if I didn’t give them the answers they wanted, I still couldn’t imagine anything to do with the murder itself.

This culminated with an officer named Rita Ficarra slapping me on the back of the head, shouting, “Remember! Remember!” until my sanity gave way completely, and I blurted out, “It was Patrick!”—surprising even myself. I was so traumatized, I truly believed that I was on the cusp of recovering some lost memory.

The police high-fived and cheered, then typed up my ramblings. At 1:45 a.m., I signed the statement. Then they rushed off to arrest Patrick. My mom had arrived in Italy and she was calling my phone, but the police wouldn’t let me answer it. They said it was evidence now. A few hours later, Mignini, the prosecutor, arrived to take another statement to try to fill the gaping holes in the first one. I made inferences based on his suggestions.

Did you hear her scream?

I don’t know.

We know you were there. How could you not have heard her scream?

I guess I must have heard her scream.

The police typed it up. Compliant and disoriented, I signed that statement, too, at 5:45 a.m. Only then was I allowed to rest. I curled up on two plastic chairs and fell asleep.

When I woke a few hours later, the “memories” I’d been pressured into imagining didn’t feel real. I told the police that I couldn’t bear witness against Patrick. They ignored me. One reassured me, Your memories will return in time. I demanded a pen and paper and wrote a recantation, explaining that I had been confused and pressured into implicating Patrick. I wrote, “Is the evidence proving my pressance [sic] at the time and place of the crime reliable? If so, what does this say about my memory? Is it reliable?” and “Who is the REAL murder [sic]?”

I handed this recantation—what would become known as my memoriale—to the police. They handcuffed me and led me to Capanne prison. Even then, I still believed them when they said I was merely a witness. It wasn’t until days later, when I was officially charged with murder, that I understood I was a suspect.

Knox in 2007. Courtesy of Amanda Knox

Patrick, thank God, had a rock-solid alibi. But despite his alibi and my recantation, the police still refused to release him. They kept him in custody even after the forensic evidence came back showing that the hairs they’d recovered weren’t human; they were likely coarse wool fibers. Among the many samples and evidentiary items collected from Meredith’s room, there was not a single trace of Patrick—or of me.

Instead, the evidence started to point to a local burglar named Rudy Guede, whose nickname was “the baron.” The murderer had left behind, traced in Meredith’s blood, fingerprints, a bare footprint, and multiple shoeprints. Just a week before the murder, Guede had been arrested in Milan after breaking into a nursery school, where he was found with a large knife. After the murder, he fled to Germany. Soon, the police released Guede’s name and photo to the media and issued an arrest warrant. In a Skype call with a friend, secretly observed by the police, he said that he’d been with Meredith at the house that night, and that I was not there, as the media were reporting. He made no mention of Patrick.     

Once Guede was apprehended, Patrick was released. The media paid little attention as one Black man was traded for another. (The police kept Le Chic closed for months, and Patrick ended up losing the business.) Instead, the media focused on me—“Foxy Knoxy,” the allegedly drug-addled girl next door gone wild who’d orchestrated what they were now describing as a death orgy with Guede and Raffaele. Guede was charged and convicted of sexual assault and murder “with others” in a fast-track trial; Raffaele and I were charged and convicted of the sexual assault and murder a year later. (Guede has maintained that he is innocent, and continues to insist that Raffaele and I carried out his crime.)

The lie that I was at the house when the crime occurred led to repeated instances of what is called forensic confirmation bias. The lie colored the collection and analysis of all the other evidence. It led police to ignore exonerating evidence, such as my lack of a motive or any history of violence or mental illness, my alibi, and the virtual impossibility of participating in such a brutal murder without leaving a single trace of DNA in the room. And it led them to distort and magnify the significance of trivial evidence, such as the fact that my DNA had been found in the bathroom where Guede attempted to clean off Meredith’s blood. Of course my DNA was found there—that was my bathroom too.

This phenomenon has been demonstrated by the cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror. In a 2006 study, he gave six fingerprint experts pairs of prints that, unbeknownst to them, they had previously judged in their own casework as matching or not. The experts were given some made-up context for each pair of prints. For the nonmatches, they were told that the suspect had confessed to the crime; for the matches, they were told that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. This fictional information resulted in two-thirds of the experts changing some of their original judgments. Believing that a suspect confessed alters the supposed objectivity of scientific experts. Dror went on to show a similar effect in other forensic domains, including DNA analysis and forensic pathology.

The jury, too, was swayed by the lie, though I truly believe that if they could have observed my interrogation, they would have known better. But my interrogation was not recorded, so no one saw the yelling, the slapping, and how I was psychologically manipulated. The irony is that at the time, Italy was more progressive on this issue than the United States: Recording interrogations was mandatory. But the police and prosecution claimed that my interrogation had been merely an “interview”—that I was not a suspect but merely a witness, and thus I was not entitled to a lawyer or a recording.

Italy’s own courts ruled that my interrogation was illegal and that the statements I’d signed were inadmissible as evidence for the murder charge. But while being tried for murder, I was simultaneously being tried by the same jury for criminal slander, and the judge allowed the statements as evidence for the slander charge. So the jurors were instructed to ignore the statements for the first charge, but scrutinize them closely for the second. It’s absurd to think that one didn’t affect the other. Had I not been charged with slander, I may never have been wrongly convicted of murder.

After four years in prison, Raffaele and I were acquitted of murder in 2011, when the court-appointed DNA experts found that the minuscule traces supposedly linking us to the crime were unreliable, and possibly the result of lab contamination. But our acquittal was appealed by the prosecution, and we were reconvicted of the same crime in 2014, based largely on spurious character evidence. Finally, in 2015, we were definitively acquitted by the Court of Cassation. In all of those trials, my slander conviction was upheld, with a sentence of three years—time served. And in that 2015 ruling, the high court also affirmed the police’s initial lie. Many who still believed in my guilt pointed to this “judicial fact” to support their theories: Amanda Knox is a liar, and she was there that night. Even if she is innocent, she knows more than she’s telling.

This left me free, but wrongly convicted; it let Guede avoid taking full responsibility for his crimes; and it left the Kercher family with a needless cloud of uncertainty.     

I have been trying to appeal the slander conviction ever since. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in my favor, sanctioning Italy for failing to provide me with a lawyer during the interrogation. Then, with the help of the Italy Innocence Project, I appealed to the Court of Cassation to reopen the case, and in 2023, it overturned my slander conviction and sent the case back to the appellate level for retrial. The high court limited this new trial to examining a single piece of evidence. The statements I’d been pressured into signing were no longer admissible. All that the judges and jury could consider was the handwritten recantation, my memoriale, in which I’d written things like “I’m unsure about the truth,” and “I don’t feel I can be used as condemming [sic] testimone [sic].”  

I traveled back to Italy for the hearing in June 2024, and testified once more. The judges and jury deliberated for two hours, then came back and found me guilty. I was dumbfounded, and deeply depressed. The conviction legally required two things to be true: that I’d made a false accusation, and that I’d done so knowingly. As for the false accusation, the presiding judge pointed to this line in my memoriale: “I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik [sic].” I wrote this to affirm to the police, after being repeatedly accused of lying, that I was genuinely confused. I finished that sentence with “but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me than what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele’s house.”

As for the second requirement, the court cited my memoriale when I wrote, “I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming. But I’ve said this many times so as to make myself clear: these things seem unreal to me, like a dream.” Despite the obvious confusion of my statements, the court argued that this mention of a scream was irrefutable evidence of my presence at the house, and proved that I knew who was and wasn’t there. In short, the court ruled that my memoriale was both false and slanderous and accurate and reliable.

I appealed this ruling to the Court of Cassation in one last bid to clear my name. And here we are.

In Italy, there is a notion of bella figura—of putting on a good face. An old-world sanctity persists around reputations, defamation and slander are taken very seriously, and officials are terrified of looking bad—everyone’s egos are at stake. An Italian lawyer once explained my slander conviction to me as a contentina, a “small contentment” handed down by the Court of Cassation to the lower courts and prosecutors. It was incredibly embarrassing for all involved when the high court absolved me of murder and cited “sensational failures” in the investigation and “culpable omissions” in the prosecution. So the high court upheld the slander conviction as a consolation prize for the officials they were rebuking. This absolved them of responsibility for justice going awry, because they could blame me, the liar, for derailing the investigation.

I’m crushed that Italy has cemented this lie into the legal record, and that I have no further recourse to clear my name in that country.

I am not a liar or a slanderer. But in the midst of all this, there is someone who committed slander, though he has never been charged with it. Rudy Guede falsely accused me and Raffaele of his crime after his arrest; in one interview from prison, he said that he was “101 percent” certain I was there the night of the murder. He is free again, after serving just 13 years in prison, and is being charged and investigated for sexual and physical abuse of another young woman. (He denies the allegations.) He continues to smear Raffaele and me. After his release, he said in an interview, “The documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds.”

Guede’s lies—and his relatively short sentence and release—are derivative of the lie invented by the police that evidence placed me at the scene of the crime. For a long time, I blamed myself for succumbing to the pressure to believe that lie. But what happened to me is not unusual.

My first glimmer of understanding came in prison, when I received a letter from Saul Kassin, a psychologist and an expert in false confessions. What had happened to me fit a playbook that had been used against hundreds—perhaps thousands—of other innocent people. The isolation, the bullying, the nitpicking of my memories, the excessive hours under interrogation, the refusal of food and bathroom breaks (I was even on my period and bleeding through my pants), the minimization, and the deception—they were all by the book. A tremendous sense of relief washed over me in realizing that what had happened was not my fault, and I came to find fellowship with others who had been put through coercive interrogations.

“Can you imagine,” Kassin told me recently, when I interviewed him for a podcast series I produced called False Confessions, “in the Central Park Five case, if each one of the five was charged with slander for implicating the others?” They, too, were lied to about the evidence against them. And like me, they all believed that they were merely witnesses, and that they would be released after signing their confessions.

But the case I see as most parallel to my own is that of Marty Tankleff, who was accused of killing his parents in Long Island in 1988. He was told that his father had awoken from a coma to say that his son was responsible. Tankleff could not comprehend how his father would lie about something like that, and after the police offered him the suggestion of a traumatic blackout, he came to believe that he’d been involved—just long enough for the police to obtain his confession. It sent him to prison for 17 years, until he was exonerated.

The problem with police deception is not that it breaks your will—isolation, bullying, and exhaustion do that—it’s that it loosens your grip on reality. This is why advocates in the U.S. are now pushing to ban deception by police during interrogations, something that has long been illegal in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, and elsewhere.

In the past few years, laws have been passed in various states in the U.S. to prohibit the police from lying to suspects during custodial interrogations, but they are all limited to minors. Adults, too, are vulnerable to these same pressures. At 20, I was in so many ways still a naive child. When I testified before the Washington State legislature last year in support of a bill that would ban the use of any testimony gathered through police deception, regardless of the suspect’s age, I was shocked to hear a law-enforcement representative frankly admit that police need to lie to do their job. The bill ended up being gutted; next week, I will testify in support of a new version of it.

When police tell the truth, they’re not only being more ethical—they’re also being more effective. A rapport-based interview method called PEACE has been embraced by the U.K., Canada, and several other countries. It eschews deception in favor of open-ended questions, and has been found to yield better information than guilt-presumptive techniques. And it has the added benefit of not destroying the trust between the police and the communities they are supposed to protect and serve.

Today, I’m going to allow myself to grieve this final ruling in my own case. But tomorrow I’m going to pick myself up and continue advocating for changing the law going forward. I’ve emerged from this legal saga with a deep understanding of how lies can derail the course of justice. When the police lie about evidence to suspects, they usually do so with noble intentions. They aren’t trying to elicit false confessions, but those lies can send the innocent to prison, let the guilty go free, and deprive victims of the closure they deserve.   

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”

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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Updated at 1:55 p.m. ET on January 16, 2025

Imagine that a foreign-born billionaire buys Facebook, asks its engineers to boost his own posts, and then introduces a payment system that rewards users for pandering to his whims and prejudices.

Also imagine that the billionaire happens across a news report on the death toll in Iraq following the allied invasion back in 2003, and links that carnage to the intelligence failures that were used to justify the war. Bristling with righteous outrage, our fictional billionaire then suggests that the state and the media have covered up this whole incendiary topic.

This was how Elon Musk sounded to many Britons after he belatedly discovered the organized child-sexual-abuse networks known as “grooming gangs.” Here was a real scandal: Networks of adult men, primarily British citizens of Pakistani descent, had trafficked and raped young girls in towns across England, over many years, aided by failures of local governments and the police. But the scandal wasn’t new, nor had reporters ignored it en masse. “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Never mind that a legacy media outlet—Rupert Murdoch’s London Times—first broke the story of the child-sex-abuse ring in Rotherham, 14 years ago.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s horrified reaction to the scandal, which appears to have been prompted by a viral post on New Year’s Eve, is entirely justified. However, it comes quite late, and demonstrates his usual self-centeredness: His thinking seems to be that if he didn’t hear about the scandal during the 2010s, then surely no one else did, either. His ownership of X, and his alliance with Donald Trump, gives him the power to force any issue he likes into the political conversation. Lately he has used that power to intervene in European politics, berating British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, boosting the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and attacking the European Union for its efforts to regulate his businesses. Starmer’s opponents on the right, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, have been quick to echo Musk’s interest in the grooming gangs—even though Badenoch’s party was in power as the story originally unfolded.

The Times reporting kicked off dozens of prosecutions, multiple public inquiries, and even a primetime British Broadcasting Corporation drama. The story was well known enough that one of the police whistleblowers appeared on a celebrity reality-television show in 2018. The news even reached America: In 2014, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class.” The ethnicity of the perpetrators mattered, he argued, but so did the status of the victims—working-class girls whom the police saw as “‘tarts’ who deserved roughly what they got.”

Musk’s newfound revulsion at the details of the abuse is entirely justified—read the sentencing reports if you have the stomach for it. “Girls were raped callously, viciously, and violently,” the judge told nine men convicted of grooming offenses in the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012, adding, “Some of you acted as you did to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect.”

The sexual abuse of children occurs in all human societies, but the forms it takes are culturally dependent. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. The gangs are not representative of the whole picture of what researchers call “group-based child sexual exploitation”—a phenomenon that in Britain appears to be dominated by men who are white, as you would expect from the makeup of the population. (England and Wales are more than 80 percent white, census data show; “Asian ethnic groups” are about 9 percent of the population.) Most grooming-gang defendants in the cases that have attracted media attention, however, were men of Pakistani descent. Many were connected to the nighttime economy, such as by running minicab firms and delivering takeout. They primarily targeted vulnerable girls—runaways or those who lived in foster homes. We know all this because of extensive reporting, testimony by victims and whistleblowers, and the bravery of politicians such as Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, two Labour Party members of Parliament who were shunned by their own side for speaking out.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk’s X endgame]

It is entirely reasonable to ask why they were shunned. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Local South Asian communities were afraid to report the perpetrators in their midst. Police did not record complaints or investigate the issue actively; by some accounts, race riots in Oldham in 2001 made police emphasize “community cohesion” over what should have been their primary concern—dismantling organized-rape gangs regardless of the demographics of the perpetrators. White members of municipal councils fell into a pattern of assuming that problems among British Pakistanis were best left to their fellow councilors from that community. “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the council overcompensated too much,” one local officer told an investigator in 2015. “It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.”

Living through this story, experiencing the slow accretion of details and convictions and inquiries in real time, clearly felt very different from learning about it all at once. One of the main complaints to have surfaced since Musk reheated this story is that much of the original coverage was piecemeal and overly restrained: Had gangs of white men been trafficking immigrant women, it might have prompted a reckoning comparable to America’s protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. What qualifies as a “reckoning” is arguable—but I agree that the left would have raised hell about such a story, as the right has done with this one.

In response, some commentators, on both the left and right, have called for a “national conversation” about the gangs. What that conversation would sound like, however, is the tricky part. Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent right want? Is the answer militant secularization of Britain? Or a renewed insistence that the United Kingdom is a Christian country? Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.

Although Musk is powerful enough to draw new attention to the Rotherham scandal, polling suggests that most Britons see his interventions as opportunistic. The X owner has a deep animus toward Starmer, the Labour prime minister, whom Musk sees as an enemy of free speech in general and of his platform in particular. Many of Musk’s posts called for implausible scenarios such as the King dissolving Parliament or the country holding fresh elections, adding to the sense that Musk had not deeply researched the topic before picking up his phone to post.

Nonetheless, the Conservative opposition, led by Badenoch, pandered to him, demanding a fresh national inquiry to “join the dots.” That reverses the Tory position of a year ago—back when the party was in power and had the ability to commission whatever inquiries it deemed necessary. (In 2019, the future Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that investigating historic sex abuses was money “spaffed up a wall.”)

Badenoch’s decision to echo the Musk line also minimized the work that the Conservatives did do in government to tackle rape gangs. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. The Tories also accepted that some sentences given to gang members had been too lenient, and proposed to create a new aggravating factor in sex offenses involving grooming. That will likely be included in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring, alongside a mandatory-reporting measure requiring social workers and others to notify police when they suspect children are being abused. Despite all that progress, Badenoch understands that calling for a new investigation is one of the few ways for an opposition leader to attract attention. (Today, Labour caved and promised a “rapid audit” and more funding for local inquiries.) Just as the activist left sometimes refuses to believe that civil-rights victories have been achieved—remaining instead in a state of politically lucrative perma-war—so the right will not claim victory in having already forced Britain to take these gangs seriously. Conservatives want the fight, not the win.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Intriguingly, Britain’s other right-wing party, Reform, has been less harmoniously in tune with Musk in the past couple of weeks than the Tories have. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has joined Badenoch in calling for a new nationwide inquiry into the gangs. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is not a folk hero. A founder of the xenophobic English Defence League, he risked collapsing one of the grooming trials by filming the defendants outside it. He is also a convicted mortgage fraudster and is currently in jail for contempt of court in a different case.

Robinson badly needs mainstream support to shake off his thuggish reputation, and Musk has taken up his cause. “Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk declared on X. He also faulted Farage—who has sought to keep racist “bad apples” out of Reform—for distancing himself from Robinson. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk complained. Once again, the billionaire seemed out of touch with the British political scene: Farage, a key champion of Brexit, is the most successful leader that the British populist right has ever had. Reform won more than 4 million votes in last year’s election and looks set to make big gains in local contests in May.

To many Britons’ relief, Musk seems to be moving on to other subjects, including the California wildfires. His intervention has presented liberals with a difficult terrain to navigate. Yes, his interest was opportunistic. Yes, he spread conspiracy theories as well as the true scandalous details. But at least part of his instinctive reaction was correct: This was and is a scandal that shames Britain, as the Times asserted in 2012. It just isn’t a hidden one, thanks to the many victims and whistleblowers who have brought it into the open , beginning more than a decade ago. They deserve the tribute of having their bravery acknowledged.

The Liberal Party has held power in Canada for 68 of the past 100 years. That record is a testament to the party’s pragmatism and prudence. A satirist once mocked William Lyon Mackenzie King, the most enduring of Liberal prime ministers, for supposedly believing: “Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.” Not all the Liberal leaders were as very cautious as King, but almost all of them absorbed his lesson: Don’t overdo things.

Until recently, the Liberals rarely deviated from King’s guidance. The one major exception occurred during the prime ministership of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father. In 1980, the elder Trudeau was returned to office after a brief spell in opposition. The previous year, the Iranian revolution had caused a geopolitical crisis that spiked oil prices worldwide. The elder Trudeau convinced himself and his inner circle that the opportunity had now come to build a state-directed energy economy. His new government fixed prices, expropriated foreign holdings, and taxed producers to subsidize consumers.

This rattletrap project soon collapsed into economic ruin. The Liberals were crushed in the following election, in 1984, losing 95 of their 135 seats in Parliament.

Pierre Trudeau himself had retired just ahead of the implosion. For decades afterward, the 1984 defeat revived Liberal prudence: Don’t overdo things. When the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they delivered middle-of-the-road economic policy. When they lost power again, in 2006, they did so not for want of moderation, but because of a classic Canadian scandal of patronage and kickbacks in government contracting.

I recite this history to make a point: Justin Trudeau inherited not only a famous name and a handsome face, but also a detailed playbook of what and what not to do in Canadian politics.

Canada is a country that does not reward imported ideologies—the nation is too riven by its own native fault lines: French versus English, resource producers versus industry and finance, rural versus urban, central Canada versus the Atlantic east and the prairie and mountain west. The successful Canadian politician must bridge those divides. The work of doing so is never easy. If a would-be leader makes the mistake of adding too many borrowed ideological isms, the already difficult becomes practically impossible.

Successful Canadian governments mix and match. The Conservative government of 1984–93 undid Pierre Trudeau’s heavy-handed government controls. At the same time, it negotiated an agreement with the United States that hugely reduced the acid rain that poisoned lakes in Ontario and Quebec. Next, the Liberal governments of 1993–2006 exercised the fiscal discipline that balanced Canada’s budgets and reduced the huge debt accumulation of the Trudeau years. Then, the Conservative government of 2006–15 both cut taxes and enacted the most ambitious anti-poverty program in recent history, a generous child benefit for poor and middle-class families.

These Conservative and Liberal governments also did much that their base voters wanted, of course. But they always remembered: Don’t overdo things.

Enter Justin Trudeau. Trudeau gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013. His rise coincided with a sharp turn in U.S. politics. During Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals shifted in a much more radically progressive direction on issues of race, gender, immigration, and identity generally. Exactly why the shift happened cannot easily be explained, but it can be accurately dated. Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood patrol in February 2012. After Eric Garner was choked to death by police in July 2014, and Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the first Black Lives Matter protests and riots broke out. Social-media use intensified the new dynamics of online activism: The most striking early Twitter mobbing erupted in December 2013. By the early Donald Trump years, polling found that white liberals expressed more progressive views on race than actual members of the minority groups those liberals supposedly championed. Detractors named this progressive veer “the great awokening.” Trudeau absorbed the turn, and rapidly came to personify it.

[David Frum: Canada lurches to the left]

At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2016, President Obama joked about the enthusiasm for Trudeau among progressives on both sides of the border: “Somebody recently said to me, Mr. President, you are so yesterday. Justin Trudeau has completely replaced you—he’s so handsome; he’s so charming; he’s the future. And I said, ‘Justin, just give it a rest.’”

Trudeau won a majority in the election of 2015: 184 of the 338 seats in Parliament. He won nearly 40 percent of the popular vote, a creditable plurality in a five-party system. Somewhere along the way, however, the playbook that warned Don’t overdo things got lost.

On issue after issue, the new Trudeau government implemented progressive ideas adapted from American activists, typically with harrowing consequences. In Canada, the federal government has a large role in criminal justice. The Trudeau government enthusiastically mimicked U.S. ideas about restorative justice. Canada’s incarceration rate dropped from about 86 per 100,000 adults in 2013–14 to about 72 in 2022–23. Over that period of nearly a decade, Canada’s rate of violent crime surged by 30 percent. From 2014 to 2022, the rate of homicides spiked by 53 percent. Residents of the greater Toronto area now share horror stories of violent home invasions. Invaders are typically seeking to grab keys to expensive cars. Toronto contractors now do a lively business in automatic driveway bollards designed to deter thieves from driving right up to the house and being able to make an easy getaway.

In 2018, the Trudeau government legalized the sale and distribution of cannabis. Enforcement of laws against the possession of harder drugs relaxed too. British Columbia currently permits personal possession of less than 2.5 grams of almost any drug, including heroin. In 2021, Ontario courts dismissed 85 percent of all drug-possession charges before they came to trial—this compared with only 45 percent of charges dropped pretrial in 2019, prior to a new policy directive in 2020.

Opioid-overdose deaths in British Columbia reached a new peak of 2,500 in 2023. Canadian cities—once famously safe and orderly—are now crowded with homeless addicts. In the three years from 2020 to ’23, Vancouver reported a more than 30 percent increase in homelessness. Vancouver’s permissive policies and mild weather have lured thousands of people who are vulnerable to addiction to a city notorious for Canada’s most expensive housing. The grim spectacle of people lying unconscious on streets, of syringes and needles discarded in parks and public places, has earned Vancouver the unenviable title of “fentanyl capital of the world.”

A view shows housing structures behind fences on March 25, 2024, as the City of Vancouver plans a cleanup of the waterfront Crab Park where homeless people have been camping for three years. (Paige Taylor White / Reuters)

Canadian-government efforts at reconciliation with Indigenous populations predated the Trudeau administration: The Conservative government of the early 2000s had paid $2 billion to settle claims of abuse from Indigenous Canadians who had attended residential schools. But the Trudeau government redoubled such initiatives, paying tens of billions of dollars more to settle additional claims. Over nine years, the Trudeau government tripled spending on what it labeled “Indigenous priorities” to nearly $32 billion annually, more than Canada spends on national defense. It negotiated settlements to Indigenous lawsuits that have added an estimated $76 billion to Canada’s future liabilities.

[David Frum: Against guilty history]

Indigenous groups have also been granted significant approval rights over major resource projects. During the Trudeau years, land acknowledgments have become a near-universal feature of public life in Canada. Public, academic, and corporate events habitually open with an expression of obligation to Indigenous groups that once dwelt on or near the meeting place.

Yet over this period of fervent commitment to restitution, Canada’s Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic decline in life expectancy. As I noted recently:

From 2017 to 2021, average life expectancy for Indigenous people in British Columbia dropped by six years, to 67.2 years (the average for non-Indigenous Canadians in 2021 was 82.5 years). From 2015 to 2021, Indigenous people in Alberta suffered a collapse in life expectancy of seven years, to 60 for men and 66 for women. The principal culprit: opioid addiction and overdose. In Alberta, Indigenous people die from opioids at a rate seven times higher than non-Indigenous Albertans.

The Trudeau government faces its gravest problem because of Canada’s poor economic performance under his leadership. Fifteen years ago, Canada made a strong and rapid recovery from the global financial crisis. Of the Group of Seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), Canada was the first to return to pre-crisis levels of both employment and output. But Trudeau has not succeeded so well with the crisis that erupted on his watch. Measured by growth in GDP per capita, Trudeau’s Canada has posted some of the worst scores of the 38 most developed countries both before the coronavirus pandemic and after.

The Trudeau government has tried to accelerate weak productivity growth by a lavish surge in federal spending and a massive increase in immigration.

Canadian public expenditure of course spiked during the pandemic. Yet even now, three years after the pandemic emergency, Trudeau’s government is still spending 2.5 percentage points more of its GDP on programs other than interest payments than it spent when Trudeau entered office. Because tax revenues have not kept pace, deficits have swelled, and the country’s overall debt burden has grown crushingly.

The immigration trend is equally arresting. Before Trudeau, Canada accepted about 250,000 new permanent residents a year. Relative to population, that figure was already substantially higher than the corresponding U.S. number. The Trudeau government raised the level past 300,000 after 2015, and now to nearly 500,000.

Canada under Trudeau has pivoted from what economists call “intensive” growth (which involves each worker producing more) to “extensive” growth (which means producing more by increasing the number of workers). There are three big problems with the extensive-growth strategy.

The first problem is that it does not raise Canadians’ living standards. The country produces more in aggregate, but the individual does not, so there is no basis for paying workers more.

A second problem is that the new immigrant workers are also new immigrant consumers, who compete with the existing population for, among other things, housing. Relative to people’s incomes, housing in Toronto is now more expensive than in New York City or Miami. The nearby new metropolis of Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, now ranks among the 10 least affordable cities in North America, as people priced out of Toronto relocate westward around Lake Ontario.

A third problem is that new immigrants may welcome Canadian opportunities, but they do not always share Canadian values. When privately reproached for the Trudeau government’s weak response to anti-Semitic outrages, his foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, reportedly replied, “Have you seen the demographics of my riding?” (Canadian electoral districts are known as “ridings.” Joly’s riding is 40 percent foreign-born, with Algeria the top source of migrants, followed by Morocco, Haiti, Syria, and Lebanon.) Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, Canadian cities have been disgraced by anti-Semitic incidents of accelerating violence. Shots have been fired at synagogues and schools, though mercifully nobody has been hurt. One Montreal synagogue has been firebombed twice. Police have given broad leeway to anti-Israel protests that would likely have been suppressed as prohibited hate speech had they been targeted at any other minority group but Jewish Canadians.

These specifics do not, however, quite capture all that has gone wrong for Trudeau. His party now stands at about 22 percent in the polls, six points worse than the Liberals’ share in the wipeout election of 1984. Look back through Trudeau’s personal-approval ratings, and you see a much earlier break point: the spring of 2018. Until then, Trudeau was remarkably popular, scoring a peak of 65 percent in September 2016. (The contrast with Trump probably helped him a great deal that fall: Trump was, and is, a widely despised figure in Canada.) Trudeau was still polling at and above 50 percent in the fall of 2017. Six months later, his rating had collapsed, to just 40 percent.

[David Frum: Justin Trudeau falls from grace]

What changed in the spring of 2018? During the school break of that year, Trudeau took his wife and three children on an eight-day tour of India. On that trip, Trudeau and his family were repeatedly photographed wearing the local costume. Trudeau had already gotten into some trouble when an image surfaced of him—then in his late 20s, working as a teacher at a private school—clad in Aladdin costume, his face darkened by makeup. But here he was, as prime minister of the country, playing dress-up in ways that looked simultaneously foolish and patronizing, all at taxpayers’ expense.

Canadians who paid closer attention to Indian politics noticed something even more disturbing on the 2018 visit. The Canadian embassy invited a notorious Sikh extremist to its dinner honoring Trudeau in New Delhi. The invitation was rescinded and blamed on an unfortunate misunderstanding. Then it turned out that Trudeau had met with the extremist before, apparently as part of an ill-considered political strategy to woo Sikh ultranationalist votes in Canada.

For Canadians, the photos of the India dress-up drove home the sting in Obama’s joke about Trudeau’s preening: “Give it a rest.” Meanwhile, the implausible explanation of the invitation to a murderous terrorist cast a shadow upon the high ideals Trudeau so often professed.

Trudeau lost his parliamentary majority in the election of October 2019. Thereafter, he governed with the support of the more left-wing New Democratic Party. Although his poll numbers would sometimes rally, especially in the first shock of the coronavirus pandemic, the gloss never lasted. Trudeau tried to regain his majority in a post-pandemic election in September 2021 and failed again.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during an election-campaign stop in Toronto. (Carlos Osorio / Reuters)

At the beginning of his prime ministership, Trudeau described Canada as a post-national state: “There is no core identity, no mainstream, in Canada.” In his mind, no membrane seemed to exist between “foreign” and “domestic.” Hence his apparent belief that Sikh extremism in India might be used as a political resource in Canada.

In 2023, however, Trudeau learned that the Chinese state had been interfering in Canadian elections for some time. China was accused of funding pro-Beijing Chinese-language media in Canada, and of pressuring individual members of the Chinese Canadian diaspora. The then-leader of the Conservative Party would later estimate that the clandestine Chinese effort cost his party at least five, and as many as nine, seats in the election of 2021—not enough to change the outcome of the election, but a significant impact nonetheless. The Chinese government also allegedly intervened in the Liberal Party’s internal politics to replace a Beijing-skeptical Liberal member of Parliament with a Beijing-friendly one in 2019.

Reportedly, the Chinese government made veiled threats to Chinese-citizen students in Canada that their visas might be revoked if they did not join the Liberal Party and back the Beijing-friendly candidate in the nominating contest. Some of those students were allegedly provided with false documents to make them eligible to vote. At a public inquiry last year, the Beijing-friendly member of Parliament testified that he’d known international students were bused in to support him but said that he did not—at the time of his nomination—realize any impropriety was taking place.

The Canadian public knew nothing of this until more than a year after Trudeau had received an intelligence briefing about it all—even then, the government seemed more outraged by the report’s leaking than by the Chinese interference. Trudeau in fact praised the Liberal lawmaker who’d been elected with Chinese help, and scolded journalists that their questions about Chinese interference verged on racism.

Yet Trudeau sometimes could discover the limits of post-nationalism. When right-wing U.S. backers provided financial support for a truck blockade of Ottawa in early 2022 to protest COVID-19 restrictions, Trudeau invoked emergency powers and froze hundreds of bank accounts associated with the protests. The two cases of foreign interference were different in many ways, but it was not easy to quell suspicions that one difference was that the 2019 interference had helped Trudeau’s party, whereas the 2022 interference did not.

As he sought Canada’s prime ministership a decade ago, Trudeau proudly described himself as a feminist. Half of his cabinet appointees would be female, because—a formula he often used—“it’s 2015.” In office, however, Trudeau tended to assign his female appointees the dirty work that men avoided. In the worst scandal of Trudeau’s leadership, Canada’s ethics commissioner found that the prime minister had pressured the justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to save an important corporate backer from criminal prosecution; Trudeau has denied that he ever ordered her to do so, but the scandal led to her resignation. Then, in his government’s terminal crisis, he forced from office via Zoom call his loyal female finance minister, Chrystia Freeland—after asking her to deliver one more round of bad news for him even as he offered her a demotion. For the self-advertised feminist, the gap between image and reality appeared wider and wider.

Trudeau has resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, but not yet as prime minister. The party will now choose a new leader to face the election that is expected sometime soon this year. For whoever wins the job, impending Liberal defeat seems impossible to avert. More likely, he or she will have signed up for the long work of reinvention and rebuilding. Trudeau’s successors will have to decide: Should the Liberal Party return to its historic pragmatism and prudence, or should it continue on his path of valuing declared intentions over measured outcomes?

The post-Trudeau Liberals may do well to rediscover the foundational rule of Canadian party politics: Seriously, we weren’t kidding. Don’t overdo things.

During the years-long height of the British superstar Robbie Williams’s fame, I’d often wonder why he struggled to cross over to true global recognition. Williams, for those who are unfamiliar, started out as a member of the wildly beloved English boy band Take That in the early 1990s. After leaving the group in 1995, right when its success was cresting, Williams transformed himself from potential pop-culture footnote into icon. A slew of blockbuster albums made him a household name across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia—but not in the United States, where his early-2000s attempts to gain traction made little progress. Perhaps the country had too many of its own idols—or perhaps, as the new musical biopic Better Man argues, Williams was too gleefully self-deprecating to sincerely make the sales pitch.

The director Michael Gracey adheres to the biopic genre’s basic contours. Better Man follows Williams’s hardscrabble youth, his rise to fame, and the ups and downs that came with notoriety, all punctuated by interpretations of some of his most famous tracks. This synopsis suggests that the film is a programmatic, musician-approved project, almost as if it’s designed to be an entry point for a new generation of fans. Except, get this: Williams is represented as a CGI chimpanzee. Like, a walking, talking, human-size chimp, portrayed and voiced by a combination of a motion-capture actor (Jonnie Davies), a musician (Adam Tucker), and Williams himself.

Why is he a primate? Better Man doesn’t ever explain—though in its trailer, Williams mentions feeling “less evolved” than everyone else—and none of the characters ever remarks on it. Instead, the meaning of the conceit is left in the hands of the audience. This decision is a baffling swerve for a celebrity biopic, one that will probably keep it from becoming an out-and-out sensation. But Better Man deserves to be treated as more than a strange curio: Despite the seemingly run-of-the-mill premise and the contrivance of the protagonist, it properly delves into its subject’s erratic persona, using the musical segments to advance the story instead of as mandatory breaks in the action. The result is one of the most thoughtfully constructed movies about a musician I’ve seen in years.

[Read: Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them.]

A core part of Williams’s appeal has always been his cheekiness, as the Brits would put it. Yes, he’s a handsome fella who sings catchy hits. But even though his stock-in-trade is sincere love ballads and toe-tapping anthems about having fun, Williams exudes the sense that he’s never taking any of the glitz around him too seriously. His narration throughout Better Man poses a possible reason for his devil-may-care attitude: It’s a cover for what he refers to as the clinical depression that has dogged him over the course of his career, especially at its peak. What better way to underline that than by removing his image from the film entirely?

The appealing presentation of chimp-Williams is helped by the fact that Gracey started his career as a visual-effects artist—he knows his way around computer-generated characters. His prior directorial effort was The Greatest Showman, a more conventional movie musical that tried to package the complex and problematic life of P. T. Barnum as a family-friendly inspirational tale. It made little sense, but it became something of a box-office phenomenon on the backs of Hugh Jackman’s bravado and Gracey’s steady hand behind the camera.

Better Man has not only similarly earwormy tunes but also a far richer subject than Barnum. Williams is a showman too, but he’s a rawer, more relatable one; he’s always worn his personal deficiencies on his sleeve, even on the biggest stage. Gracey’s attentive care with Williams’s discography is especially striking. Williams’s career could easily have been shot as a straightforward jukebox musical, running down the track listing of his greatest-hits CDs while sprinkling in some run-of-the-mill backstory material. Instead, Gracey rearranges the chronology, finding numbers that thematically match the events of his protagonist’s life. Williams performs the power ballad “Feel,” the lead single from his fifth solo album, to illustrate his tough childhood. The director re-creates the singer’s famed 2001 live rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for Better Man’s grand finale; instead of just plucking another of the singer’s own numbers, he chooses to evoke one of Williams’s biggest inspirations.

[Read: The missing piece of the Bob Marley biopic]

The film’s most jaw-dropping set piece is also perhaps its most timeline-flouting. After covering his difficult adolescence in the downtrodden industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent, Better Man turns to Williams’s early years in the music industry. Gracey captures the explosion of Take That’s crossover appeal—they climbed the ladder from small gay clubs to national arenas—in a scene where the band performs “Rock DJ,” Williams’s solo chart-topper from 2000. It unfolds as an unbroken, CGI-assisted camera move, with Williams and his bandmates—who, in real life, had nothing to do with the song—dancing through the streets of Central London, surrounded by a growing throng of fans. An artificial long take can sometimes come across as gimmicky, but it works tremendously well here, thanks in part to the creative choreography. Movie-musical directors must make certain decisions when mounting their big numbers: Should they throw everything into a wide shot, capturing the scale of the dance routines but making the world around them feel static? Or is it better to cut into the action constantly, highlighting the individual players but losing that sense of magnitude? The one-shot technique helpfully circumvents those questions.

Gracey makes an effort to innovate in several other ways, navigating around the musical genre’s visual conventions and limitations. A later scene, for example, renders the anthemic “Let Me Entertain You” as a dreamlike battle between Williams and his mouthiest chimp-demons. High points like these helped keep Better Man in my good graces even as the second half dips into excessively maudlin territory, as Williams wrestles with the strictures of fame. Still, some viewers might find the audacity of a hero that’s a CGI chimp impossible to overcome—especially those who know little about the real person (including what he actually looks like). Early box-office returns seem to indicate U.S. theatergoers’ disinterest, if not outright bafflement. But Williams has always thrived on the audience’s sympathy as much as their admiration, and Better Man finds a wonderfully goofy way to represent that with its charming, if unevolved, simian star.

There has been no shortage of explanations for the devastation wrought by the wildfires still burning across greater Los Angeles. Some commentators have argued that sclerotic local governance left the region unprepared to respond to such a large-scale disaster. Others have invoked the impact of climate change or the perils of the Santa Ana winds. And some have blamed the Ukrainians or Israel.

“We sent $250 billion to Ukraine,” Charlie Kirk, the CEO of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, wrote on X. “And yet we can’t get water to fight fires in California.” The post received more than 100,000 likes and 10 million views, and was echoed by other pro–Donald Trump surrogates. “California is literally on fire right now so of course Biden gave Ukraine more money,” quipped Not the Bee, a popular right-wing commentary site, in response to the administration announcing its final military-aid package this week.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, a similar discourse has unfolded—but with a different culprit. “Sorry America, your government couldn’t afford water for fire hydrants and firefighting planes, they have to give billion of tax dollars to israel to kill innocent children in Gaza,” declared the activist Mohamad Safa, who runs a human-rights organization accredited by the United Nations, in an X post that garnered some 150,000 likes and 2.9 million views. In response to an NBC report that L.A.’s fire chief had warned that budget cuts could harm “response to large-scale emergencies,” the progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan appended this to the headline: “US spends a record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since last Oct. 7.”

Similar attempts to export accountability abroad emerged after September’s Hurricane Helene and are fast becoming a fixture of our post-disaster discourse. But whether left-coded or right-coded, such claims are equally misguided—and dangerous. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, ranking ahead of the United Kingdom, India, and France. It is one of the wealthiest and highest-taxed states in America. Simply put, the federal government using a fraction of a percent of its $6.8 trillion budget for Ukraine and Israel is not why one of the richest state governments in the country was unprepared to deal with a very plausible emergency. Regardless of what one thinks of either conflict, they have nothing to do with what is transpiring in Los Angeles.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

Bizarre theories like these are damaging not just because they misconstrue the nature of American governance or assail overseas targets, but because they undermine our society’s capacity to self-correct. In the aftermath of disaster, healthy communities ask themselves, What did we do wrong? Unhealthy ones ask, Who did this to us? Nations that externalize their internal issues lose the ability to address them. Blaming freeloading foreigners for the policy and governance failures that enabled the L.A. wildfires will not prevent future failures, but rather will allow the real causes of those failures to continue to fester.

For this reason, the historian Walter Russell Mead once warned that “an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom.” When people pin their domestic problems on foreign scapegoats—whether Ukraine or Israel or another country—they erode any effort to genuinely confront those problems. Which means that those who spread these arguments don’t just endanger their targets; they endanger us all.

Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.

Juli Gittinger keeps a bag packed with iodine pills and a machete. “It’s good for getting through brush,” she explained to me recently. Gittinger’s mind churns with images of a future in which she might have to flee her home with just a backpack, bushwhacking her way through rural Georgia to safety. She has enough water in her house to last 30 days, and enough food to last 100 days.

Gittinger, a religious-studies professor at Georgia College, is a prepper, but unlike the stereotype that term commonly conjures—a bunker-bound, right-wing conspiracist—Gittinger is liberal. She began prepping after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Among her prepping supplies are Plan B emergency contraceptive pills that she’s bought ahead of Trump’s second inauguration, in case his administration introduces new restrictions on reproductive health care.

Gittinger is representative of a small number of preppers who oppose Trump and who are gearing up for whatever disasters the next four years might bring. Across Reddit boards and Facebook groups, they are stocking up on and freeze-drying food—and say that others should be too.

[Read: Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change]

Precise numbers on prepping are hard to come by, but the United States has likely millions of preppers of all political persuasions, says Michael Mills, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in the United Kingdom. Liberals make up a small percentage—about 15 percent, according to Mills. Like their conservative counterparts, liberal preppers are worried about the stability of the economy and the power grid, but unlike the conservatives, they also worry about climate-change-induced disasters and the potential that Trump will weaken America’s security through foreign-policy snafus. Mills is skeptical that the number of liberal preppers has dramatically increased, but the moderators of several liberal-prepping forums told me they’ve seen a spike in interest and activity since Trump’s reelection, in November. Several preppers I interviewed mentioned getting current on their vaccines, in case the new administration alters the rules for vaccine insurance coverage, or updating their passports, in case they feel they have to leave the country.

In addition to being a prepper herself, Gittinger has studied prepper groups and written about them in an academic book, American Apocalyptic. Starting in 2018, Gittinger surveyed several hundred liberal preppers (and a few conservatives) on Facebook. When she asked what got them into prepping, 31 of the 300-some respondents mentioned the election of Trump, and 35 mentioned “political anxieties.” Among the calamities they feared would strike were both the politically driven—economic and societal collapse, an attack from a foreign power—and the completely random: a pandemic, a natural disaster. “The country is so divided that anything could ignite riots like we haven’t seen before,” one respondent told her.

Lots of Americans are doing some version of prepping for Trump’s second term, even if they don’t call it that. Some providers of Plan B and abortion pills say they noticed an increase in orders immediately after the election. The election prompted many to rush to buy electronics, cars, and other goods ahead of Trump’s promised tariffs. Spending on vehicles, auto parts, and appliances rose in November, The Washington Post reported. Along with stocking up on food and water in anticipation of tariffs, Gittinger recently bought a new phone, and Zoe Higgins, another liberal prepper, bought a new car.

Genevra Hsu, a moderator of the Leftist Preppers subreddit, grew up learning survivalist techniques from her father, but she began prepping in earnest around 2013, when she moved to a rural area of Virginia. Some of her friends got into gardening, and she would give them tips. She now has six months of meals on hand—she does her own pressure-canning, dehydrating, and freezing. She’s at high risk of complications from COVID, so when the pandemic started, the stores provided an “animal comfort that comes from knowing there’s enough on the shelf that I don’t have to go anywhere,” she told me. Recently, she has started dehydrating and freezing powdered eggs in case of a bird-flu pandemic. On the subreddit, preppers discuss stocking up on toothpaste with fluoride, which Trump’s chosen health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., opposes adding to tap water. They’re buying up birth control and medical textbooks for treating vaccine-preventable diseases.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

The line between prepping and emergency readiness is hazy. Indeed, some of the liberal preppers I interviewed seem more worried about act-of-God disasters such as hurricanes than a Handmaid’s Tale–type dystopia. KC Davis, the author of How to Keep House While Drowning, moved to Houston after 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and became concerned about flooding and losses of power. Now she keeps canned water, headlamps, thermal blankets, life jackets, rechargeable lanterns, and 30 days of emergency food on metal racks in her garage. She also has a generator, which fired up while we were talking.

In New Orleans, Higgins has a month’s worth of freeze-dried spaghetti, beef stroganoff, chicken alfredo, and other meals. She’s procured flashlights, headlamps, waterproof matches, fire starters, water-purification tablets, camping stoves, and propane tanks, along with something she calls a “bug-out binder” containing 400 pages of emergency checklists and instructions. Some preppers admit that the gear they’ve accumulated is less a preparation for a specific, Trump-related emergency and more a consequence of prepping gradually becoming a hobby, with ever more complicated gadgets for ever more outlandish scenarios. Among Gittinger’s prep is a Faraday bag—a backpack that blocks electromagnetic signals, in which Gittinger keeps a spare phone and a computer—to be used in case of an extreme solar flare.

Over and over, liberal preppers told me that they differ from their conservative counterparts because they are less conspiracy-minded and more concerned with helping their community rather than only their immediate family. (Gittinger wouldn’t need Plan B herself, but she bought it for other young women who might.) But like their right-wing counterparts, liberal preppers do tend to own guns, according to Gittinger: 121 of the 198 people who answered her survey question about weapons said they owned a firearm. Whom, exactly, they would use them against is less clear. “I think a lot of that is just out of a response to general uncertainty,” Hsu told me.

Another major commonality between liberal and conservative preppers is a distrust of the government, a feeling that institutions won’t help you if the worst comes to pass. For liberal preppers, this feeling has grown only more pronounced since the first Trump presidency. The rise of Trump, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and Republican victories in the states have given liberals the sense that they are on the ropes. “My general feeling, especially about Texas, is that there’s not a lot of community safety-netting when it comes to emergencies,” Davis says. “It feels like sort of every man for himself.”

Her sentiment fits with what the pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson calls a “cross-partisan rise in distrust” of institutions. Republicans and Democrats now share similar levels of distrust of Congress and big business. Americans on both the left and the right feel unsupported; preppers are just doing something about it. “There’s this common thread that I think unites preppers of all political persuasions, which is a lack of faith in political progress as a whole and a skepticism towards political leadership,” Mills told me. Conservative preppers were once worried about Barack Obama, and liberals are most worried about climate disasters, but they both worry that the government doesn’t have your back.

[Jonathan Chait: How liberal America came to its senses]

Some of my conversations with liberal preppers served as good reminders to buy bottled water and flashlights in case of a natural disaster, but some of them had an air of paranoia. Many of their worst-case scenarios seemed unlikely to ever take place. What are the odds that American citizens would actually be banned from international travel? What is the likelihood that Republicans would outlaw not just Plan B, but also birth control, which is used by 82 percent of reproductive-age women?

Then again, we live in outrageous times, during which a reality-TV host can become president, for the second time, after a failed coup attempt. That president picked another TV host to be in charge of the nation’s defense. His chosen health secretary has urged parents to ignore the CDC guidelines for childhood vaccinations. Abortion is completely banned in 12 states. There really has been a global pandemic that shut down much of the world for years. There’s a sense that literally anything can happen, so you’d better be prepared.

Gittinger pointed out that when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, she had N95 masks on hand. Who’s too paranoid now?

Illustrations by Max Guther

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The Bar Is Closed

A short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was empty. But looking closer, I realized that business was booming. The bar was covered with to-go food: nine large brown bags.

As we ate our meal, I watched half a dozen people enter the restaurant without sitting down to eat. Each one pushed open the door, walked to the counter, picked up a bag from the bar, and left. In the delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, not a word was exchanged. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.

Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars. “It’s just a few seats, but it was a pretty happening place,” Rae Mosher, the restaurant’s general manager, told me. “I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it,” she went on. “I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. But there’s nowhere else for the food to go.” She put up a sign: BAR SEATING CLOSED.

The sign on the bar is a sign of the times for the restaurant business. In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.” Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)

Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

[Derek Thompson: Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out]

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.

Max Guther

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping. A 2021 study of the widely used UCLA Loneliness Scale concluded that “the frequently used term ‘loneliness epidemic’ seems exaggerated.” Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is little evidence that loneliness is rising more broadly today. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday” declined by roughly one-third from 2021 to 2023, even as alone time, by Atalay’s calculation, rose slightly.

Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life—its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse. Our habits are creating what Atalay has called a “century of solitude.” This is the anti-social century.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

The End of the Social Century

The first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social. From 1900 to 1960, church membership surged, as did labor-union participation. Marriage rates reached a record high after World War II, and the birth rate enjoyed a famous “boom.” Associations of all sorts thrived, including book clubs and volunteer groups. The New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world; communities and developers across the country built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and all kinds of gathering places.

But in the 1970s, the U.S. entered an era of withdrawal, as the political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. Some institutions of togetherness, such as marriage, eroded slowly. Others fell away swiftly. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half. The decline was astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every demographic group that Putnam tracked.

What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.

Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time—300 hours a year!—to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.

Television transformed Americans’ interior decorating, our relationships, and our communities. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards. Like a murder in Clue, the death of social connections in America had any number of suspects. But in the end, I believe the likeliest culprit is obvious. It was Mr. Farnsworth, in the living room, with the tube.

Phonebound

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.

Max Guther

The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.

[Read: Jonathan Haidt on the terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: The latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” These data are alarming, but shouldn’t be surprising. Young rats and monkeys deprived of play come away socially and emotionally impaired. It would be odd if we, the self-named “social animal,” were different.

Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.

If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional costs of physical-world togetherness—and prone to keeping even close friends at a physical distance—that suggests that phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.

[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]

In the 1960s, Irwin Altman, a psychologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, co-developed a friendship formula characterized by increasing intimacy. In the early stages of friendship, people engage in small talk by sharing trivial details. As they develop trust, their conversations deepen to include more private information until disclosure becomes habitual and easy. Altman later added an important wrinkle: Friends require boundaries as much as they require closeness. Time alone to recharge is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.

Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

[From the July/August 2008 issue: Nicholas Carr on whether Google is making us stupid]

If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.

Homebound

Last year, the Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey was working on a book about how places shape American lives and economic fortunes. He had a feeling that the rise of remote work might have accelerated a longer-term trend: a shift in the amount of time that people spend inside their home. He ran the numbers and discovered “an astounding change” in our daily habits, much more extreme than he would have guessed. In 2022—notably, after the pandemic had abated—adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.

This finding formed the basis of a 2024 paper, “Homebound,” in which Sharkey calculated that, compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.”

One might ask: Why wouldn’t Americans with means want to spend more time at home? In the past few decades, the typical American home has become bigger, more comfortable, and more entertaining. From 1973 to 2023, the size of the average new single-family house increased by 50 percent, and the share of new single-family houses that have air-conditioning doubled, to 98 percent. Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th-century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness.

A homebound life doesn’t have to be a solitary life. In the 1970s, the typical household entertained more than once a month. But from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45 percent, according to data that Robert Putnam gathered. In the 20 years after Bowling Alone was published, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32 percent.

As our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?,’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer, said last year that “for the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” From studying floor plans, he noticed that bedrooms, walk-in closets, and other private spaces are growing. “I think we’re building for aloneness,” Fijan told me.

“Secular Monks”

In 2020, the philosopher and writer Andrew Taggart observed in an essay published in the religious journal First Things that a new flavor of masculinity seemed to be emerging: strong, obsessed with personal optimization, and proudly alone. Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

When I read Taggart’s essay last year, I felt a shock of recognition. In the previous months, I’d been captivated by a particular genre of social media: the viral “morning routine” video. If the protagonist is a man, he is typically handsome and rich. We see him wake up. We see him meditate. We see him write in his journal. We see him exercise, take supplements, take a cold plunge. What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. These videos are advertisements for a luxurious form of modern monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and, at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that is ideally avoided—like porn, perhaps, or Pop-Tarts.

[Read: The agony of texting with men]

Drawing major conclusions about modern masculinity from a handful of TikToks would be unwise. But the solitary man is not just a social-media phenomenon. Men spend more time alone than women, and young men are increasing their alone time faster than any other group, according to the American Time Use Survey.

Max Guther

Where is this alone time coming from? Liana C. Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, shared with me her analysis of how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. Sayer divided leisure into two broad categories: “engaged leisure,” which includes socializing, going to concerts, and playing sports; and “sedentary leisure,” which includes watching TV and playing video games. Compared with engaged leisure, which is more likely to be done with other people, sedentary leisure is more commonly done alone.

The most dramatic tendency that Sayer uncovered is that single men without kids—who have the most leisure time—are overwhelmingly likely to spend these hours by themselves. And the time they spend in solo sedentary leisure has increased, since 2003, more than that of any other group Sayer tracked. This is unfortunate because, as Sayer wrote, “well-being is higher among adults who spend larger shares of leisure with others.” Sedentary leisure, by contrast, was “associated with negative physical and mental health.”

Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. He calls it “neededness”—the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere,” he said. This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count on us to fill a pew or bring the dip.

But building these bridges to community takes energy, and today’s young men do not seem to be constructing these relationships in the same way that they used to. In place of neededness, despair is creeping in. Men who are un- or underemployed are especially vulnerable. Feeling unneeded “is actually, in some cases, literally fatal,” Reeves said. “If you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives, they are worthless and useless.” Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of men have died of drug overdoses, mostly from opioids and synthetics such as fentanyl. “If the level of drug-poisoning deaths had remained flat since 2001, we’d have had 400,000 fewer men die,” Reeves said. These drugs, he emphasized, are defined by their solitary nature: Opioids are not party drugs, but rather the opposite.

This Is Your Politics on Solitude

All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional. Marc J. Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive: Today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger.

Parents are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of communication. “My wife and I have texted 10 times since we said goodbye today,” Dunkelman told me when I reached him at noon on a weekday. “When my 10-year-old daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a phone notification about it.”

At the same time, messaging apps, TikTok streams, and subreddits keep us plugged into the thoughts and opinions of the global crowd that shares our interests. “When I watch a Cincinnati Bengals football game, I’m on a group text with beat reporters to whom I can ask questions, and they’ll respond,” Dunkelman said. “I can follow the live thoughts of football analysts on X.com, so that I’m practically watching the game over their shoulder. I live in Rhode Island, and those are connections that could have never existed 30 years ago.”

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.

The middle ring is key to social cohesion, Dunkelman said. Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views. “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past. “An important implication of the death of the middle ring is that if you have no appreciation for why the other side has their narrative, you’ll want your own side to fight them without compromise.”

The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy. For the past five decades, the American National Election Studies surveys have asked Democrats and Republicans to rate the opposing party on a “Feeling Thermometer” that ranges from zero (very cold/unfavorable) to 100 (very warm/favorable). In 2000, just 8 percent of partisans gave the other party a zero. By 2020, that figure had shot up to 40 percent. In a 2021 poll by Generation Lab/Axios, nearly a third of college students who identify as Republican said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of Democratic students said the same of members of the GOP.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had many causes, including inflation and frustration with Joe Biden’s leadership. But one source of Trump’s success may be that he is an avatar of the all-tribe, no-village style of performative confrontation. He stokes out-group animosity, and speaks to voters who are furiously intolerant of political difference. To cite just a few examples from the campaign, Trump called Democrats “enemies of the democracy” and the news media “enemies of the people,” and promised to “root out” the “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Max Guther

Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal. In the fall, one popular Democratic lawn sign read Harris Walz: Obviously. That sentiment, rejected by a majority of voters, indicates a failure to engage with the world as it really is. Dunkelman emailed me after the election to lament Democratic cluelessness. “How did those of us who live in elite circles not see how Trump was gaining popularity even among our literal neighbors?” he wrote. Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right. Even in the highly progressive borough of Brooklyn, New York, three in 10 voters chose Trump. If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.

Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, began asking Americans to evaluate false rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with people on the left sharing conspiracies about the right and vice versa. But some participants seemed drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. Perhaps more important, Petersen said, they tended to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues coined a term to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos.

[Read: Derek Thompson on the Americans who need chaos]

Although chaotically inclined individuals score highly in a popular measure for loneliness, they don’t seem to seek the obvious remedy. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said. For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.

The Introversion Delusion

Let us be fair to solitude, for a moment. As the father of a young child, I know well that a quiet night alone can be a balm. I have spent evenings alone at a bar, watching a baseball game, that felt ecstatically close to heaven. People cope with stress and grief and mundane disappointment in complex ways, and sometimes isolation is the best way to restore inner equilibrium.

But the dosage matters. A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing. A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely. And people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy. In his 2023 paper on the rise of 21st-century solitude, Atalay, at the Philadelphia Fed, calculated that by one measure, sociability means considerably more for happiness than money does: A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.

Max Guther

Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone, in their home, away from other people. Perhaps, one might think, they are making the right choice; after all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want, or what will make them happy. The saying that “predictions are hard, especially about the future” applies with special weight to predictions about our own life. Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety. And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.

[From the May 2012 issue: Is Facebook making us lonely?]

Several years ago, Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, asked commuter-train passengers to make a prediction: How would they feel if asked to spend the ride talking with a stranger? Most participants predicted that quiet solitude would make for a better commute than having a long chat with someone they didn’t know. Then Epley’s team created an experiment in which some people were asked to keep to themselves, while others were instructed to talk with a stranger (“The longer the conversation, the better,” participants were told). Afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel? Despite the broad assumption that the best commute is a silent one, the people instructed to talk with strangers actually reported feeling significantly more positive than those who’d kept to themselves. “A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Researchers have repeatedly validated Epley’s discovery. In 2020, the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky, at UC Riverside, asked people to behave like an extrovert for one week and like an introvert for another. Subjects received several reminders to act “assertive” and “spontaneous” or “quiet” and “reserved” depending on the week’s theme. Participants said they felt more positive emotions at the end of the extroversion week and more negative emotions at the end of the introversion week. Our modern economy, with its home-delivery conveniences, manipulates people into behaving like agoraphobes. But it turns out that we can be manipulated in the opposite direction. And we might be happier for it.

Our “mistaken” preference for solitude could emerge from a misplaced anxiety that other people aren’t that interested in talking with us, or that they would find our company bothersome. “But in reality,” Epley told me, “social interaction is not very uncertain, because of the principle of reciprocity. If you say hello to someone, they’ll typically say hello back to you. If you give somebody a compliment, they’ll typically say thank you.” Many people, it seems, are not social enough for their own good. They too often seek comfort in solitude, when they would actually find joy in connection.

Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities.

The AI Century

The anti-social century has been bad enough: more anxiety and depression; more “need for chaos” in our politics. But I’m sorry to say that our collective detachment could still get worse. Or, to be more precise, weirder.

In May of last year, three employees of OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence company, sat onstage to introduce ChatGPT’s new real-time conversational-speech feature. A research scientist named Mark Chen held up a phone and, smiling, started speaking to it.

“Hey, ChatGPT, I’m Mark. How are you?” Mark said.

“Hello, Mark!” a cheery female voice responded.

“Hey, so I’m onstage right now,” Mark said. “I’m doing a live demo, and frankly I’m feeling a little bit nervous. Can you help me calm my nerves a little bit?”

“Oh, you’re doing a live demo right now?” the voice replied, projecting astonishment with eerie verisimilitude. “That’s awesome! Just take a deep breath and remember: You’re the expert here.”

Mark asked for feedback on his breathing, before panting loudly, like someone who’d just finished a marathon.

“Whoa, slow!” the voice responded. “Mark, you’re not a vacuum cleaner!” Out of frame, the audience laughed. Mark tried breathing audibly again, this time more slowly and deliberately.

“That’s it,” the AI responded. “How do you feel?”

“I feel a lot better,” Mark said. “Thank you so much.”

AI’s ability to speak naturally might seem like an incremental update, as subtle as a camera-lens refinement on a new iPhone. But according to Nick Epley, fluent speech represents a radical advancement in the technology’s ability to encroach on human relationships.

“Once an AI can speak to you, it’ll feel extremely real,” he said, because people process spoken word more intimately and emotionally than they process text. For a study published in 2020, Epley and Amit Kumar, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, randomly assigned participants to contact an old friend via phone or email. Most people said they preferred to send a written message. But those instructed to talk on the phone reported feeling “a significantly stronger bond” with their friend, and a stronger sense that they’d “really connected,” than those who used email.

Speech is rich with what are known as “paralinguistic cues,” such as emphasis and intonation, which can build sympathy and trust in the minds of listeners. In another study, Epley and the behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder found that employers and potential recruiters were more likely to rate candidates as “more competent, thoughtful, and intelligent” when they heard a why-I’m-right-for-this-job pitch rather than read it.

Even now, before AI has mastered fluent speech, millions of people are already forming intimate relationships with machines, according to Jason Fagone, a journalist who is writing a book about the emergence of AI companions. Character.ai, the most popular platform for AI companions, has tens of millions of monthly users, who spend an average of 93 minutes a day chatting with their AI friend. “No one is getting duped into thinking they’re actually talking to humans,” Fagone told me. “People are freely choosing to enter relationships with artificial partners, and they’re getting deeply attached anyway, because of the emotional capabilities of these systems.” One subject in his book is a young man who, after his fiancée’s death, engineers an AI chatbot to resemble his deceased partner. Another is a bisexual mother who supplements her marriage to a man with an AI that identifies as a woman.

If you find the notion of emotional intercourse with an immaterial entity creepy, consider the many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen. Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he said.

Epley sees the exponential growth of AI companions as a real possibility. “You can set them up to never criticize you, never cheat on you, never have a bad day and insult you, and to always be interested in you.” Unlike the most patient spouses, they could tell us that we’re always right. Unlike the world’s best friend, they could instantly respond to our needs without the all-too-human distraction of having to lead their own life.

“The horrifying part, of course, is that learning how to interact with real human beings who can disagree with you and disappoint you” is essential to living in the world, Epley said. I think he’s right. But Epley was born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s. People born in the 2010s, or the 2020s, might not agree with us about the irreplaceability of “real human” friends. These generations may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation—that can be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon-based life forms. Long before technologists build a superintelligent machine that can do the work of so many Einsteins, they may build an emotionally sophisticated one that can do the work of so many friends.

The Next 15 Minutes

The anti-social century is as much a result of what’s happened to the exterior world of concrete and steel as it is about advances inside our phones. The decline of government investments in what Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure”—public spaces that shape our relationship to the world—may have begun in the latter part of the 20th century, but it has continued in the 21st. That has arguably affected nearly everyone, but less advantaged Americans most of all.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to poor neighborhoods in big cities, and the community leaders tell me the real crisis for poor teenagers is that there’s just not much for them to do anymore, and nowhere to go,” Klinenberg told me. “I’d like to see the government build social infrastructure for teenagers with the creativity and generosity with which video-game companies build the toys that keep them inside. I’m thinking of athletic fields, and public swimming pools, and libraries with beautiful social areas for young people to hang out together.”

Improved public social infrastructure would not solve all the problems of the anti-social century. But degraded public spaces—and degraded public life—are in some ways the other side of all our investments in video games and phones and bigger, better private space. Just as we needed time to see the invisible emissions of the Industrial Revolution, we are only now coming to grips with the negative externalities of a phonebound and homebound world. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation. We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.

Max Guther

But we can choose differently. In his 2015 novel, Seveneves, Neal Stephenson coined the term Amistics to describe the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept. The word is a reference to the Amish, who generally shun many modern innovations, including cars and television. Although they are sometimes considered strictly anti-modern, many Amish communities have refrigerators and washing machines, and some use solar power. Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values. In his 1998 dissertation on one Amish community, Tay Keong Tan, then a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, quoted a community member as saying that they didn’t want to adopt TV or radio, because those products “would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people.”

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?

A seemingly straightforward prescription is that teenagers should choose to spend less time on their phone, and their parents should choose to invite more friends over for dinner. But in a way, these are collective-action problems. A teenager is more likely to get out of the house if his classmates have already made a habit of hanging out. That teen’s parents are more likely to host if their neighbors have also made a habit of weekly gatherings. There is a word for such deeply etched communal habits: rituals. And one reason, perhaps, that the decline of socializing has synchronized with the decline of religion is that nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.

“I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.

When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it.”

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Anti-Social Century.”