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May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”

But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?

[Music]

Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?

Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”

Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?

Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.

Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.

Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.

It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.

Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.

Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.

And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.

Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?

Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.

Rosin: Every year?

Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.

Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.

Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.

And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.

Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?

Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.

And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.

It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.

Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.

Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?

Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.

But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.

But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.

Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.

Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?

They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.

Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.

Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.

And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.

And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.

Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?

Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.

And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.

Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.

Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—

Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.

Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.

And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.

Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.

Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.

Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.

Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.

She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.

And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?

Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.

Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.

Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.

But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.

Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?

Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.

It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.

And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.

Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?

Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.

Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.

Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?

Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.

They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.

And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.

And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.

Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”

Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.

I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.

Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.

Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.

We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.

And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.

Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.

Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.

When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.

The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.

We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.

And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.

And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.

And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.

Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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The Dream

A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes.

A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A suit that would see me through the immigration checkpoints of difficult countries. A suit that would convince readers that the man in the author photo has a sense of taste beyond the Brooklyn consensus of plaid shirt and pouf of graying hair.

The suit would serve as the perfect carapace for a personality overly dependent on anxious humor and jaundiced wit, a personality that I have been trying to develop since I saw my lightly mustached punim in the mirror as a pubescent boy and thought, How will I ever find love? The suit would transcend my physicality and bond with my personality directly. It would accompany me through the world’s great salons, the occasional MSNBC appearance, and, most important, the well-compensated talks at far-flung universities. The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.” Finding this perfect suit, made by the most advanced tailor out of superlative fabric, would do nothing less than transform me.

The Body

Before there is a suit, there is a body, and the body is terrible.

First there is my shortness (5 foot 5 and a half, with that “half” doing a lot of work). Being short is fine, but those missing inches are wedded to a narrow-shouldered body of zero distinction. Although I am of Russian and Jewish extraction, the continent whose clothing stores make me feel most at ease is Asia. (I once bought an off-the-rack jacket in Bangkok after the clerk examined me for all of three seconds.) However, this is not exactly an Asian body either, especially when I contrast myself with the natural slimness of most of my Asian friends. Just before my bar mitzvah, I got a set of perfect B-cup knockers and had to squeeze into a “husky” suit to perform the ritual yodeling at the synagogue. But that’s not all. Some hideously mismanaged childhood vaccination in Leningrad created a thick keloid scar running the length of my right shoulder. The shame of having this strange pink welt define one side of me led to a slumped posture favoring my left shoulder. When I finally found people to have sex with me—I had to attend Oberlin to complete the task—my expression upon disrobing resembled that of a dog looking up at his mistress after a bowel movement of hazmat proportions.

Before the Suit

The clothes before the suit were as bad as the body.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1972 and was quickly dressed in a sailor’s outfit with white tights and sexy little shorts, then given a balalaika to play with for the camera. The fact that Russia now fields one of the world’s most homicidal armies can partially be explained by photos such as this. On other occasions I was forced to wear very tight jogging pants with a cartoon bunny on them, or a thick-striped shirt dripping with medals from battles I had never seen. These outfits did make me feel like I belonged to something—in this case, a failing dictatorship. I left the U.S.S.R. before I could join the Young Pioneers, which would have entailed wearing a red tie at a tender age, while prancing about and shouting exuberant slogans such as “I am always ready!”

Top: The author, about 6 years old, in Leningrad, dressed as a sailor and forced to play balalaika under a hanging carpet. Bottom: About a year later, in Rome, his parents buy him a normal Western sweater. (Courtesy of Gary Shteyngart)

What I wasn’t ready for, however, was immigration to Queens. I arrived in New York in 1979 with the immigrant’s proverbial single shirt, although my parents had managed to snag a cute Italian V-neck sweater during the few months we spent in Rome on our way to America, a sweater that would serve me for the next half decade (as mentioned, I did not grow much). The Hebrew day school to which I was sentenced for eight years began a clothing drive for me, and I was rewarded with pounds of old Batman and Robin T-shirts, which made me look like a Soviet-refugee poster child. It’s worth noting that, growing up, I never thought, They hate me for my clothes or my poverty or my lack of English skills. This realization would come later, in hindsight. For the longest time, I thought that I was hated for the essential state of being myself; the clothes were more a symptom than a cause. My school may have been Jewish, but I somehow found myself in the throes of Calvinist predestination. For as long as I was myself, I deserved these clothes. Around this time, the idea of becoming an entirely different person took root—How will I ever find love? This is how—an idea that would be expanded for four decades, until it finally led me to The Suit.

Growing Up Tasteless

High school found me trying to blend in with a suburban outlay of clothes that my now middle-class family could finally afford. These were surfer T-shirts from Ocean Pacific and other brands that suburbanites who survived the 1980s might remember: Generra, Aéropostale, Unionbay. Unfortunately, I did not go to high school in Benetton Bay, Long Island, but in Manhattan, where these shirts were immediately a joke. (This would become a pattern. By the time I figure something out fashion-wise, I’m already two steps behind.) At a high-school job, my boss bought me a set of colorful Miami Vice–style shirts and jackets. These proved ridiculous at Oberlin, where dressing in janitor uniforms from thrift shops was considered the height of style. (Ironically, I had worked as a janitor during the summer, at the same nuclear laboratory that employed my father.)

After college, I fell in with a crowd of artsy, ketamine-addicted hipsters, and together we managed to gentrify several Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late ’90s. One of my friends, who was especially fashion-conscious, began to dress me at the high-priced secondhand emporium Screaming Mimis. The clothes she told me to buy were very itchy, mostly Orlon and Dacron items from ’70s brands such as Triumph of California, but these tight uniforms, like their Soviet predecessors, made me feel like I was playing a part in a grander opera, while also serving as a form of punishment. On nervous dates, I would sometimes have to run to the bathroom to try to angle my acrylic armpits under the dryer.

Because I was a writer who worked in bed, I mostly did not need a suit, although when I got married, in 2012, I went down to Paul Smith to get a herringbone number that I thought was just fine, if not terribly exciting. I bought a J.Crew tuxedo for black-tie benefits. Once, I did a reading sponsored by Prada and was given a nice gray jacket, pants, and a pair of blue suede shoes as compensation. Come to think of it, there was also a scarf. As a final note, I will say that I am incredibly cheap and that shopping for clothes has always raised my blood pressure. Leaving Screaming Mimis after spending more than $500 would always end in me getting terribly drunk to punish myself for the money I had blown on such a frivolous pursuit.

The Dream Begins

When I reached the age of 50, mildly prosperous and with a small family, I met a man named Mark Cho. We discovered each other because of a mutual love of wristwatches (a costly middle-aged hobby I had recently acquired), and because I knew about his classic-menswear store, the Armoury, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. The Armoury has been called “a clubhouse for menswear nerds”; if you’re looking for, say, a cashmere waistcoat in “brown sugar,” you have found your home. I had even given one of the characters in my latest novel, a dandy from a prominent Korean chaebol family, an article of clothing from that store to wear.

[Read: The future of marketing is bespoke everything]

We met for dinner at Union Square Cafe, and I liked him (and his clothes) immediately. Mark was almost always dressed in a jacket and tie, and would often sport a vest along with spectacles made of some improbable metal. What I loved about him was how comfortable he appeared in his medley of classical attire, and how, despite the fact that all of his garments had been chosen with precision, he gave the impression that he had spent very little time and thought on which breathable fabrics to settle over his trim body. He looked like he was, to use my initial formulation, at ease.

Later, I would learn that this whole look could be summarized by the Italian word sprezzatura, or “studied carelessness,” and later still I learned of something that the Japanese had discovered and refined: “Ivy style,” which is basically studied carelessness goes to Dartmouth. For the time being, I knew that I liked what I saw, that my inner lonely immigrant—the one who is always trying to find a uniform that will help me fit in—was intrigued. Mark once gave me an Armoury safari jacket, the very same one worn by the character in my novel, and its light, unflappable linen proved perfect for my summer readings around Germany and Switzerland that year. Everywhere from starchy Zurich to drunken Cologne to cool-as-fuck Berlin, the jacket would pop out of a suitcase and unwrinkle itself in seconds, yet it was also stylish and seemingly impervious to the odors of my non-Teutonic body. It was, to use Hemingway-esque prose, damn well perfect, and I immediately knew I wanted more.

I had lived in Italy in my 30s and met many aristocrats there. Those bastards had sprezzatura to burn, but when I asked them the make of their suits and jackets, they would smile and tell me it was the work of a single tailor down in Naples or up in Milan. Ah, I would say to myself, so that’s how it is. Given my outlook on life, owning a bespoke suit was not an outcome I was predestined for. The Prada jacket I had been given, which fit me well enough, was the most that my Calvinist God would ever grant me.

But over more martinis and onglets au poivre with Mark, I began to understand the parameters of a fine bespoke suit and its accessories: bespoke shirts and bespoke shoes. I also began to timidly ask questions of a financial nature and learned that the price of owning such a wardrobe approached and then exceeded $10,000. I did not want to pay this kind of entry fee. Given my own family’s experience in fleeing a declining superpower, I try to have money saved with which to escape across the border. Unlike watches, a suit could not be resold in Montreal or Melbourne.

A brief but generative conversation with my editors at this magazine soon paved the way for my dream to become possible. At a particularly unsober dinner with a visiting Japanese watchmaker, I whispered to Mark the extent of my desires. Yes, it would take a lot of work, a lot of research, and possibly travel to two other continents. But it could be done. At the right expense, with the most elegant and sturdy of Italian-milled fabrics, and with the greatest of Japanese tailors, a superior suit could be made for anyone, even for me.

Some Thoughts on Male Fashion

In religious school, I studied the Torah and the Talmud, which were okay but failed to leave a deep impression. At Oberlin, I read Gramsci’s notebooks from prison; those were fine, but a little too carceral for my airy disposition. Mark sat me down with the foundational texts more relevant to my lived experience, as they say. Or at least the experience I hoped to live. The canonical texts of male fashion, and I urge them upon any aspiring dandy, are Dressing the Man, by Alan Flusser, and True Style, by G. Bruce Boyer (that name alone deserves a cummerbund). I would also slip in an interesting national study, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, by the well-dressed intellectual W. David Marx, whom I would meet in Tokyo soon enough. Like the diligent student I had rarely been before, I took copious notes: American look, dart, London shrunk, natural shoulder, weft, warp. I have worn clothes all my life but never known a single thing about them. It was like not knowing the difference between freshly caught tilefish and farm-bred tilapia; each fills your stomach, but only one tastes good.

Formal male fashion traces back to two personalities: Beau Brummell, the sharp-witted proto-dandy of the early 19th century without whom the modern suit would be unthinkable (and who reportedly spent five hours a day getting dressed), and Edward VIII, the Nazi admirer and short-term king better known as the Duke of Windsor. These two insufferable assholes are mostly responsible for how men dress today. “With Brummell,” Flusser notes, “male style became a matter of impeccable fit and cut, exquisite detail, and immaculate cleanliness.” Before Brummell, the aristocracy dressed in rich, smelly materials; after, styles were adapted from military uniforms—think of the broad shoulders of a British pinstripe suit, for example. The duke took Brummell’s simplicity and “ran to Baroque elaboration,” Boyer wrote. “District checks, windowpane plaids, bold stripes, and tartans were his true métier.”

In the battle between the 19th-century dandy’s stark simplicity and the duke’s playful elaborations, I find myself choosing the former. My personality is colorful enough without tartans; let the suit merely contain it. Whatever the duke’s “district check” is, I will leave it uncashed.

Yamamoto-San Arrives

On May 24 of the fateful year 2024, a plane from Tokyo landed in New York City, carrying one of the most meticulously attired men in existence. His name is Yuhei Yamamoto, and he is the preeminent representative of Ivy style, that mode of dress that Americans appreciate yet only the Japanese fully understand.

The British suit, in all its City of London severity, morphed into different shapes around the world. The Italians made particularly interesting work of it. The Milanese suit was the most British-like, but as you traveled farther down the boot to Florence, Rome, and Naples, the tailors became more freehanded; the colors and fit became jauntier and more Mediterranean, more appreciative of bodies defined by crooked lines and curves and exploded by carbohydrates. Meanwhile, in America, as always, we went to work. The suit became a uniform that stressed the commonality and goodness of Protestant labor and church attendance without any further embellishments. It came to be known as the “sack suit.” In the 1950s, Brooks Brothers furthered this concept with an almost subversively casual look: a jacket with natural-width shoulders that hung straight from the body, and plain-front trousers. This, along with other American touches, such as denim, became the basis for Ivy-style clothes that the Japanese of the ’60s made into a national obsession, and that culminated in a wholly different approach to workwear, office wear, and leisure wear. Today, you can’t go into a Uniqlo without seeing the aftereffects of Japanese experimentation with and perfection of our “Work hard, pray hard” wardrobe ethos.

I met Yamamoto-san at the Upper East Side branch of Mark Cho’s Armoury empire. The moment I first saw him, I was scared. No one could be this well-dressed. No one could be so secure in a tan three-piece seersucker suit that didn’t so much hang from his broad shoulders as hover around them in expectation. No one’s brown silk tie could so well match his brown polka-dot pocket square and the thick wedge of only slightly graying hair floating above his perfectly chiseled face. This man was going to make a suit for me? I was not worthy.

Yamamoto-san examined me briefly and said, “Sack suit.”

The author’s chest is expertly measured by the master tailor Yuhei Yamamoto at the Upper East Side location of the Armoury. (Peter Fisher for The Atlantic)

The diagnosis stung at first. I was already aware of the provenance of the sack suit, which had clothed men up and down the very avenue (Madison) right outside Mark’s store for almost a century. Was I not more than an Excel jockey or a finance bro whose oppressive job had him ready to be put into a sack? Were my curves, at least the double trouble posed by my tatas (true, they had shrunk and mellowed with age), not worthy of something with a little bit more Florentine flair, if not full-on Neapolitan decadence?

“Sack suit,” Yamamoto-san repeated. He then explained through a translator that I was, in his eyes, “full of character.” I had heard this sentiment before, and not always in the form of a compliment, but wanted elaboration. “You’re a character,” he said. “You’re an authentic New Yorker. You transcend fashionable suits. As an authentic New Yorker, you need a sack suit.”

He and Mark began to talk about the master plan for my body. Yamamoto-san would make a drape-cut suit that would emphasize my slimness, and “flatter” my chest. The pants would accentuate my legs while making me look taller than 5 foot 5 (and a half).

“You can hide a multitude of sins with a good suit,” Mark said. The Calvinist inside me blanched.

For the first time in my life, I felt nonphysician, nonlover hands all over me—measuring, prodding, taking stock. The thousands of dollars being spent on this project were not just creating a garment; they were affording me a new level of care and involvement. It was the sartorial version of having a concierge doctor. “At the fitting stage,” Mark said, “you’ll feel like a woman getting haute couture. Why should women have all the fun?”

Yes, I thought. Why should they? We retired to the Armoury’s garden to smoke half a dozen short Davidoff cigars and discuss matters some more. “Clothing is a visual language,” Mark said. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?”

I puffed on my cigar, feeling seen. “Your head has to sit in a certain way on your frame,” Mark said. I pictured my head above the suit, like the dot at the top of an inverted exclamation point. The suit, according to Mark, would focus attention on my head, which was definitely where I wanted the attention to fall. After mastering English in Hebrew day school and social democracy at Oberlin, I had always made the right sounds with my head. (“I want to make a suit that accentuates my client’s character,” Yamamoto-san had told me. “I don’t want a suit that speaks more than the character.”)

“The best body type for a suit,” Mark went on, “is one that is slightly unathletic and also stoops slightly so that it hangs better.” That’s me! I thought, shocked that what I’d considered a debility had turned out to be a strength. “Yamamoto-san will make a softer, rounder, more natural shoulder,” Mark continued. “He will cut closer to the hips. You don’t want a pumpkin shape.”

“Most certainly not,” I said.

Back inside, Yamamoto-san had set the music system to his beloved Chuck Berry and had spread out ancient Esquire and GQ magazines. “I will make you a suit from the golden age of American style,” the tailor was saying. “I will make your legs even more beautiful.” We were looking at intimidating books of fabric swatches. I had signaled that I wanted the suit to be ready for nights of leisure as well as labor; drunken dinners at Frenchette as well as university readings and television appearances. This led us to the darker side of the color spectrum, until we settled on midnight blue. “Six-ply is more durable, and it travels well,” Mark was saying. “There’s more return. See how it bounces back more quickly? Fewer wrinkles.”

That all sounded great, but I was both intrigued and confused. What the hell is “six-ply”? How is yarn even made? Mark invited me to attend a fabric fair in Milan in July, then to journey to the nearby fabric mill, where the materials for my suit would be prepared. Next, we would fly to Hong Kong to have the appropriate shirts made by the fine shirtmaker Ascot Chang, and on to Tokyo for a second fitting with Yamamoto-san, as well as a fitting for a pair of shoes at the atelier of the master shoemaker Yohei Fukuda.

“Sure,” I said.

Somewhere in the heavens, my Calvinist God was preparing his lightning bolts.

The Anticipation Grows

There are many days between May and July. How many exactly I cannot tell you, as I am not a mathematician, but definitely too many when you’re waiting for a series of garments to change your life.

In the meantime, Mark threw a black-tie party to celebrate 10 years of the Armoury in New York, and I put on my J.Crew tuxedo, hoping no one would sneer at its humble pedigree. The party was sponsored by Campari, and I was soon coasting on boulevardiers and chatting with a gaggle of short menswear nerds and the attractive women who loved them. As with most Midtown parties, the mix had its share of financiers, but also included war-crimes prosecutors and museum executives. “Are you in fashion?” I overheard one attendee asking another. “No, I’m a Marxist.” (And, I later found out, an architect.)

[From the June 2009 issue: Fashion in dark times]

Alex Seo, a Korean American man dressed stunningly in a white double-breasted, peak-lapel tuxedo jacket, told me that when his grandfather, an academic, had landed in the Midwest from Korea many years ago without a proper outfit, the man who’d sponsored him had said, “Every professor should have a tweed jacket,” and then handed him his own. The story reminded me of the clothing drive that was started for me at my yeshiva, although this tale had a kinder, more midwestern ending (Alex’s father and his Armoury suit were also at the party). Looking around the room and talking to people, I realized just how many of us were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. The need for a fine suit became obvious. It was the final certificate of naturalization.

Milan and Beyond

I tried to take my mind off my desperate need for bespoke clothing. A conference brought me to Tbilisi, Georgia, and then I tooled around Istanbul, Rome, and Lucca for a bit. Finally, the fabric fair arrived, and, accompanied by my old friend, the stylish Tuscan resident, art historian, and translator Shilpa Prasad, I traveled to Milan, where Mark was waiting for us.

“We’re starting way upstream,” Mark told me, meaning that we were going deep into the nitty-gritty of how a suit is made. Amid the city’s heartless July humidity, he took us to a neoclassical palazzo, where Dormeuil, a family-run French maker of high-end fabrics, presented us with endless espresso and samples. I wasn’t here to shop, just to learn what was possible.

Testing crease-resistant fabric at Vitale Barberis Canonico, the oldest fabric mill in Italy (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

What followed was an impressive display of discernment. Mark and his colleague Jan would feel the square of a fabric swatch, then scrunch it up and watch as it regained its composure. “Fabric drives our collection,” Mark said. “For Hong Kong, this is good winter fabric,” he said of one sample. Because Hong Kong represents a large portion of his business, he is very attuned to that part of his clientele. “This one’s too hairy,” he said of another. “Hong Kong people don’t like things that are hairy.” Most people don’t, I thought, sadly.

Shilpa was amazed by how Mark and Jan knew which samples they would buy from just a cursory feel. “It’s like muscle memory,” Jan told her.

“We’ll take four meters,” Mark told the fabric salesman, and the barcode adjoining one swatch was zapped. The price for this particular fabric, which would become a three-piece suit for another client, was about 68 euros a meter. Shilpa lovingly stroked cloth flecked with gold that clocked in at 380 euros a meter, and visualized the shawl that could be made from it.

Mark explained that some fabrics are better for business suits, others for leisure suits. As an example of the former, he showed me the kind of slightly shiny wool-and-mohair blend that could have been worn by members of the Rat Pack. The fabric for my suit should bridge the gap, Mark said. It should be both beautiful and travel-resistant. “More texture, less sheen.”

The Milano Unica fair took place in a typical soulless convention center on the city’s edge. The booths where the vendors had set up shop were grouped by the type of goods they were hawking: Shirt Avenue, for example. The sellers we visited each gave us a fine cup of espresso and sometimes even a little chocolate, so that by the time I left the fair, I was orbiting Neptune.

We stopped by the esteemed Somerset cloth maker Fox Brothers, which produced the fabric that once draped Winston Churchill and Cary Grant. They favor undyed sheep’s wool and are known for their wool flannel, the kind that was used to make Fred Astaire’s trousers. The clothes made from their fabrics, one trench coat in particular, were gorgeous, but I would have needed to buy a Land Rover to complete the look.

Next we headed down the “street” to the booth for Vitale Barberis Canonico, the mill tasked with producing the fabric for my suit. After we had another coffee, the attractive representatives of the brand presented us with bolts of cloth to feel. “This reminds me of going to sari shops in Bombay,” Shilpa said as we felt our way through the sensuous wares, gasping in delight. I was reminded of Mark’s quip: “Why should women have all the fun?”

A sample of the fabric that would be used for my suit was finally presented to me—the 21 Micron. I was told that the mill’s 21 Micron is made from the wool of Argentinian and Uruguayan sheep that live high in the mountains. Regular, less important sheep are subjected to the cruelty of mulesing, where strips of wool-bearing skin are removed from around their ass, to prevent the parasitic infection of fly larvae. My sheep were not subjected to such horrors. “They are happy sheep,” one dapper representative told me with a wolfish smile.

Despite its South American origins, the fabric had a heavy British solidity. I crumpled it up in my fist as I had seen Mark and Jan do, and when I let go, the fabric opened like a flower. “21 Micron is the more exclusive fabric,” the mill’s representative told me. “It is breathable, high-twisted yarn; it will not wrinkle.” Unlike most suits, mine would be made of six-ply yarn. The fabric’s weight, exclusivity, sturdiness, and expense came from the fact that there was simply more of it.

“Six-ply is for the brave,” the dapper man assured me, a sentence I did not understand, but cherished nonetheless.

“Your suit will be business luxury,” Mark told me. “You can wear it into the ground.”

I stared into the fabric, which looked as inky blue as the eternity I hope to fall into after I expire, many fathoms deeper than the Baltic Sea by which I was born. Soon, I thought, this magical fabric will cover me from my ankles to my neck. And then, maybe, I will be another person.

The author is confronted with endless amounts of wool at Vitale Barberis Canonico. (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

The next day, Mark and I traveled west of Milan, past rice fields and solar-power farms and shirtless men yawning on balconies, to a village in the Biella region of Piedmont, where Vitale Barberis Canonico is based. The mill’s waiting room was filled with volumes that had titles such as I Am Dandy, and the magazines Monsieur and The One: Yacht & Design. Yachtless and without a French appellation, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. The executive offices surrounded a lovely Japanese garden, and as we began our tour, the members of a visiting group of fabric buyers from Taiwan, China, and Japan shyly snuck photos of Mark.

First mentioned in documents in 1663, Vitale Barberis Canonico is truly canonical, the oldest fabric mill in Italy. Our tour guides explained that the water in the Biella region has a very low concentration of minerals, making it soft, unlike the harsh water in other parts of Europe. This adds an extra softness to the fabric, much as pizza crust in Naples would be unimaginable without the city’s acqua. I touched a clump of Australian wool, and noted how superior my South American sheep was to its antipodean cousin. The seven steps for making wool fabric were explained: washing, gilling (aligning the wool fibers and removing short strands), spinning, dyeing, warping, weaving, and finishing. Giant machines are dedicated to these tasks, and they run all day, mostly without human intervention. The weaving, in which the weft, the horizontal structure, is inserted into the fabric’s vertical structure, the warp, is conducted in the world’s quietest weaving room. Touching the yarn as it was being spun by a machine was like strumming a gently weeping guitar. I was told that my six-ply yarn was the strongest that Vitale Barberis Canonico produced, and that it had been worsted to eliminate some of its hairiness (Hong Kong readers, rejoice). Finally, this exemplary fabric had been put into a massive machine called the Dolphin 1200, which finishes the fabric and prevents it from shrinking.

The author snuggling with some alarmingly soft wool at the Vitale Barberis Canonico mill (Bea De Giacomo for The Atlantic)

In the mill’s archives, we examined order books dating back to 1846, as well as a photo of King Charles III and his fun-loving wife, the Queen Consort, who both appear to be fans of the brand. I saw an advertisement for my fabric, which featured a drawing of sheep standing on a road, next to a man leaning against a sports car. A sign behind him pointed to the ruta del fin del mundo, “the route to the end of the world.” The tagline read: “21 Micron is the final destination of a long journey in search of a family of cloths of the highest quality that guarantee unparalleled strength and crease resistance.”

Is this it? I thought. Has my long sartorial journey finally come to an end?

Mom Posture

But my journey had only begun.

On the way to Asia, I watched one of Wim Wenders’s latest films, Perfect Days, and was struck with the teariness that often hits at 30,000 feet. The film follows an older toilet cleaner in Tokyo, exulting in the care with which he performs his task, the way he makes his work anything but menial. The toilet cleaner’s devotion reminded me of something Mark had said about how a true craftsman focuses on just one item, asking himself constantly, Is this as good as it can be?

In Hong Kong, Mark brought his obsession with individual crafts to a 100-year-old building off Queen’s Road Central, known as the Pedder Building. On the fifth floor, a 6,000-square-foot space called the Pedder Arcade has a distinctly Wong Kar-wai feel, punctuated by broad arches and spinning overhead fans. The Armoury may be the Pedder Arcade’s flagship store, but it is just one part of a lifestyle hub for the intelligent moneyed class, where you can buy a signed first-edition set of John le Carré’s Karla Trilogy for about $7,000. Mark himself works out of a space called “The Study,” where people feel free to drop in and smoke a cigar—some of the world’s best cigars are sold out of an anteroom, with the more intense aged Cuban variants smelling, according to Mark, “as good as God’s armpit.”

Mark is Malaysian Chinese by heritage, but grew up in London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles and speaks perfect American English, though he will occasionally break a word like forgotten into two, adding to his charm. He got his bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown and started out in finance. We are similar in that neither of our fathers was perfectly happy with the career we ultimately chose: wordsmithing and clothes selling. In Milan, I had asked Mark how he’d resolved things with his father. “He died,” Mark said.

At the Ascot Chang factory, in Hong Kong, sewers and cutters produce about 45 meticulously made shirts a day. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

In the island’s oppressive heat, Mark and I strolled over to a neighboring mall, where Ascot Chang, the renowned maker of shirts and suits, has one of its stores. Justin Chang, the grandson of the founder—the family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953—greeted us and pulled out rolls of fabric (the store has more than 7,000 variations).

I was to have four shirts made to complement my suit. Justin and Mark talked over each other as I pawed at the crisp fabrics.

We chose four fabrics for the different shirts: a spread-collar dress shirt made in a fine cotton piqué, a traditional white oxford button-down, a vintage-1970s cotton shirt with blue stripes, and my favorite, a chambray shirt with a button-down collar whose uneven yarn gave it a cool and casual look. I reveled in the by-now familiar, almost therapeutic feel of several men pressing measuring tape against my shoulders, chest, and arms. Because I am a watch aficionado, Mark requested that the diameter of the left cuff be slightly larger to expose my timepieces. The formal shirt must not have a pocket, he said, but the easygoing chambray could have a pocket with a button on it. “What does this button convey?” I asked Mark, trying to master all the rules.

“It conveys, I have a button on my shirt.”

The author visiting Ascot Chang in Hong Kong to select fabric and be fitted for four bespoke shirts (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

One of the shirts had to be rushed for my second fitting with Yamamoto-san in Tokyo in a mere two days. Back at the Pedder Arcade, as I tried on a pair of artisanal-denim jeans, Mark told me that this was a particularly difficult task for Ascot Chang, because of my body’s many quirks. “There’s a large drop to your right shoulder,” Mark said. “It makes it difficult to dial in.”

I also apparently have something called “rounded shoulders,” which results from a forward head position and a forward pelvic tilt. When I looked up my diagnosis online, I discovered that it is also called “mom posture,” a malady that usually afflicts mothers, who have to bend down to take care of their children. I wanted to congratulate myself on my devotion as a parent, but realized that my mom posture must result from a lifetime of slouching my shoulders to hide my breasts and, possibly, from constantly nursing my other child, my phone, while walking.

As I modeled the artisanal denim, Mark and I discovered something else: I have no ass. This is why all my pants fall off me.

“No,” I said, immediately predicting what Mark would prescribe. “I can’t. It’s too Wall Street, the movie.”

“Suspenders,” he said.

The next day, we left the fancy Central district and crossed the bay for the industrial hum of Kowloon East, to see the shirt that was being rushed for our Tokyo departure. In the warm, bright light of the factory, a host of workers was making my chambray shirt. I smiled sheepishly at the men and women toiling overtime to create the special differing armholes that would compensate for my dropped shoulder. Thirty-eight workers at the Ascot Chang factory produce about 45 shirts a day. The cloth cutters are mostly men; the sewers, who do the more complex engineering, such as the cuffs and collars, are mostly women.

The author touring the Ascot Chang factory. The Chang family has been making shirts in Hong Kong since 1953. (Leung Man Hei for The Atlantic)

The next morning, the chambray shirt was ready. I tried on my first-ever bespoke garment with trepidation. In the wooden glow of the Ascot Chang shop, I witnessed my first transformation. This was not the suit, but it was the pre-suit, an exquisite blue thing with gleaming charcoal mother-of-pearl buttons and, as I was told by Mark, “quite a strong collar for someone your size.”

But for the first time in my life, the fit was right. The fit was good. The fit was perfect. Through the industry of a thoughtful team of cutters and sewers on the edge of Asia, I had finally reached a détente with my body. I looked at myself in the mirror and there I was: a well-dressed middle-aged man.

Yamamoto-San Returns

Armed with one Ascot Chang shirt, with three more on the way, we left Hong Kong for Tokyo for the final steps of the bespoke journey—the second fitting with Yamamoto-san and a shoe fitting with Yohei Fukuda, “arguably the best shoe money can buy,” according to Mark.

Tokyo is the city for craftspeople, and I was happy to watch Mark buzz around like a hummingbird, searching for perfect accoutrements for his clients. We visited the Ginza branch of Atelier Jean Rousseau, where men in white lab coats perfected a watch strap for a customer’s Patek Philippe Ellipse. “Do you have a real rose-gold stitch?” Mark asked. “I know they cost a lot of money.”

We cabbed across Ginza to Ortus, a maker of elite bags from materials including hippo, elephant, and seal, where Mark had commissioned a briefcase for an underemployed man of means that contained nothing but a Monopoly set (the Hong Kong–tram edition, naturally, the pieces made in silver). “Does he go around Hong Kong playing Monopoly with his friends?” I asked.

“Well, he’s hoping this will make him some friends,” Mark said.

That evening I had dinner with W. David Marx, the author of the aforementioned Ametora. David is a 6-foot-4 southern WASP-Catholic-Jew hybrid, who also counts Yamamoto-san as a tailor. “It makes you look like an adult,” he told me of the suit I would soon wear. “Which is not what people want to look like anymore.”

The next morning, I climbed the steps to the second floor of Yamamoto-san’s atelier, Tailor Caid, in the hip Shibuya section of Tokyo. Welcome to Caid modern tailoring proclaimed a sign next to a silhouette of a man in a fedora toting a briefcase down an imaginary Madison Avenue. We are not fashion snobs, the sign continued, but we know a few simple rules.

Inside, Yamamoto-san was resplendent in another seersucker suit, this one light blue, a dark-blue pocket square providing contrast. A record player was spinning not just Ella Fitzgerald, but a rare Japanese edition of her work titled Ella and Nice Guys. A Harvard pennant hung in the bathroom. There were old, yellowing copies of the Japanese magazines that had made Ivy style synonymous with Japan, with titles such as Popeye and Hot-Dog Press and headlines including “We Are Real IVY Leaguers.” And, finally, I was confronted with the work in progress, draped over a wooden hanger: my midnight-blue suit held together with white basting thread.

I relieved myself beneath the Harvard pennant and, with shaking hands, put on the suit. At this stage in the bespoke process, the basting thread disfigured the jacket, dividing it into quadrants, and the buttons were nothing but stickers. But I could begin to imagine the wonder that the suit would become. The heavy six-ply fabric felt primordially satisfying, like a light suit of armor, but one that managed to cling to my body with near perfection. This second fitting would remove the near.

“There is an extended shoulder, but no pad,” Yamamoto-san explained through a translator, negating the horrors of the shoulder-pad-stricken ’80s, but also managing to support my dropped right shoulder. “There is an empty space in the chest,” Yamamoto-san pointed out. Because I stoop so profoundly, he had used the draping technique to, in Mark’s words, “give your chest a little more volume.” The jacket cleverly made my chimichangas all but invisible, while ironically providing them with new space to roam.

“Damn, this is dramatic,” the usually unflappable Mark said.

“The way you wear this,” Yamamoto-san said, “it looks like ’50s France, or Alain Delon in the ’60s.”

We talked about areas that needed improvement. I lifted my arms and turned around. “What do we do with Gary’s behind?” Mark asked as the two men searched for my ass. “Apparently you lost some butt since the first fitting.”

“He should wear his pants as snug as possible,” Yamamoto-san said. The dreaded word suspenders came up again. “When the pants are above the belly button, everything is in line.”

“He could do some squats,” Mark said, an opinion I would not dignify with a response.

We chose a beautiful turquoise lining to contrast with the outer sobriety of the suit, and also navy buttons made out of nuts. “Into each life, some rain must fall,” Ella crooned on the record player, but I was hardly listening to her.

The author with Mark Cho, the owner of the Armoury ( left), and Yamamoto-san (middle), enjoying a drink at Martiny’s bar, in New York City (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

To celebrate the suit, we retired to the tailor’s favorite bar, Le Zinc, a few minutes’ walk from his atelier. Yamamoto-san is the type of Japanese man who surrounds himself with so much perfection that it would be interesting to take him someplace awful, like Hudson Yards or Westfield Garden State Plaza. Le Zinc felt like it had floated in from a former America, too spare and beautiful to provoke nostalgia, only awe. My martini was so excellent, I struggled not to cry. “There’s a sentiment in Japan,” my tailor said. “We don’t want to come to a bar without being well-dressed. There is a sentimentalization of Western culture.”

“A Western culture that barely exists,” I said.

A few martinis and highballs into our celebration, Yamamoto-san began to talk at length. He’d idolized America since he was a child. He listened to jazz in elementary school and saw the men wearing suits, and he couldn’t wait to wear a suit as well. He fell in love with the show Bewitched, in which an ad executive named Darrin (originally played by Dick York) was married to a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery)—but more important for Yamamoto-san, Darrin worked on Madison Avenue and wore fabulous suits.

I have to pause this story for a minute. Back in Queens, when I was wearing my Robin the Boy Wonder T-shirts and watching television on my grandmother’s failing 1960s Zenith set, Bewitched had managed to bewitch me as well. My nearly pubescent eyes lightly male-gazed Samantha, but I was equally in love with Darrin and his stark but perfect suits and ties. Though separated by a continent and an ocean, the young Yamamoto-san and I had entertained the same ideas of male fashion.

“A lot of young people today are anti-aging,” he continued. “They want their clothes to show their youth. I like the idea of aging, the kind of aging you see in vintage furniture or a vintage watch. Aging is beautiful. When I see a 70-year-old man in Manhattan picking up after a dog while wearing a suit, I applaud.”

We continued our discussion over bottles of Barolo at his favorite restaurant, which featured Lucchese cuisine. I had been to the actual Lucca just a month earlier, but the Japanese version of the food, like my Ivy-style suit in progress, seemed to both canonize and elevate its inspiration. If this part reads like a love letter to Japan and its pasta makers and toilet cleaners, I assure you it is.

According to ancient Japanese custom, a night of karaoke followed, about which I recall only singing Suzanne Vega’s child-abuse classic “Luka,” to which my audience nodded politely. In the middle of the night, I tripped over the complicated stairs of my hotel suite and almost broke my nose. But I felt fine.

The Final Touch

The next day would see the last piece of my wardrobe fall into place. The back-order list for Yohei Fukuda’s shoes is so long, the atelier has stopped accepting bespoke-shoe orders from new clients. For the time being, it is near-impossible to get his shoes, so please allow me to enjoy mine by myself. Fukuda-san and his assistants make only eight pairs a month, and each takes 130 to 140 hours of work. The soles are stitched by hand, which makes them a lot more flexible. Much like Yamamoto-san, who interned with a Boston tailor, Fukuda-san attended two years of “shoe college” in Northamptonshire, England, and then worked his way up from repairing soles to creating leather masterpieces in his atelier, by Tokyo’s Olympic stadium.

Fukuda-san is perfectly bald, with a luxuriant mustache. His work has been described as “kind of British,” which means he references and perfects traditional British shoes with the same brio as my tailor’s approach to Ivy style. The British did fine; Yohei Fukuda does better.

The atelier of the shoemaker Yohei Fukuda, in Tokyo (An Rong Xu for The Atlantic)

Mark has this theory that bespoke oxfords are not really worth the money, because many fine examples can be found off the rack. But he believes in bespoke loafers. So now is the time to confess another of my body’s deficiencies: One of my legs happens to be longer than the other. Since I was a child, I’ve had to wear inserts in my shoes to account for this discrepancy, and so an easygoing loafer, the pride of America’s aristocratic New England class, is sadly not for me.

We surveyed the gleaming shoes arrayed along the length of Fukuda-san’s atelier, like icons in a church. “Derby shoes,” Mark suggested. I looked over a couple. They were not quite as formal as oxfords, nor as floppy as loafers. Unlike oxfords, they had an open-laced construction that would comfort my calloused piggies during my daily six-mile walks around the countryside.

My final row of samples to examine was rolled out, a collection of hides that would allow us to choose a color. “For derbies, the best place to start is the darkest brown,” Mark suggested. I remembered Boyer writing in True Style about how the Italians had taught the world not to be afraid of mixing brown shoes with blue suits.

“Coffee,” Fukuda-san suggested, as we flipped through the hides.

“Maroon,” Mark offered.

“Brown pepper!” I said, as I ran my hands across a suede that seemed spicier, more intense, more brown than the others. Fukuda-san measured and traced every part of my foot, as we discussed adding a big rubber heel for better traction, and a steel toe. As with Yamamoto-san’s suit, my comfort and pleasure would be the biggest factors here; there would be no room for ostentation. No one must know that these shoes cost $3,000, I thought. No one.

My derbies would be lined with forest green to remind me of the forests behind my dacha. “Would you like your shoes monogrammed?” Fukuda-san asked. I was tempted to allow this to happen, but my Oberlin education still had some sway. My shoes remain anonymous.

Yamamoto-San 3: The Transformation

Just over two months later, Yamamoto-san arrived back in New York with my suit. My shoes had emigrated through different channels.

It was November 7, two days after an important American election. I was trying to practice self-care. I couldn’t make my adopted country fall out of love with fascism, but at least I could enjoy my new shoes. Also, I suspected that our new leader would cut my taxes as he had in the past, shuffling money from his supporters into my piggy bank. As an immigrant who had moved from one failed superpower to another, I had learned to take my pleasures wherever I could.

Mark educates the author on how to tie an Old Bertie knot during his final fitting at the Armoury. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

On the night of my suit’s unveiling, Mark threw yet another party at the Armoury’s Upper East Side location. The evening was warm, almost summery. Before I was ready to put on my suit, Yamamoto-san showed me how to steam-iron it with his beloved Panasonic travel iron. The Yohei Fukuda shoes were presented to me in a beautiful blond-wood box. “There’s no nail in that box,” one of the Armoury’s salesmen said. “Like a Jewish coffin.”

But as I put on the suit, I felt less Jewish than distinctly Christian, Episcopalian if not Calvinist; in any case, born again. I walked out of the changing room and looked into a mirror. I was contained by midnight blue, my shoulders weighed down with six-ply pleasure, each of my feet covered by what felt like the product of a heavily personalized cow.

“Yokatta! ” Yamamoto-san cried—roughly, “Thank goodness!”

“Yokatta,” Mark said, smiling.

The author stroking the iridescent lining of his suit during his final fitting (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

While I stood there yammering my gratitude, I noticed that despite the tailor’s best efforts, my pants were still sliding off the ghost of my ass. “I also have no tuchus,” the Armoury salesman who’d likened my shoebox to a Jewish coffin explained. “There’s no shelf on our bodies.”

To compensate, I was strapped into a pair of suspenders, and Mark lovingly tied a polka-dot tie around my neck in an Old Bertie knot. Even though I was at least a decade older than he was, I had started to think of Mark as my parent. He demonstrated how using a Bertie knot instead of the usual four-in-hand would benefit a shorter man like me by ending my tie at the waist, not the groin, where our returning president likes his. He thrust his index finger below the knot of my tie and explained that he was making a dimple.

“Braces and polka dots, matching, wow!” Yamamoto-san said in English. He motioned to my nearly transparent Selima Optique frames. “And with glasses color, very nice!”

We’d had many discussions about whether my pants would come with buttons instead of a zipper, to avoid the dreaded “pants tent.” But after I had demonstrated to him my love of martinis and the many bathroom visits they inspire, Yamamoto-san had relented with a zipper.

I left the fitting room and walked out into the crucible of menswear society. Although my suit felt Episcopalian, men gathered around me as if I were a bar mitzvah at the bimah. They touched the fabric; they touched my shoulders; they touched my arms and my collar. They followed me out into the Armoury’s well-lit backyard.

“It looks like it was painted on you,” one man said.

“The back is so clean.”

“Your shoulders slope, and this just hugs them.”

“The neck hugs the collar with no wrinkle.”

“The stitching adds texture and visual interest.”

“The weight helps it hang, the drape.”

“That’s a good lapel length.”

“You’re shaming us all tonight.”

The author strolling through New York with his newfound self-esteem (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)

I opened up my suit, shyly and then proudly, to let folks touch the iridescent lining within. Is this what it was like to be loved in this country? Yamamoto-san took me aside and told me that I must wear my suit all the time, and wear it casually, not just for special occasions. The suit was a part of me now. “What we have to divine is: What is a Gary Shteyngart suit?” Mark had once asked. Well, now we had divined it.

“If this becomes just for special occasions, I haven’t done my job,” Yamamoto-san said.

I promised him that I would never abandon the suit. Every week, I would find a use for it.

And I have kept my promise. I wear my suit regularly and with joy. I can do the Bertie knot in my sleep now. The different Ascot Chang shirts combine with either the polka-dot tie or its less formal counterpart, a silk foulard tie, to create different personalities. “You look like a crooner from the ’50s,” my wife, Esther, said of one combination. “You look like an English deacon,” she said of another.

“Bitch! You’re ready for anything now!” Shilpa wrote from Tuscany.

“I feel like you’re walking differently than you usually do,” my friend Sarah remarked. “You’re strutting a little.”

Only my 11-year-old son, Johnny, was unimpressed. “I wear a less comfortable version of that every single day,” he told me, pulling at the collar of his school uniform.

I began to wear my suit to all my meals and to take it into consideration when I ordered. What would my suit like to eat? I would ask. The suit wanted shrimp cocktail. Even after the noon hour, the suit wanted steak and eggs with Tabasco sauce and a Bloody Mary. I traveled with my suit to give a reading at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit was a perfect companion. It sprang out of my suitcase like a golden retriever, with not even the afterthought of a crease on it.

My head floating above the perfect triangle effectuated by my lapels, I gave one of the best readings of my life. Why shouldn’t I? I had always been content with my mind, but now I loved my body. It was no longer an object of discomfort and derision. I loved the small flickering muscles beneath my chest. I loved the roundness of my posture, my settled state. Like a character out of a James Salter novel, I loved my physique, my physicality. And I loved myself.

We did a photo shoot at Martiny’s, a Japanese-style cocktail bar on 17th Street. Yamamoto-san insisted that he would help supervise. He parted the tie for me as I lay on a couch to make me look more at ease, more Ivy style. He made sure that only half of the watch I had chosen for the shoot, a gilt-dial 1963 Rolex Explorer, would flash from beneath my cuff.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Afterward, Mark and I were walking through Tribeca past an immensely popular French bistro. It was the weekend, a prime dining hour; the place looked packed.

“Let’s get a table,” Mark said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. I mentioned several other restaurants down the street that might prove a better bet.

“Just go in and try,” Mark said. “I have to make a phone call.”

I approached the beautiful maître d’ alone, but instead of the usual sniveling noises I make in these situations, the excuses for not making a reservation, my understanding that I might have to wait for an hour or more for a table to open up, I stated forthrightly that my friend and I were in need of immediate sustenance.

A microsecond passed among myself, the maître d’, and my suit. A brief nod was issued. “Would you like the dining room or the bar?” she asked.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Behold My Suit!” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Sometime on Tuesday evening, the USAID website was taken down and replaced with what looked like a beta page from the internet of the 1990s. There were no affecting photos of American government officials distributing food and medicine overseas. Instead, a box of text explained that nearly all USAID personnel would be placed on administrative leave, globally. With administrative assistance from Elon Musk, President Donald Trump seems to have wiped out the world’s largest donor agency in just a few days. It was a radical act, but maybe not as politically risky, in the domestic sense, as other plans in the grand project of dismantling the federal government. USAID has important beneficiaries, but most of them are not Americans and live overseas.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we discuss where Trump and Musk seem to be headed and the obstacles they are likely to encounter in the future. What happens when Trump starts to face challenges from courts? What happens when Musk goes after programs that Americans depend on, particularly those who voted for Trump? What new political alliances might emerge from the wreckage? We talk with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics. And we also talk with Shane Harris, who covers national security, about Trump’s campaign to purge the FBI of agents who worked on cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol.

“I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends,” Harris says. “I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Today is the deadline for some two million federal employees to decide if they want to type resign in response to the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email. The email, of course, is one in a list of things that Elon Musk, empowered by President Trump, has been doing in order to “disrupt” the federal government.

Donald Trump: We’re trying to shrink government. And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

Rosin: For example: gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system—

News anchor: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granting Elon Musk’s DOGE team access to the federal government’s payment system, which handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Rosin: —dismantle USAID, of which Trump is not a fan—

Trump: And we’re getting them out. USAID—run by radical lunatics.

Rosin: —and neither is Musk.

Elon Musk: If you’ve got an apple, and it’s got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you’ve got actually just a ball of worms, it’s hopeless. And USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

Rosin: All of these efforts are unusual, maybe even unprecedented, norm-breaking—even for Trump. But are they unconstitutional? And could they fundamentally change the character of the country?

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

[Music]

News anchor: At the FBI, some agents have started to pack up their desks as fears of mass firings grow.

Rosin: In the second half of the show, we’re going to focus on a special case inside the government, which presents a different set of potentially history-changing problems—the FBI—with staff writer Shane Harris.

But first, we are going to discuss what’s at stake, more broadly in this overhaul, with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics for The Atlantic.

[Music]

Rosin: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here.

Rosin: So, Jon, of all the unorthodox things that Trump has authorized Elon Musk to do with the federal government, which one strikes you as pushing constitutional limits the most?

Chait: Attempting to eliminate or cut spending for agencies that have been authorized by Congress. This is just a totally revolutionary step in terms of the structure of our government. And it’s kind of shocking, to me, how far he’s been able to go, and how much permission he’s received from the Republican Party.

Rosin: And is there another time in history when a president tested this limit between what Congress authorizes and what the president can do with that? And how has it worked out in the past?

Chait: That’s a great question. You had a struggle with Andrew Jackson over the Bank of the United States. That was a real constitutional struggle between him and his enemies as to how much power the president had vis-à-vis Congress and whether the president had just total authority to do what he wished. And Andrew Jackson was sort of known for pushing the boundaries of the office to or past their limits, and saying if the Supreme Court ruled against him, he would just do what he wanted, anyway. He did the same thing with his attempts to ethnically cleanse Native Americans to take their land. He just fundamentally didn’t care if he had authority from Congress.

That’s the kind of struggle we’re, I think, heading into right now. And Richard Nixon tried a smaller version, I think, of what Trump is doing now. He basically said, Congress has authorized certain kinds of spending, and I’m just going to impound it. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and Congress passed the Impoundment [Control] Act that formalized the fact that Congress has this authority, and the president doesn’t, and if Congress authorizes spending, with very limited exceptions, the president has to carry it out. And if the president objects to certain forms of spending that Congress enacted, he has to persuade Congress to pass a law to change it.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. So that’s the line we’re working with. So it’s the Impoundment Act. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court. Can we talk about examples of, say, how far an administration can go in resisting a previous administration’s policies, but not pushing against this constitutional line? What would be something we’ve seen before? And what would prompt what people would refer to as, say, a legal or constitutional crisis?

Chait: Just in the big picture, the executive branch has been asserting more and more authority, over decades, as Congress has gotten more and more dysfunctional. The use of the filibuster has risen. Congress has gotten less and less able to fulfill its constitutional obligation to really direct national policy the way the Constitution imagined it. And so the executive branch has really kind of filled in this gap in a lot of ways. So you’ve seen presidents of both parties creatively exerting their authority.

You had Trump doing this with immigration, where he, you could say, couldn’t or just barely even tried to get Congress to fund the wall that he wanted. So he just basically redirected funding from the Pentagon to the border by calling it an emergency. And Trump is doing the same thing with tariffs.

Now, Congress basically ceded the president emergency authority to declare tariffs for various national-security emergencies, thinking that this would just be used in the case of something like a war or an international conflict, but it let the president decide what an emergency is. And so Trump can just say, well, an emergency is whatever he wants, and that’s on Congress.

And Biden has kind of pushed the limit in a lot of ways, I think most controversially with student loan forgiveness, where the executive branch has control over student loans, and so Biden just kind of forgave those loans on a kind of sweeping basis. Now, he was challenged legally. But when you’re in power, your party has a pretty strong incentive to interpret executive power in the most sweeping way.

So there’s a way in which both parties have really been engaged in this, but I really think what Trump and Musk are doing now has totally breached the walls of normal and is just turning the Constitution into a farce.

Rosin: Okay. So the reason that’s true is mostly because of appropriations? Because from what you’ve said, presidents are pushing this line constantly. So what are they doing that doesn’t just break norms or traditions, but actually is pushing into constitutional crisis?

Chait: Article I of the Constitution, which is really just, like, the guts of the Constitution, says that Congress has authority over spending.

So Congress establishes an agency. Congress sets its spending levels. And throughout our history, with the exception we’ve described for Nixon, which was slapped down, the presidents have to follow that because that’s the law, right? Now, the president has a role in that. The president can veto some of these laws. If Congress proposes spending that the president doesn’t want, the president can veto it, and then Congress can override it, or Congress can make a deal with him. But whatever emerges from that is the law, and the president has to follow the law.

Rosin: Okay. And does the Trump team have any creative arguments for how to get around this Impoundment Act?

Chait: So far, Elon Musk is just operating in this totally chaotic legal gray zone. So his first target has been the United States Agency for International Development. And one thing they’ve made this argument is that, Well, that was just established by an executive order by the president, John F. Kennedy, 1961, so it can be ended by an executive order. The problem is: After it was established by executive rule, it was later established by Congress. Congress voted to make the United States Agency for International Development an agency.

So after Congress established the United States Agency for International Development, it had the force of law. And so saying, We’re going to eliminate this agency, is just a violation of the law. It’s pretty simple.

Rosin: Okay. I can see the argument. So can we play out both scenarios? The first scenario is: The courts push back on Trump. You know, they enforce the Impoundment Act. They say, You cannot do this. You can’t end USAID. Elon Musk has to stop roaming around the federal government and making these decisions that violate this constitutional balance of power. What happens then? Does it call Trump’s bluff?

Chait: It might, but I wouldn’t count on it, for a couple reasons. Number one: Musk is moving much faster than the legal system can move. And it’s a lot easier to destroy something than it is to build something. So once you’ve basically told everyone they’re fired, and they can’t come to work, they can sit and wait for the courts to countermand that while they’re losing their income and their mortgage is going under, or they could just go find another job somewhere.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just, like, facts on the ground change, so that even if the legal reality doesn’t budge, you’ve already disintegrated the actual infrastructure.

Chait: You lose the institutional culture. You lose the accumulated expertise. And by the time the courts have stepped in, rebuilding it is difficult to do, even if the president wanted to. And obviously, they’re not going to want to anyway. Second of all, it’s not totally clear that they’re going to follow the law, that the law has any power over them.

I mean, remember: Donald Trump established on the first day of his administration that he believes that people who break the law on his behalf can get away with it when he pardoned the entire—or commuted the sentences of the entire—insurrectionists, right?

Rosin: Yeah.

Chait: So Elon Musk knows full well that if he violates the law, Trump is going to have his back. So I think that’s also shaping the behavior of everyone involved in this episode.

Rosin: Right. So it sounds like you pretty strongly believe there is no brake to this. b-r-a-k-e. There is no stop to this. I was thinking that maybe the courts or something to, you know, put some hope in to stop this. But it sounds like no.

Chait: Well, in the long run, the courts can have an effect by saying, You don’t have the authority to eliminate this agency. It still exists, meaning that when the Democrats win back the presidency, if that ever happens, it’ll still be there, and then they can actually rebuild it.

Rosin: So in other words, in that scenario, there’s temporary dismantling, but the balance of powers remains in place, is affirmed by the courts, and things get slowly rebuilt.

Chait: Right. Although, you know, you’ve lost all your talent, you’ve lost your institutional memory, and then you’re probably rebuilding this agency from scratch.

And keep in mind, USAID is just the test case. I think they’re just picking on the most politically vulnerable agency. It deals with foreign aid, right? So most of the people affected by this right now are mostly living in other countries, who won’t get, you know, drinking water and food. And people are going to starve and die of diseases, but they’re not going to be Americans. They can’t vote, so they’re politically weak and vulnerable.

So that’s the target that they’ve picked to establish this principle that the presidency can pick and choose what spending is real and what isn’t. So then they’re going to start to go on to do domestic targets. But then, I think, once they’ve started attacking domestic targets, then they’re going to start dealing with political blowback in a way they’re not facing when they’re going after foreign aid.

Rosin: I see. So that’s a different political—so if that starts to happen, if we enter a period where you have people who have stake in this in the U.S., can you see any interesting alliances that could come out of that moment?

Chait: It’s really hard to see where they’re going, because Elon Musk is not proceeding from an accurate map of reality.

So to just explain what I mean by that, he said that he wants to cut—first he said—$2 trillion from the fiscal-year budget, from one year. Then he revised it down to $1 trillion. So right away, you know, when you’re just picking these random round numbers, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. But he said, like, basically, there’s a trillion dollars in just, you know, waste and improper payments—and there just isn’t. There’s nothing close to that by even the most expansive possible definition. So Musk thinks he’s going to just go through the budget and find waste, and just kill it and add up to a trillion dollars. And he’s obviously not.

So the question is: What happens when his fantasy starts to run into reality? Does he start to just attack social-welfare programs and end payments of food stamps and Medicaid reimbursements and programs like that to people? Does he realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about and he’s in way over his head? We don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think that is the question you’ve got to answer before you start to figure out what the politics look like.

Rosin: Right. And there’s also military budgets. Like, if you think where the giant spending is, you’re running up against budgets that will face a huge amount of resistance if you slash them in the way that he’s slashed other things.

Chait: Right. Yeah. If they start going after the Pentagon, I think you, obviously, cut pretty deeply into the Republican coalition pretty fast. I even think they’re probably starting to accumulate small amounts of domestic political targets with USAID, right? They cut off funding to a Lutheran charity, but, you know, those are midwestern religious conservatives who are operating those programs who are being targeted. Now, most of the money is going overseas, but you’re still hurting people in the United States of America. And I think that pain is going to start to spread more widely if they keep going.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so you’re describing a realistic scenario in which this whole operation does encounter resistance. There are many policy researchers—on the left, even—who have argued that the government does, in fact, need an overhaul and, more specifically, isn’t equipped for a digital age. Is there a chance that in all of this, you know, Elon Musk could usher in a more efficient, tech-friendly kind of government?

Chait: Yeah, well, that was the initial hope that some people who specialize in government reform were hoping for. Jennifer Pahlka is an expert in what’s called “state capacity,” which is just the ability of government to function and to bridge the gap between its ambitions and its actual ability to meet those ambitions.

And part of that is fixing the way government hires and fires people.

But the problem is: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in that in any way whatsoever. He’s just holed up with a bunch of engineers who don’t seem to have any expertise in government or state capacity whatsoever. And they’re just finding programs that people within this kind of right-wing bubble in which he resides think sound radical and just, you know, saying, Delete it! Delete it! and getting cheers on social media for it.

It’s just so completely haphazard. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually making the government, you know, operate better.

Rosin: Yeah. And I suppose Twitter did not become a better, more profitable, you know, smoother-functioning company after Elon Musk took it over. It just became a kind of tool of the culture war—like, an effective tool of the culture war.

Chait: Right. It became smaller, less profitable—jankier, but more conservative.

Rosin: Right, okay. All right. One final thing. So project far into the future. Let’s say that your blowback scenario is real. What political alliances can you see reforming? Like, if you had to predict a political realignment some years down the road that includes a reaction to everything that’s going on now, what does it look like?

Chait: Well, the Trump coalition has really been built on winning multiracial, working-class voters back from the Democrats—and those voters are disproportionately to the right on social policy—and they’ve exploited some of those progressive stances on social policy that the Democratic Party has adopted over the last decade, but they’re still relatively to the left on economics. Maybe they don’t believe in government, in the abstract, but in the specific, they really rely on programs, like nutritional aid and Medicaid, Obamacare.

And every time the Republicans have gone after those programs, their coalition has splintered. That was really a major element in killing George W. Bush during his second term. He decided to privatize social security, and that was a major cause of the decline of his popularity that made him politically toxic, along with the Iraq War and Katrina, social security privatization.

You know, you could see a version of that happening with Trump, but I wouldn’t take for granted that it’ll play out that way because we live in a different world in a lot of ways.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Jonathan Chait.

After the break: Donald Trump also has his eyes set on the FBI. We hear from The Atlantic’s Shane Harris about what that might mean.

[Break]

Rosin: Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Harris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So the president asked the FBI to turn over the names of every agent who worked on the Capitol riots. What do you read into that request?

Harris: Well, I think you don’t even have to read that closely between the lines. You can just read the lines as they were sent in the order that we now have seen publicly, that went from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, of course, who had been one of Donald Trump’s lawyers as a private citizen, telling the acting director for the FBI, Look—we want the names of these people because they believe in the words that he has put, that they can no longer have trust that these FBI employees will implement the president’s agenda faithfully.

So what they are saying is that these are individuals who they don’t think are on board with Trump administration policies. And then of course, you know, we can do a little bit of inference, which is, you know, why would he go after the people who investigated January 6 and his role in it? Which was, by the way, the biggest FBI investigation in the country’s history. You know, these are the agents who interviewed and ultimately gave evidence that created the charges for the Capitol rioters—who were sent to prison, who Trump then later pardoned and who are now free—who investigated his own activity around January 6 and efforts to impede the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration.

So these are the FBI agents who did that case. And you know, what Trump is making very clear here is that, you know, he wants to identify them. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t trust the leadership that oversees them, and either wants them removed or moved, or we’ll see what the disciplinary action is. But some of them, he’s actually said he wants them fired immediately. He’s made pretty clear how he feels about these people and why he’s going after them, I think.

Rosin: Now, that must have landed in a very particular way at the FBI. You know the agency better than I do. As far as I understand it, I mean, you are assigned a case; you work on that case. So how have leaders in the agency responded to that request?

Harris: I think it’s been really interesting. I mean, there’s been this mixture from people I’ve talked to of: On one level, people are not surprised that Donald Trump went after FBI personnel, because it was expected that he would go after senior-leadership-level type people. I mean, he had essentially pushed out the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who—remember—became the FBI director when Donald Trump fired the previous FBI director, James Comey, in his first term.

But people were genuinely stunned by the scope of this demand to know the names of all of these agents who worked J6—and then there’s one other related case—because it’s, you know, potentially 4,000 to maybe even 6,000 personnel if you’re taking in FBI agents, analysts, people who play a support role.

But then something really fascinating has happened: There has been this—I hesitate to say the word defiant—but there are senior leaders at the FBI, including the person who is serving as the acting director right now, who essentially are saying, No, you cannot just fire agents for this reason, for no real cause. These people have protections under civil-service rules. They have due-process rights. And what’s more, some of the advocates for these folks are saying, Look—you can just read the plain language of the order that I just read to you and see that this is a retaliatory response, that what the president is doing is going after people because he doesn’t like their opinions or what they did.

As you pointed out, these thousands of agents didn’t pick to be on the case. I mean, it’s not like they raised their hand and said, Yes, please. I would like to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. They were assigned these cases. So the leadership has actually really kind of dug in here, some of them, and essentially is saying, There’s a process for this. This isn’t fair.

Now, we’ll see how long they can resist the White House on this, but we’re seeing some real institutional pushback from the FBI, which personally, I think, is encouraging.

Rosin: I want to get more into the pushback, but I’m curious what we know about this group of agents. There’s a few thousand. Because, yes, I followed the January 6 cases. I know that it was the biggest investigation in history, but who are they? Like, if you think about losing these 4,000, is why I’m asking, what’s their expertise, and what do they generally do?

Harris: If we take that group of the J6 investigators, the agents themselves, these could be people who were pulled in from all over the country. So this could include agents that were investigating national-security-related matters, counterterrorism matters, transnational crime, narcotics. The universe of these agents, as you know, was so big because the case was so big and demanding.

Trump, though, has zeroed in, more particularly, on some individuals, including some very senior-level officials that have the title of executive assistant director, and he actually named some of these in this order. And those people were involved in things like, for instance, the Mar-a-Lago investigation, when Donald Trump took classified documents from the White House and stored them at his estate in Florida—offenses for which he was later charged under the Espionage Act.

Some of these people—one of them was the special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, which participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Others had supervisory and leadership positions on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It was a counterintelligence squad at the Washington Field Office in D.C. that handled the Mar-a-Lago case. So, you know, he understands that there are people who, individually, separate from J6, worked on the Mar-a-Lago case, as well, and those people are being singled out too.

Rosin: Right. I mean, there are two things here. One is, we’ve talked about this in terms of other agencies, like USAID, which is: What vast institutional knowledge would you lose? So these people worked on individual cases, but also, they have a lot of expertise in counterterrorism. They just must have a large, you know, body of knowledge and experience that you could lose.

Harris: Absolutely. So let’s just take, for instance, the squad at the Washington Field Office that did the Mar-a-Lago investigation. They work in the counterintelligence division of the FBI. So when those folks are not investigating, you know, Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents, they’re looking at things like spies operating inside the United States trying to maybe steal government secrets or recruit agents in the United States. They’re looking at people who might be mishandling classified information. They look at people who might be leaking to journalists as well.

These are folks who work on highly specialized counterintelligence cases. This isn’t just something that you, you know, kind of step into, and on day one, you know how to do it. These are different kinds of tradecraft. They’re very sensitive. These people all will have high-level security clearances. They will have been vetted for these jobs. So folks who are in positions like that, when you eliminate them, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me that there is just then, like, a backup bench of people who can come in to do these really important national-security cases.

And the same would go for anyone who’s working actively on counterterrorism, you know. I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about his concern that there are, you know, terrorists making their way inside the United States, taking advantage of, you know, weak border security or other ways of getting into the U.S. Well, it’s FBI agents who do counterterrorism cases that investigate things like that.

So if you’re suddenly moving people with this level of expertise off their jobs, or you are creating a real disruption and distraction while they’re trying to do their jobs, I think that arguably weakens national security, it creates vulnerabilities, and it distracts the FBI from doing its job, which is to go out and not just investigate crimes but to try and stop violent crimes and bad things from happening to Americans and to the U.S. government.

Rosin: Right. So you can see the future crisis. Like, you can project a future crisis where we are vulnerable to terrorism or something like that because we’ve lost a huge amount of this expertise.

Harris: I think that’s right. Yes. It doesn’t seem to me like he is thinking through the consequences of hobbling the FBI at this moment. What he is interested in is retribution. He’s interested in payback. And he is putting, you know, not only the country, but he’s putting his administration at grave political risk by doing that.

Rosin: Okay, Shane. Here’s something else that I was wondering about. Since when did the FBI come under so much suspicion from the right? I’ve always thought of the FBI as an agency conservatives can get behind, and Trump’s attacks feel like they upend all that. It’s confusing.

Harris: Oh definitely. And this has long been one of the more baffling aspects of Donald Trump’s critique of the FBI, as he’s painting them as this kind of leftist deep state.

I mean, the FBI—I’m speaking in general terms, of course, I mean—it is a generally conservative institution, both because I think that the people who work in it are often politically conservative or just sort of dispositionally conservative. It’s a law-enforcement agency. I mean, it does everything by the book. There are jokes in the FBI about how it takes, you know, five forms that you have to fill out before you can make a move on anything. It is a very hidebound, bureaucratic, small-C conservative organization. I mean, these are cops.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Harris: Okay? It’s a bunch of cops, right? This is like, if you want to think in generalities, like, you know, USAID is like, Oh, yeah, it’s people who want to get to charities, and they worked in the Peace Corps, and they’re all about humanitarian causes. And that, too, is kind of a broad brush.

But, you know, when I talk to people who have worked in the bureau, if you knew these people, these are not people who you would associate with progressive causes. That doesn’t mean that they are sort of reactionary right-wingers. I don’t want to make that impression either. They’re very much following the rule of law. It’s a conservative institution. It is very hidebound and steeped in tradition and in regulation.

And, you know, Trump just has this image of it as this out-of-control left organization. And he has persuaded large numbers of his followers and Americans that this is true. And I have to tell you, in the 20-plus years that I’ve covered national security, one of the most fascinating and bewildering trends that I have seen is this change in political positioning, where now, people who tend to be on the left, sort of—I don’t want to say revere the FBI and the intelligence agencies but—hold them up as models of institutions of government that we need to have faith and trust in, and they’re there to try and protect people. When it was a generation ago, people on the left who were deeply skeptical of the CIA and the FBI because these agencies were involved in flagrant abuses of civil rights and of the law in the 1950s and ’60s.

And now it’s people on the right who, particularly after 9/11, used to be so reflexively defensive of the CIA and the FBI and counterterrorism and Homeland Security, who now have sort of swapped political positions with the critique on the left that see these institutions as, you know, run through with dangerous, rogue bureaucrats who want to prosecute their political enemies. I mean, it’s just like the people have switched bodies.

Rosin: Let me ask you a broader question about this. As someone who’s been tracking Trump’s attempts to rewrite the history of January 6 for a while, I could say I was a little surprised by the blanket pardon of insurrectionists, maybe a little more surprised by this effort to go after the agents who investigated them. Because—and tell me if this is an exaggeration—to me, that could send a message to supporters: If you commit violence on my behalf, not only will you not get punished, but anyone who tries to go after you will be in trouble. Which, if I continue that logic, seems like, potentially, a blank check to commit violence on the president’s behalf. Is that paranoid?

Harris: No. It’s not. It’s not. That is, I think, one of the clear risks that we face with the president behaving in the way that he has. And I would take it one step further, which is to say: The message is that if you are an FBI agent, or maybe more to the point, an FBI leader, someone in a management position, there are certain things that you should just not look into and investigate.

And not to say, like, now that the president enjoys, you know, presumptive immunity for all official acts. I mean, who knows what the FBI is even going to investigate when it comes to Donald Trump. But how good would you feel being assigned a case to look into Elon Musk or, you know, Trump campaign donors who may have engaged in illegal activity or influence peddling, the whole universe of people connected to Trump?

What he is saying by pardoning these J6 rioters is that If you are on my side, I will come protect you. And I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends. I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.

The FBI is there to investigate crimes objectively, regardless of who may have committed them. And what the president is doing now is essentially saying there’s a whole category of people who, if not outright exempt, are people that are going to fall under his protection, and for the people who might dare to investigate them, there will be consequences.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you, but no thank you, for laying that out in such a clear and chilling way. I appreciate it.

Harris: My pleasure, Hanna. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

DeepSeek is banned on government devices in South Korea, Australia and Taiwan. More countries might follow suit.

At least 33 countries, mostly in the Americas, provide automatic citizenship to anyone born within their borders.

Illustrations by Jan Robert Dünnweller

On a late summer’s day in Cambridge, England, the writer Ali Smith sat with me on a wooden bench in a patch of garden across from the brick rowhouse where she works. Her new novel, Gliff, was due out before long; she described it as a “dystopian pony book,” clearly pleased to have invented a new genre. She flashed impatience when I suggested that she frequently expresses political views both in her fiction and outside it. After a tart “Do I?” she continued, “I think I’m always in the realm of fiction.” A pause before she allowed, “Well, I’m a citizen.” At that moment, I knocked over the water glass I’d carelessly balanced on one arm of the bench. It shattered, and Smith said merrily, “See what happens when you talk politics?” I apologized, and she told me, “If you want to break another one, I’ll break one with you.”

Funny, cheerfully provocative, at once friendly and sharp-elbowed: That’s Smith in person, and also in her copious fictional output (13 novels and six story collections over the past 30 years). Her books are challenging—experimental and unabashedly literary—yet welcoming to all, eminently readable even when they’re disorienting; they engage the reader, demanding collaboration. (Her fifth novel, published in 2011, has a fill-in-the-blank title: There but for the.) Most writers with a foot in the avant-garde achieve cult status at best; Smith collects awed reviews at home and abroad, wins prizes and honors, and sells lots and lots of books to avid fans.

She breaks rules with gleeful abandon, mocking convention, asking her publisher to do things that the industry instinctively abhors. After Gliff will come Glyph—a pair of homophone titles guaranteed to trip up booksellers and buyers for years to come. (Smith adores wordplay, the quirks of language: puns, rhymes, bizarre etymologies, neologisms, contronyms—words that have developed contradictory meanings.) According to her publisher, the two books will “belong together.” Could she tell me more about Glyph ? “Absolutely not”—she hadn’t yet started writing. I backed off, reminded of a line from Artful (2012), a novel first delivered as a series of Oxford lectures, much of it literally ghostwritten (that is, written by a ghost): “Sequence will always be most of the word consequence.”

I’ve been thinking about Smith for more than 20 years. In 2006, just after her third novel, The Accidental, was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I reviewed it, and did a little research. I found a short essay by her fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson in which Smith asks, rhetorically, “Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?” This is what Smith does: First, she confuses you—Who’s talking? When did this happen? Where am I?—then she hooks you with a flash of storytelling genius or a dazzling formal innovation. You read on, and the world seems strange to you, and you seem strange to yourself. The flimsy illusions offered up by conventional literature seem hollow (life is stranger than fiction), as do the certainties you live by (are you yourself truly a coherent character?). You have been reskinned.

The hook sometimes looks like a gimmick. It’s not. At Smith’s behest, her obliging publisher hurried each of the four books of the Seasonal Quartet (2016 to 2020) onto bookstore shelves only about six weeks after she’d delivered each manuscript—an unthinkably quick turnaround. Smith’s ambition, from the time she conceived the project in the 1990s, had been to graft the rush of current events onto the everlasting cycle of the seasons. Soon after she finally sat down to write the first book at the end of 2015 came the United Kingdom’s Brexit crisis. Galvanized by the shock result of the referendum, she told herself as she began to write, “This book has to meet the contemporary head-on, or there’s no point to this sequence of books.” Hence the superfast schedule: Autumn appeared just four months after the vote.

[Read: Ali Smith’s Autumn is a post-Brexit masterpiece]

Although the press labeled it “the first Brexit novel,” the word Brexit is never uttered in the book. A seemingly random yet oddly menacing chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and security cameras, is erected near an ordinary English village. A woman battles bureaucracy to renew her passport at the local post office; the petty hurdles are dismaying, ominous, comical. Spanish tourists visiting England are heckled at a train station: “This isn’t Europe … Go back to Europe.” Appalled, a sympathetic witness realizes that “what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic”—a compact summary of Smith’s narrative strategy.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018, Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, interviewed Smith onstage—since when does a nation’s leader host an experimental novelist at a literary festival?—and read aloud a passage from Autumn that for her perfectly captured the post-referendum mood:

All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland.

The echo of Dickens (the first line of Autumn is “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”) carries on and on: 46 consecutive sentences begin with “All across the country.”

Every volume of the Seasonal Quartet was a best seller in the U.K.; the most conspicuously topical of the four, Spring (2019), tackled the “migrant crisis” and reached the top of the Sunday Times best-seller list. Migration has been one of Smith’s abiding concerns. “We’re ignoring it,” she said in an interview more than a dozen years ago. “As our countries and our world become smaller … we’re bordered, everything is about the stranger.” She eventually went to see for herself what detainees in the U.K. are put through and was shocked to find “a razor-wire fence so high and encircling such a tiny yard space that it would pass as a literal example of surreality.” In Spring, a brutal Immigration Removal Centre is described in distressing detail—but Smith also imagines a kind of underground railroad for migrants anxious to avoid the authorities.

Bad guys versus good guys? Part of Smith’s appeal is that she shows us warm-hearted progressive ideals in action, a spirit of inclusion feeding hope and healing hurt. As one character in Spring puts it, “What looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open.” But nothing in Smith’s fiction is that simple. In Winter, two sisters are mourning the death of their mother. One says, “It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more.” The other thinks, “Platitude, cliché.” If your sympathy is divided, that’s because with Smith, every either/or is complicated by a both/and. A maxim from The Accidental : “The word and is a little bullet of oxygen.”

[Read: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter]

The stories she tells spill out of stories that spill out of other stories. She’s an inveterate flouter of chronology—a timeline for almost any of her books, including the quartet, would look like a manic Etch A Sketch scribble: Rather than plot or the forward sweep of the clock’s hands, it is Smith’s voice, her many voices, that propels the reader. As though on a whim, she’ll take an unexpected detour into art history or natural history or literary criticism. Finger-on-the-pulse backdrops are balanced by cultural or historical or scientific deep dives. Against the grim tidings of the day, news of pain inflicted by strangers on strangers, she pits, in Spring, the oddly charming tale of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spending several weeks in 1922 in the same small Swiss town—and never meeting. A hack screenwriter wants to rework that non-anecdote into an erotic TV costume drama, the two writers screwing in a swinging cable car high above a picturesque snowy valley. Appalled, the director he hopes to hire flees and ends up in the Scottish Highlands, where he crosses paths with the network of people dedicated to helping migrants.

Like every Smith novel, Spring is about human connection, how hard it is—how damned important it is—to acknowledge humanity in the other and embrace it. Yet Smith has talked about how she loves the spirit of alienation in Mansfield’s writing: “Distance, foreignness, knowing you’re out of place or in limbo … and however much you feel at home, you’re fooling yourself, and however strange you feel in the world … it’s natural, it’s the most natural thing.” Sometimes there simply is no connection. Force it, and you get schlock.

When I interviewed Smith for The Paris Review in 2017, a few years after the Scottish-independence referendum, she told me, “I like edges but not borders.” Born in Inverness in 1962 and raised by an Irish mother and an English father, she calls herself “Scottish by formation” (quoting another of her heroes, the Scottish-born Muriel Spark). “I grew up on the margins,” she said. “I inherited all the value of the margins.” Her working-class parents brought her up in council housing. She was much younger than her four siblings, and looking back, she recognized that she’d had “a remarkably lucky childhood, cosseted and bullied both in that lovely family way, with nobody following me, no rivalries.” Her parents had both won scholarships, but had been obliged to leave school to go to work. They were adamant that their children would be educated. All five graduated from university.

“I was a proficient, happy, versatile child,” Smith told me. She went to Roman Catholic primary school, then a state-run high school. She read all the time. “I thought of myself as a poet through my teens,” she confessed to another interviewer. “I was pretty dreadful.” At the University of Aberdeen, she studied English literature and language, graduating with highest honors. She then spent five years studying for a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge. Alongside her studies, she wrote plays; Sarah Wood, who became her life partner, directed five of them. The doctorate, meanwhile, never materialized. Her examiners requested changes to her dissertation on three Modernist masters (James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams); she refused. She was nevertheless offered two teaching jobs, and accepted the one at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.

That stint lasted 18 months, cut short by a debilitating bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. At the time, the illness felt “like I’d been hit from the back with a baseball bat—after which I … went into a kind of physical breakdown.” Smith returned to Cambridge to recover, but the symptoms lingered, resurfacing intermittently. Though she found it painful to write longhand, she scratched out her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which scooped up a couple of prizes. She persuaded her publisher, Virago, to take a chance on her debut novel, Like (1997), and from then on, she was a writer only.

Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), was shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange Prizes, success of the kind that heralds a major career. In The Guardian, the novelist Giles Foden wrote, “I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel.” It begins with the voice of a ghost. A teenage chambermaid working at a fancy hotel in a dour northern city has fallen down a dumbwaiter shaft to her death. Her ghost, itching to feel again (“What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe”), would like to know how long it took her to fall:

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

A classic, manically ludic Smith passage, grim and comical, pushing at the edge of too much, yet as easy to swallow as a spoonful of honey.

Having given voice to the dead, Smith takes it away; the ghost girl is losing her ability to speak, losing language. Her last message to the living:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.

When I asked Smith about the legion of ghosts in her fiction, she shrugged and said, “I just don’t think death makes that much difference.” Sounding like Gertrude Stein, she elaborated: “We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.”

The realm of fiction where Smith says she “always” dwells is mostly populated by family and friends, the people we’re most comfortable with, who also drive us crazy. Often the setting is the home we long for and can’t wait to escape. The premise of The Accidental—borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film, Teorema—is the reskinning of an unhappy bourgeois family: mother, son, daughter, and stepfather. In musical notation, an “accidental” changes the pitch. In the novel, the accidental—the catalyst—is a mysterious character who rings the doorbell and announces, “Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.” Though she’s very much flesh and blood (her flesh is desired by every family member, young, old, male, female), this uninvited guest might as well be a ghost, an inexplicable apparition with uncanny powers. The daughter thinks of Amber as “the kind of superheroine that can draw things to her and repel them away from her at the same time.”

Jan Robert Dünnweller

The reader watches as the family’s world disintegrates, and the idea, I believe, is that the reader molts in sympathy. The daughter, in her old skin, needs everything to be mediated, filtered, distanced. A bright, lonely 12-year-old, she’s obsessed with her video camera (and has a verbal tic, using i.e. ad nauseam). Amber drops the girl’s camera from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy highway below—deliberately. Amber does everything deliberately. In her new skin, the younger girl accepts that “her responsibility” is about “actually seeing, being there.” That may sound like a New Age mantra, but the transformation, slight and subtle, is also plausible and moving. The parents fare less well; the fractured family will never be whole again. (Smith doesn’t do happy endings.)

In my mind, the 12-year-old from The Accidental reappears, four years older and much sadder (her mother has died), in my favorite Smith book, How to be both (2014), a novel in two parts published in vice-versa editions: with the same cover, but with the order of the parts reversed—in effect, different novels packaged identically and released simultaneously. This older girl, George, is also bright and lonely, and she’s pedantically fixated on correct grammar—“a finite set of rules,” she insists. George, too, will be reskinned. Among other things, she slowly discovers her erotic love for another girl. Her evolution is watched over by the ghost of an actual Italian quattrocento painter from Ferrara, Francesco del Cossa.

One part of How to be both is narrated by the bewildered painter, who can’t comprehend 21st-century England and decides he’s in an afterlife “purgatorium,” condemned to traipse after George, whom he mistakes at first for a boy. The other part is told from George’s perspective, close third-person. She remains unaware of the ghostly observer who’s following her around. Which part you read first depends on which edition you happen to have bought, and to discover which sequence works best, you’ll have to reread. Should the tale of a 600-year-old artist, with its technical asides on the art of the fresco, come before the tale of modern-day teenage angst? Do the parts of the puzzle fit either way?

The painter’s confusion about George’s gender is an ironic echo (or foreshadowing) of the backstory Smith has invented for him: He was born a girl but disguised himself as a boy to become a painter. (“Nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman,” warned his father, a brickmaker.) The adventures of this talented cross-dresser make a mockery of binary ideas about gender. What the painter learned centuries ago in Ferrara, what George learns in 21st-century London, is that no finite set of rules applies.

Back on the sunny Cambridge bench, Smith told me about the origins of Gliff, which is full of characteristic quirks and revisits her abiding concerns—gender, boundaries, the importance of unmediated engagement with the world. But it’s darker fiction, with some acutely painful passages. It began as a short story written “very fast” in August 2023, a commission for an anthology: “I was supposed to write something that was tangentially Kafkaesque,” she explained, after which she turned to work on a new novel. But she was ambushed by a “horrendous” bout of insomnia, “three months of almost no sleep,” and realized that she was writing the wrong book, and that the short story “was not going away, was waiting, rather like characters do, at the back of your head.”

Where did the title come from? “I was playing about online one day thinking, Is this a nonsense word or not? And I looked up the word that sounded like glyph but was spelled differently, and found out it wasn’t a made-up word—it was actually a northern word, a Scottish word.” It has many meanings, among them a glimpse, a sudden fright, or a brief moment. It’s also the name of the horse in this dystopian pony book, but we’ll get to that.

A glyph is a mark—as Smith said, “The smallest unit of meaning,” a scratch on a cave wall, an ornamental carving on a primitive tool. In the Paris Review interview, when I asked about the building blocks of her prose, Smith explained that “the rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it—the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.” Now she’s taken the next step, training her attention on the gesture that precedes even the syllable. In Gliff, she shows us prehistoric cave art and the head of a horse carved many thousands of years ago onto a rib bone.

She also steps for the first time into the near future: A brutal totalitarian state has been rounding up, interning, and reeducating people whom the regime deems “unverifiable.” The climate is as much Orwell as Kafka: 24/7 surveillance, grotesque euphemisms, justified paranoia. Britain’s not quite there yet—but, Smith insisted, “could be.” She added, sitting up taller, “If we just raise our heads from thinking it’s not happening, we’d see that most of the book is happening right now somewhere.”

The authorities have started drawing red lines around the unwanted unverifiables—literally. They have a comically low-tech machine called a “supera bounder” that applies paint around houses, around vehicles. Demarcated houses are demolished, vehicles towed away: rapacious capitalism combining punishment and profit.

Two siblings, a young teenager and a younger sister, more or less abandoned in an empty house, find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. The older sibling—our narrator, Bri, cautious and protective—worries about the meager supply of canned food, and tries hard to lift the spirits of the younger one, who finds seven horses in a nearby field, one of which, a gray gelding, she adopts (or is adopted by). She gives him his name.

Gliff the horse is the moral center of Gliff the novel, and also the occasion of some arresting descriptions:

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field. It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree …

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and—what?

Five years later, in a moment of crisis, Bri realizes that the missing word is “equanimity.”

When Smith was a child in Inverness, about 4 or 5 years old, she discovered a stable behind an ice rink. “Between the age of 7 and 11,” she said, “I went every Saturday in the summer and hung out. We did do a little grooming—very small ponies in my case. What I know about horses all comes from that place at the back of the ice rink, where 12 or 13 horses lived in the field.” She paused. “You know, being on the back of a horse teaches you everything about everything.”

The writing about Gliff the horse does more than bring the living creature into focus. “His mouth was decisive without force, a soft lipped line. It made him look resigned, noncommittal, but also poised, as if waiting.” That “soft lipped line” is the antithesis of the supera bounder’s garish, excluding red. Yet Smith is in the business of complicating binaries as well as erasing boundaries; she won’t tolerate a simple dichotomy.

Which brings us back to the two siblings. The younger one is Rose, wild, fiercely loyal, fiercely stubborn. Bri, kind and caring and, like so many of Smith’s characters, obsessed with words and their meaning, is also Briar or Brice. (“Why did I myself really like having more than one name, as if I had more than one self?”) When asked, bluntly but without malice, “Are you a boy or a girl?,” the answer is, “Yes I am.”

Flash-forward five years and—a spoiler follows—Bri now serves the state. Reeducated? Lured by the promise of elevated status? Tortured? It’s not clear what has happened, but Bri is complicit in the horrors of the regime, and this lover of words has been silenced: “That’s as much of that story as I care to tell. One line about it is more than enough.” The unspoken, the unspeakable, is more frightening than anything else in the novel.

Four cats patrol the alley next to where Smith and her partner live and work. The cats came and went, occasionally pausing near our bench to lick a paw and ignore us ostentatiously. I wondered which ones were hers, and she said, approvingly, “They kind of live everywhere.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]

I asked again about politics, suggesting mildly that sometimes she deploys her dazzling skills in the service of ideology. In Winter, she quotes Keats: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Does she agree? “Fiction’s only agenda is to be fiction,” she replied, “but lies have an agenda.” Her soft, lilting voice was buttressed by quiet conviction: “All you do is tell the story. What you do is write and write, and you tell the story that arrives—and it really is like being on the back of a horse.” But what about the wild complexity of her narratives, the abrupt swerves and unannounced excursions? As though to allow for nuance, she said, “Of course it will be political when it’s written, because everything is. But I believe deep in my own bones that story is about something that cancels division between us.” She added, “We cross those lines every time we listen to someone or are heard by someone.”

Some early reviewers of Gliff have complained that it feels too “on the nose.” The book’s horrors—climate catastrophe, internment camps, genocidal wars, high-tech surveillance—are too familiar to serve as prophecy. Is it fair to complain that the future is almost already upon us? Who needs prophecy when dystopia is now? The novel thrums with Smith’s urgent need to tell a story about where our divided present could lead us. “We cannot look away at the moment,” she said to me. “We must not look away from the darkness. And if I didn’t look at the dark, what kind of a writer would I be?”

* Lead-image sources: Lorentz Gullachsen / Contour by Getty; Leonardo Cendamo / Getty.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Experimentalist.”

To understand the harm Donald Trump has done with his tariffs on Canada and Mexico, here are four things you need to know:

First, every tax on imports is also a tax on exports.

The most popular beer in America is Modelo Especial, brewed in Mexico. Impose a 25 percent tariff on Modelo and sales will slide. So, too, will exports of the American barley that goes into Mexican beer. Mexico buys three-quarters of U.S. barley exports, almost all for brewing.

Trump surrogates may promise you that by driving Mexican beer off of grocery shelves, Trump’s tariffs will increase sales of U.S. barley to U.S. brewers. That promise may even be substantially true. But that offer has fine print that barley growers will notice.

Barley growers don’t care only about how much barley they sell. They care about the price at which they sell it.

A tariff raises the price of both every imported good and every good that competes with imports. If the price of Modelo is pushed up, the price of American-brewed beer will rise as well. American beermakers are not operating a charity. The tariff on Modelo allows them to both increase their market share at Modelo’s expense and raise their prices enough to increase their margins at the consumers’ expense.

But American consumers do not have infinite amounts of money. If they are paying more for beer, they have to make savings elsewhere. The result—and economists will prove this to you all day with facts and figures—is that prices in exporting sectors such as barley, and agriculture generally, will decline in proportion as prices in the importing sectors rise.

This is why developing countries that tried, after 1945, to bulldoze their way to industrialization using high tariffs—Argentina under Juan Perón; India under Jawaharlal Nehru—ended up instead isolating themselves from world markets. The tariffs did allow them to make their own radio sets and cars, but at the price of lowering national incomes and so shrinking the domestic market for those radios and cars. And, of course, the protected radios and cars could not compete on global markets against the superior products of the countries that accepted world prices, such as Germany and Japan.

Trump tariffs will be paid in the form of higher prices for imports and their substitutes, and lower profits and wages for everyone who works in export industries.

[Juliette Kayyem: Trump is threatening California in the wrong way]

Second, every product is also an input.

When journalists write about tariffs, they look for everyday examples familiar to everyone, the way I just did with Modelo beer. Others will cite tomatoes or avocados, food items for which the cost of the tariff will be reflected in the price at the supermarket checkout. But the greatest harm done by tariffs is concealed in a way that prevents most of us from seeing the harm directly.

The largest glassmaker in North America is a Mexican company, Vitro. It operates plants in the U.S. and Canada, but the center of its operations is Monterrey, Mexico.

Very few of us buy big sheets of industrial glass. We do not see or care about the price. But we do care about the price of a new apartment. That apartment price depends on the cost of construction. Which depends on the price of the window systems that clad the apartment building. Which depends on the price of glass. Which Trump just raised by up to 25 percent.

You may buy a little aluminum in the form of cans and other household products. But the main way you pay for aluminum is in the price of airline tickets. Put a tariff on aluminum, and aircraft prices rise. Inflate aircraft prices, and airline-ticket prices also rise. The traveler will not know why, and will be tempted to blame airline greed—and will find politicians ready to feed that grievance. Who will connect the surprise extra fee they have to pay to sit beside their child with a president’s decree against the cheaper Canadian aluminum that owes its price advantage to superabundant Quebec hydroelectric power?

Big, sophisticated global companies can shift their input-sourcing from tariffed countries such as China and Mexico to favored countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines. But the shift is never easy. For smaller companies, it may prove altogether unfeasible. The largest maker of outboard motors in the United States employs only about 5,000 people. It is furloughing and laying off more than a quarter of its workforce. This type of firm cannot easily fly into Hanoi to source a reliable replacement for its trusted components supplier in Shenzhen, China. The challenge is only greater when the U.S. manufacturer has no idea how long the Trump tariffs will last. It will probably continue to use its familiar suppliers, pay the tariff, raise its prices, and suffer the stagnation and shrinkage of its business.

[Read: Democrats wonder where their leaders are]

Third, “illegal” is irrelevant; don’t expect relief from tariffs through lawsuits.

You might wonder how can Trump do this. After all, Trump himself renegotiated NAFTA and praised his new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal as “based on the principle of fairness and reciprocity.” Surely, it can’t possibly be consistent with U.S. treaty obligations to impose new tariffs on a whim.

All true. Trump’s actions are almost certainly illegal under treaty rules. But the U.S. stopped obeying treaty rules some time back.

In 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The affected countries took their case to the World Trade Organization. More than four years later, in December 2022, the WTO issued its judgment. The United States lost on every point. Result? The Biden administration declared it would ignore the ruling. The United States “will not cede decision-making over its essential security to WTO panels,” said a spokesperson for then–U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

Those defiant words were backed by obstructionist practices. In 2017, the Trump administration had blocked new appointments to the WTO’s appellate court, in effect the supreme court of world trade. The Biden administration continued the embargo. Today, all seven seats on the panel are empty.

The United States has likewise sabotaged the dispute-settlement mechanisms under the North American trade agreements. In 1998, the U.S. escaped defeat on a Mexican complaint by the ingenious method of refusing to appoint anyone to the commission that was supposed to adjudicate the matter. That more or less killed NAFTA from the start as a way to police actions by the American government. Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement is even more riddled with exceptions that allow his government to do as it pleases.

On trade, the U.S. itself has led the way back to the law of the jungle. Remember that fact when the other big cats strike back.

[Read: Trump has created health-care chaos]

Fourth, Americans may not remember their past actions, but others do.

You may have already forgotten all about last weekend’s Trump outburst against Colombia, backed by threats of high tariffs on Colombian products. You may not ever have known that Colombia opened up to U.S. wheat, soybean, beef, cotton, and peanut exports in order to secure a free-trade agreement with the United States. But Colombians remember.

Colombia’s politics are intensely polarized, the legacy of bitter years of insurgency and civil war. Through most of the 21st century, Colombia’s politics had been dominated by U.S.-friendly politicians of the right. In 2022, for the first time in its modern history, Colombia elected a president of the left, Gustavo Petro. Petro is a former Marxist guerrilla, but he pledged to continue dialogue with the United States.

How does that dialogue look now to Colombians? And to others in South America and the world?

Trump is single-handedly reneging on 80 years of American work to persuade others to trust and rely on the United States. He is remodeling the international image of the U.S. after himself: impulsive, self-seeking, short-sighted, and untrustworthy. First-term Trump might have been dismissed as an aberration, brought to office by a fluke of America’s archaic Electoral College. A returned Trump, this time empowered by a genuine popular-vote victory, cannot be so readily dismissed. He obviously represents something deep in American politics, something likely enduring, something that other countries must take into account.

Mexico and Canada must ultimately suffer whatever the U.S. imposes on them. They cannot relocate; they have few credible options. Mexico has learned from especially bitter experience that any attempt to strike its own international deals will be vetoed by the U.S., using force if necessary.

Canadians have had an easier time, summed up by the cynical local joke: “The Americans are our best friends whether we like it or not.” But other countries have more options.

[From the March 2025 issue: Europe’s Elon Musk problem]

Over the past five centuries, the Euro-Atlantic world has seen the rise of one great power after another: Habsburg Spain, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Victorian Britain, Imperial and then Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Each of those powers was ultimately brought down because it frightened other powers into uniting against it.

The United States since 1945 tried a different way. It reconciled the world to its dominance in great part by using that dominance for the benefit of willing partners. The United States provided security, it opened markets, it welcomed the improving prosperity of fellow democracies and like-minded allies. Who would hazard the costs and dangers of uniting to topple such a benign hegemon—at least, so long as the hegemon remained benign?

In the 21st century, the United States faces a new kind of adversary. Past rivals might have matched the U.S. in wealth, technology, or military strength, but not in all three. China today is the nearest peer power the U.S. has faced since Americans battled the British Empire in the War of 1812. To balance China while keeping the peace, the U.S. will need more and better friends than ever before. Trump is doing his utmost instead to alienate and offend those friends.

“America First” means “America Alone.” This week’s trade wars are steps on the way to future difficulties—and, unless a great infusion of better judgment or better luck suddenly occurs, future disasters.

The geopolitical verdict on the first Trump presidency could be written with a breath of relief: “Bad as it was, it could have been worse.” On the present trajectory, the verdict on the second may not come with any relief at all.