“To a true collector,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” “the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all. Some titles go straight from best seller to well-loved classic, with no dip in demand; others, though popular in their author’s lifetime, may quickly fade into obscurity.

And then there are the “rebirths” Benjamin described: the second acts, rediscoveries, and renewals that bring older works back into circulation. Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of print, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writers, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you’d never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion.

The Maimed, by Hermann Ungar, translated by Kevin Blahut

“A sexual hell” is how the German writer Thomas Mann apparently referred to Ungar’s debut novel, The Maimed, first published in German in 1923. The tense, terse novel follows a hapless bank clerk, Franz Polzer, as he finds himself drawn into a sadomasochistic affair with his landlady. The Maimed brings Franz Kafka’s work to mind, but it is more sexually explicit on the page and made all the more claustrophobic by the introduction of Karl—a childhood friend of Polzer’s who may or may not have been his lover, and who is dying of an unnamed degenerative disease. As Polzer’s affair turns more and more violent, a murder occurs, as well as a mystery: Who is responsible for the killing? With its swirl of erotic anxiety and its ambiguous ending, The Maimed heralded the beginning of a promising literary career that, like Kafka’s, was cut short when Ungar died in his prime, in 1929, at age 36.

Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones

“You’re not crazy to me,” one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. “You’re daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.” That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it’s easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones’s sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart.

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz

First published in 1995 and recently reissued by the Bay Area–based small press Transit Books, the science-fiction novel I Who Have Never Known Men, written by a Belgian psychoanalyst, has received a surprising amount of attention on social media. BookTok contains hundreds of videos of readers discovering and discussing Harpman’s haunting feminist dystopia. Told from the perspective of its young and nameless female narrator, the book follows a group of 39 women of various ages who spend their days imprisoned in an underground bunker, which is patrolled by a mysterious series of male guards. After an accident sets the women free, our protagonist finds herself suddenly wandering through a wasteland and learning, from the other women, about the world as it existed before the vault, which she has no memory of. Together, they reconstruct elements of society: devising a system of time-telling through counts of the human heartbeat, rediscovering the existence of organized religion. What stands out most is the philosophical approach Harpman takes as she renders the familiar strange.

The Long-Winded Lady: Notes From The New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan

The woman wandering the city alone has become something of a popular, even glamorous, figure. She’s a variation on the 19th century’s flaneur, seen in contemporary works such as Olivia Laing’s 2016 memoir, The Lonely City, as well as reissued novels such as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, from 1979, and Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, from 50 years before that. The characters in those books would find common cause with the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who from 1954 to 1981 wrote missives for The New Yorker under the pen name “The Long-Winded Lady,” a woman who witnessed all kinds of behavior from New York’s denizens at all hours of the day. The columns in this collection, first collected in 1969 and reprinted in 2016, depict, in finely rendered strokes, the minutiae of close-quarters living. “There were no seats to be had on the A train last night,” one begins; still another starts in a bookstore and veers off, at the end, into a meditation on Balzac’s favorite food (sardine paste, apparently). At a moment when the atomization of interpersonal relationships is at the forefront of public discussion, Brennan’s winsome, melancholy-streaked portraits of city life hold particular resonance.

Mr. Dudron, by Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim

The relationship between the artist and their audience has been analyzed and fetishized by critics ad nauseam, but Mr. Dudron provides a fresh perspective from the artist’s point of view. This previously unpublished novel by the Greek-born Italian painter de Chirico, written fitfully over decades, doesn’t have much of a plot, instead unfurling as a series of anecdotal conversations among artists and meandering, essayistic theories of painting. In lieu of a digestible arc, the reader gets a peek inside the head of de Chirico, whose off-kilter paintings of empty city squares in the early 20th century would go on to strongly influence the Surrealists. “A work of art should never force the viewer nor the maker into an act of reasoning, or criticism, or exposition,” de Chirico writes, per one early translation; instead, “it should provoke only satisfaction … that is, a condition in which reasoning no longer exists.”

Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton

“Mrs. Wharton,” reads a line in The Atlantic’s review of her 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, “has never really descended from that plane of excellence which since its beginning has characterized her work.” Implicit in this observation: until now. Although contemporary reviewers might not have appreciated Twilight Sleep as much as they did Wharton’s previous books, her 17th novel offers an updated, Jazz Age–variation on a familiar, Wharton-esque theme: social ruin. In Roaring ’20s New York, Pauline Manford, the book’s heroine, inoculates herself from life’s unpleasantries—including her second husband’s affair with his stepson’s wife, Lita—with a busy social calendar, but when disaster strikes and the affair is discovered, not even Pauline’s unblinking devotion to rationality, truth, and progress can soothe her emotional reaction. Named after the drug cocktail given to women in the 20th century to ward off the pains of childbirth, which brings to mind the anesthetized attitude of some of its characters, Twilight Sleep was republished in late 2024.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Donald Trump abruptly fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C. Q. Brown, on Friday. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss what the president’s move could mean for the U.S. military.

“Trump, in his first term, tried to assert control over the military in a way that went beyond what the commander in chief does, not just as a defense for the country against external enemies but as a tool, potentially, for internal use when he had domestic criticism,” Peter Baker said last night. “Clearly, there is a decision that C. Q. Brown is not someone [Trump] can trust to carry out his bidding.”

Whether Brown’s firing will be an isolated one, or the beginning of a “wholesale purge of generals,” remains unknown, Susan Glasser said. “Trump has made it very clear that he wants people who are loyal to him personally and not to the office, not to the Constitution,” she continued. Trump’s agenda “really suggests a politicization of the nonpartisan leadership of America’s armed forces if generals are being replaced on the basis of perceived political loyalty to the president.”

Meanwhile, Trump has also aligned with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on ending the war in Ukraine and has falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the conflict. Panelists discussed what’s behind the president’s pivot toward Putin.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Jonathan Lemire, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC.

Watch the full episode here.

By reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has grown two of the largest hardware-innovation companies in the world, Tesla and SpaceX. As for Trump, he once told Golf Digest: “I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”

But now, united in Washington, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk has made its mark not by building, but by the opposite: demolition.

With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of power: Serving as the iron fist of the White House, he’s rooting out what he sees as the plague of wokeism in government, halting grants, freezing payments, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as he can get away with. On Monday, DOGE claimed to have already saved the government more than $50 billion. Meanwhile, federal judges have ruled that Trump and Musk have violated the law, typically by exceeding the powers of the executive branch and attempting to defund agencies that were initially funded by Congress.

In theory, DOGE exists to promote efficiency. And the need for efficiency is real. The federal government is deeply in debt. Its interest payments now exceed what it spends on defense. Even if the United States had no issue with its debt, it would still be a mitzvah to find ways to make government work better—to take the same tax dollar further, to do one more unit of good. But judging by DOGE’s early returns, the only objective conclusion one can reach about the agency seems to be that it’s out of control. What we’re witnessing in government right now—across the Departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Education, and beyond—is not only a bonfire of cruelty but a reign of ineptitude.

[Read: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]

Let’s start with the Department of Energy, which recently faced the brunt of massive DOGE layoffs. Among those who lost their job were dozens of staff members at the National Nuclear Security Administration—scientists, engineers, and safety officials responsible for safeguarding and assembling nuclear warheads. Roughly 100 people were reportedly laid off from the Pantex Plant, in Texas, the most important nuclear-assembly-and-disassembly plant in the country, before they were called back to the office. As Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said: “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for.”

Next, there’s Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered buyouts to tens of thousands of employees before realizing that, once again, they’d made a mistake. Far from the typical impression some might have of government workers just moving paper around all day, the VA provides health and psychiatric care to millions of U.S. veterans. That means if you offer buyouts to the VA, what you’ll get is a lot of underpaid doctors, nurses, and psychologists taking up offers to leave offices that are already understaffed—which is exactly what happened. Days after the buyout offer, thousands of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other essential staff got a notice that they were exempt from the offer.

At the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems to want to destroy, DOGE terminated $1 billion in contracts. But rather than end ideological programs that Musk says he wants to eliminate, these cuts decimated the Institute for Education Sciences, which funds many of the longest-running and most famous studies in education research, including several longitudinal studies on student achievement and school effectiveness. It’s hard to think of a better nonpartisan role for government than data collection. But Musk and his team have gutted some of the best education-data tools we have. Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told The Washington Post: “There’s a lot of bloat in IES. There’s a lot of problems to be solved. These are problems you solve with a scalpel and maybe a hatchet, but not a bulldozer.”

[Read: The government waste DOGE should be cutting]

DOGE’s cuts will go much further. At the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, including those involved in testing food and medical devices. At the CDC, more cuts have reached the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which pays disease detectives around the world and stops epidemics in other countries before they spread. At the National Institutes of Health, the administration is set to slash personnel and funding in a variety of ways. If you’re a fan of Musk and Trump, your hope is that these cuts will be all fat and no bone. But remember: This is the same administration that, in an attempt to refocus the Department of Energy on nuclear security, initially gutted the division with the words nuclear security in it.

So far, few DOGE actions have received more attention than the agency’s attack on USAID, which is responsible for foreign aid and global-health spending. Musk seems to be on a gleeful and personal mission to destroy USAID, placing most of its employees on leave, closing its headquarters, and moving what’s left of it to the State Department. According to one report, the administration says that it plans to reduce USAID staffers from 10,000 to about 600. As Musk recently posted on X, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

There is irony here. And there is tragedy. The irony is that, when he was a U.S. senator, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he called foreign aid “critical to our national security.” In 2019, he said: “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.” Today, however, Rubio is in the morally compromising position of overseeing, as secretary of state, the dismantling of the very aid agency he once praised.

[Read: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

The tragedy will be felt at the individual level, with immense human costs. Unless the administration course-corrects and immediately replenishes our global-health grants, there’s just no getting around the fact that a lot of people around the world are going to suffer and die in order to save the typical American taxpayer a negligible sum. The U.S. pays for insecticide sprays in Uganda, for pregnancy services in Zambia, for health-care clinics in the poorest parts of the world. Most notably, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented more than 5 million babies from being born with HIV. It’s not yet clear whether PEPFAR will be spared or left to wither away. This wrecking-ball approach to reform has astonished even the most famous critics of U.S. aid programs. William Easterly, an economist who has written that much of American aid props up dictators and goes to waste, told The New Yorker that Trump’s USAID-demolition plan is “horrific,” “illegal,” and “undemocratic.”

Musk has hinted, amid rising criticism, that DOGE will simply reverse any measures that go too far. This sounds good in theory. Move fast; cut stuff; add back whatever you miss. But in practice, you can’t just slash 10,000 programs at once and then reinstall them on a one-by-one basis depending on whether the volume of criticism passes some imaginary threshold. Whatever you think of the failures of progressive governance, “mess around and find out” is not a suitable replacement. Unfortunately, it does appear to be the current methodology of the executive branch.

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans. (“I couldn’t move,” Rebecca Klassen, the museum’s curator of material culture, told me afterward.)

“Packed” is an unusual state for a historical society. But people were eager to look, in person, at photos they most likely had already seen online: Flaco flying, Flaco preening, Flaco peering in a window, Flaco sitting on a pitcher’s mound. An older woman with a cane stood in front of a photo of Flaco avoiding recapture and chuckled to herself, then said quietly, “Marvelous.”

“The Year of Flaco” features videos and photographs of the beloved bird, as well as dozens of trinkets and letters that were left at a memorial for Flaco at the base of an oak tree in Central Park last March. Those items were collected and stored by a group of Flaco fans, who over the summer presented Klassen with the idea for the exhibition. Klassen was convinced by their sincerity and their presentation about Flaco’s significance to the city. She told The New York Times, “He was a raptor. Raptors have a hold on people,” which I thought was fantastic reasoning.

The exhibition takes up half of a long, narrow space that could more accurately be called “a hallway.” But it tells Flaco’s story in satisfying detail. Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo when an unknown vandal cut open the mesh of his enclosure. Though zoo employees initially made several attempts to recapture Flaco, mostly out of concern for his ability to care for himself in the “wild” (New York City), they gave up because he was evading them so well and because he started hunting and seemed to be enjoying his exciting new life. He mostly roamed Central Park, but in the fall of 2023, he took a few trips downtown. One day he was photographed sitting on the fire escape of a building on the Upper West Side. At the exhibition, this image—-and the idea of such an encounter—nearly brought me to tears. Imagine if that had happened to you! (Imagine if that had happened to me!) The luck of some people.

You may think this feeling is out of proportion, and you may not be wrong, but I am not alone. Flaco was the pride of the city for a season—or four—and Michiko Kakutani, the legendary and technically retired Times book critic, came back to write not one but two reported stories about him. He was somehow petite and precious (weighing only a few pounds) but also huge and terrifying (wingspan of about six feet). Just after he escaped, my colleague Matteo Wong used the words of Walt Whitman to describe him: “well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.” It’s true: His irises were a gorgeous shade of chrysanthemum orange. His talons looked like they could maim a medium-size dog. In letters displayed at the New York Historical, fans are startlingly—and even unsettlingly—vulnerable. They express attachment to Flaco that goes into the realm of the feelings they might have for their own actual pet, or for a person (one thanks Flaco for inspiring the writer to apply to law school). Others are short and sweet: “Fly high, Flaco”; “Freedom and peace our beautiful hero.” There is one acrostic poem: “Fabulous / Liberated / Awesome / Captivating / Owl.”

[Read: Is “instinct” really keeping Flaco the owl alive?]

After Klassen asked visitors if they had any Flaco stories to share, a woman in a cream turtleneck told me and the other onlookers that she’d gotten a Flaco tattoo on her back that she couldn’t show—because of the turtleneck—and that it was a cityscape done by an artist who has painted murals of Flaco. The woman shared that she’d seen Flaco herself on seven or eight occasions while running in the park. Sometimes, a crowd was around him already. If one wasn’t, she would keep his secret. “I would see him and I would wink,” she said.

Flaco was perpetually hounded by paparazzi (regular people with iPhones), and his apparent ease in that situation was what made him such a good celebrity. Many random animals do become symbols and social-media stars. When they die, we mourn them, but they also trigger our imagination (“I think for a lot of people, he symbolized that all things are possible,” the actor Alan Ruck said about Los Angeles’s favorite mountain lion, P-22, five months after he was hit by a car.) Think of the tragic story of Harambe the gorilla, which challenged the premise of zoos and then became a distasteful meme. Think of the white-tailed deer in Harlem that was labeled a Christmas reindeer just because he happened to appear in December. His death—though it actually had nothing to do with our lives—was read as poetic because it came at the end of 2016, when many New Yorkers were already quite emotional and glum due to the first election of President Donald Trump.

[Read: Tracking the mountain lion that ate a Chihuahua]

And though we like any animal with a story, we like escaped animals best. When some poor beast escapes from whatever zoo or circus or (sorry) slaughterhouse we put them in, we love to see it. We want them to get out. We want them to live like us. This is projection to an understandable but somewhat morbid degree. Many Flaco fans, including my co-worker Matteo, described Flaco as a New Yorker while he was alive, but of course, Flaco didn’t know what New York was or that he lived there. Others said he was an immigrant, though this is not true—his is a non-native species, but he was born in North Carolina. They said he was proving that everyone longs for freedom and the American dream, but he didn’t know about rights and probably didn’t even know about longing. They said he was gritty, but I honestly don’t know what that means when you’re talking about a bird.

Now that he is dead, we are thrusting martyrdom onto him. I think we love Flaco still, after all this time, because he lived on our toxic planet and in our wretched (wonderful) city that is so inhospitable to life, and he did it with dignity, grace, and humor until he couldn’t—until he lost all control of his faculties and died alone.

Also because he was such a beautiful, beautiful bird.

During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to the president.  

Read alongside Elon Musk’s and Vice President J. D. Vance’s apparent willingness to defy the courts, Trump’s rhetoric is a concerning sign about where this administration might be headed. But there is significance to the fact that the administration already has a hefty stack of court orders it might want to defy. Despite Trump’s effort to present himself as an agent of overwhelming force, he is encountering persistent and growing opposition, both from courts and from other pockets of civic life.

Litigants have sued the administration over the seemingly unlawful freezing of federal funds, the deferred-resignation program for civil servants, the destruction of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the handling of sensitive government data by Musk’s aides, the removal of scientific data from government websites, the attempt to write birthright citizenship out of the Constitution, the barring of transgender people from military service, the transfer of undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, and more.

[Read: The tasks of an anti-Trump coalition]

And now the court orders are coming, blocking the administration from pushing forward, or at the very least slowing its speed.

Courts have prevented Trump from dismissing a government watchdog without explanation and granted restraining orders barring the administration from slashing funds for crucial scientific research. They have prevented Musk’s team from meddling with Treasury Department systems and insisted that the government halt its transfer of an incarcerated transgender woman to a men’s prison. Four separate judges have issued orders requiring the government to stand down on its effort to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Litigation has also proved to be a valuable tool for prying loose key information from the administration, like the specifics of just what access Musk’s aides were given to the Treasury Department, and as a means of making legible to the public what Trump is trying to get away with. “It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Judge John Coughenour commented when issuing an injunction against the birthright-citizenship order. But, he went on, “in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

So far, there’s no indication that Trump has attempted to ignore Judge Coughenour’s injunction. In other cases, though, troubling signs have emerged of the administration’s laxity in following court orders, including multiple instances in which judges have found agencies to be in defiance of the court’s instructions and attempts by the government to find work-arounds. It’s not yet clear how much of this stems from chaos and incompetence and how much is a strategy by Trump and Musk, however clumsy, to force a confrontation with the judiciary. Either way, this approach endangers the health of the constitutional order—which may well be the point.

If the administration decides to launch an assault against the judiciary, it will be all the more important that a strong response comes not only from the courts themselves, but from Congress and the public. Trump is skilled at presenting himself as the indomitable voice of a true American majority, creating a facade of consensus aided by the startling quiescence of congressional Republicans. Dissent, both loud and quiet, can crack that facade and make an illegitimate power grab apparent for what it is.

Some of that dissent is already coming from inside the executive branch. Over the course of a bizarre three weeks, the administration encouraged federal workers who had not yet been fired to depart their posts under a “deferred resignation” program clearly modeled on the buyouts Musk offered to Twitter employees after his takeover of that company. (The program closed on Wednesday after it was briefly frozen, and then unfrozen, by a federal judge.) But if the goal was to persuade federal workers to depart on their own, the slipshod rollout and smarmy, dismissive tone—one FAQ provided by the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find “higher productivity jobs in the private sector”—may have backfired. The Subreddit r/fednews is buzzing with government employees expressing defiance. “Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit,” wrote one user. “I took an oath under this position to the American people.” In reference to OPM’s description of the program as a “fork in the road,” some federal employees adopted the spoon as a symbol of their opposition. Earlier this week, federal workers rallied at a protest outside the Capitol holding signs that read Public Service is a Badge of Honor!

In Congress, the Democratic minority, which entered this second Trump era cautiously, seems to be waking up. “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times in an interview published on February 2. Just two days later, though, Schumer was standing outside the Treasury Department leading a rally to protest Musk’s apparent takeover of the department’s sensitive payment systems. Democrats held the Senate floor for 30 hours to drag out the confirmation of Russ Vought, the architect of many of Trump’s most aggressive schemes, to head the Office of Management and Budget, and senators such as Brian Schatz of Hawaii have hinted at plans to escalate to even more dramatic procedural measures. “The roots of democracy are still strong,” Schatz told The New Yorker recently. “It depends on not just members of the legislative branch fighting back but there being a mass movement to back us up.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

This opposition movement will try to build on itself. The Democratic Party is taking more aggressive action in part because of an outraged constituency demanding that it speak up; that, in turn, may encourage Americans to push the party further. Spoon emoji, court orders, protests—all of these serve as indications that those who dissent are not alone. True, courageous leadership can emerge unexpectedly. Within the FBI, Acting Director Brian Driscoll has become a folk hero of sorts for his refusal to provide Justice Department leadership with the names of FBI agents to potentially be fired. Six Justice Department officials resigned yesterday rather than follow orders to dismiss the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: Granting the mayor a political favor would constitute “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent,” the acting leader of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued in a letter to Justice Department leadership, writing, “I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor” as an attorney. During a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a U.S. military installation in Germany, an eighth grader organized a walkout at her middle school to protest Hegseth’s attacks on diversity efforts within the military.

The fact is that Trump is an unpopular president who eked out a razor-thin plurality of the popular vote and whose party holds the slimmest of majorities in the House. So far, he has been able to avoid that inconvenient reality by relying on executive orders. But March 14 is approaching, when the federal government will run out of money and House Republicans—never a compliant group at the best of times—will need to organize to pass a funding bill in order to avoid a shutdown. The limitations of Trump’s attempts to rule by decree, and the inability of his party to govern, may then become unavoidably apparent.

Illustrations by Javier Jaén

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.

No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American “is devoured with a passion for locomotion,” the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 1835; “he cannot stay in one place.” Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on.

But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.

The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted far more attention. In that same span, fewer Americans have started new businesses, and fewer Americans have switched jobs—from 1985 to 2014, the share of people who became entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans are ending up worse off than their parents—in 1970, about eight out of every 10 young adults could expect to earn more than their parents; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half of young adults. Church membership is down by about a third since 1970, as is the share of Americans who socialize several times a week. Membership in any kind of group is down by half. The birth rate keeps falling. And although half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same.

These facts by now form a depressingly familiar litany. They are often regarded as disparate phenomena of mysterious origins. But each of them can be traced, at least in part, to the loss of mobility.

In 2016, Donald Trump tapped into the anger, frustration, and alienation that these changes had produced. Among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six-point lead in the vote that year. Those living within a two-hour drive, though, backed Trump by nine points. And those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Eight years later, he tapped that support again to recapture the White House.

Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.

As a result, many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.

Javier Jaén I. Moving Day

The great holiday of American society at its most nomadic was Moving Day, observed by renters and landlords throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th with a giant game of musical houses. Moving Day was a festival of new hopes and new beginnings, of shattered dreams and shattered crockery—“quite as recognized a day as Christmas or the Fourth of July,” as a Chicago newspaper put it in 1882. It was primarily an urban holiday, although many rural communities where leased farms predominated held their own observances. The dates differed from state to state and city to city—April 1 in Pittsburgh, October 1 in Nashville and New Orleans—but May 1 was the most popular. And 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.

For months before Moving Day, Americans prepared for the occasion. Tenants gave notice to their landlords or received word of the new rent. Then followed a frenzied period of house hunting as people, generally women, scouted for a new place to live that would, in some respect, improve upon the old. “They want more room, or they want as much room for less rent, or they want a better location, or they want some convenience not heretofore enjoyed,” The Topeka Daily Capital summarized. These were months of general anticipation; cities and towns were alive with excitement.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The right to move is under attack]

Early on the day itself, people commenced moving everything they owned down to the street corners in great piles of barrels and crates and carpetbags, vacating houses and apartments before the new renters arrived. “Be out at 12 you must, for another family are on your heels, and Thermopylae was a very tame pass compared with the excitement which rises when two families meet in the same hall,” a Brooklyn minister warned. The carmen, driving their wagons and drays through the narrow roads, charged extortionate rates, lashing mattresses and furnishings atop heaps of other goods and careening through the streets to complete as many runs as they could before nightfall. Treasure hunters picked through detritus in the gutters. Utility companies scrambled to register all the changes. Dusk found families that had made local moves settling into their new home, unpacking belongings, and meeting the neighbors.

In St. Louis, the publisher of a city directory estimated in 1906 that over a five-year span, only one in five local families had remained at the same address. “Many private families make it a point to move every year,” The Daily Republican of Wilmington, Delaware, reported in 1882. Moving Day was nothing short of “a religious observance,” the humorist Mortimer Thomson wrote in 1857. “The individual who does not move on the first of May is looked upon … as a heretic and a dangerous man.”

Moving Day was, The Times-Democrat of New Orleans attested, “an essentially American institution.” Europeans might move “in a sober, quiet, old-world way, once in a decade or thereabout,” the paper explained, but not annually, in the “excessive energetic manner of the nomadic, roving American.” European visitors made a point of witnessing the peculiar ritual and included accounts of carts flying up and down the streets in their travelogs.

For some, Moving Day meant trauma and dislocation. In tightening markets, landlords seized the opportunity to jack up rents. But in most places and for most people, Moving Day was an opportunity. The housing stock was rapidly expanding. You could spot the approach of the holiday, a Milwaukee paper explained, by the sight of new buildings being rushed to completion and old houses being renovated and restored. As wealthier renters snapped up the newest properties to come to market, less affluent renters grabbed the units they vacated in a chain of moves that left almost all tenants better off. Landlords faced the ruinous prospect of extended vacancies if they couldn’t fill their units on Moving Day. Tenants used their leverage to demand repairs and upgrades to their house or apartment, or to bargain for lower rent.

The habit of annual moves was not confined to the poor or the working class. Nor was it confined to local relocations. Americans moved to new territories, thriving towns, and rapidly growing cities, driven forward by hope. “That people should move so often in this city, is generally a matter of their own volition,” the journalist and social reformer Lydia Maria Child wrote of New York. “Aspirations after the infinite,” she added tartly, “lead them to perpetual change, in the restless hope of finding something better and better still.” It’s not a bad summary of the American dream.

What lubricated all of this movement was not an abundance of space but rather a desperate eagerness to put space to better use. The viability of their communities, Americans believed, rested on their capacity to attract merchants and manufacturers and, above all, residents. Land use was regulated as early as the colonial era, but the rules were sparse, and written to maximize development. A fallow field or an abandoned mine could be seized; a vacant lot could draw a stiff fine. Noxious businesses, such as tanneries and distilleries, were consigned to the margins, for fear that they would deter construction in the center. The goal was growth.

The nation’s push westward in the 1800s created new opportunities, and Americans moved toward them—dispossessing Native peoples of their land—but westward migration was never the whole story, or even most of it. The rate of migration within the East was even higher, as Americans drained away from farms and into market towns, county seats, and teeming industrial cities. There were few rules about what could be constructed on private property, and a diverse array of buildings sprang up to meet demand. A new arrival might rent a room in a private home, boardinghouse, tenement, residential hotel, or bachelors-only apartment building. Some of these structures were garish, or stuck out from their surroundings like tall weeds. Reformers were eager to manage the chaos, and cities began to adopt more extensive building codes, aimed at reducing the risk of fire and protecting the health of residents. But old buildings continually yielded to newer ones, as neighborhoods climbed higher to meet demand; the first townhouse on a block of freestanding homes might, a couple of decades later, be the last remaining townhouse sandwiched between apartment buildings.

So long as speculators erected new buildings, so long as aging houses were turned over to the rental market or split up into flats, so long as immigrant entrepreneurs built new tenements, people could reasonably expect to find a new home each year that in some way exceeded their old. And through the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th, the supply of homes steadily expanded.

Javier Jaén

Americans of that era tended to look at houses the way Americans today look at cars or iPhones—as useful contrivances that nevertheless lose their value quickly and are prone to rapid technological obsolescence. Every year, newly constructed and freshly renovated homes offered wonders and marvels: water that ran out of taps, cold and then hot; indoor plumbing and flush toilets and connections to sewer lines; gas lighting, and then electric; showers and bathtubs; ranges and stoves; steam heating. Factories created new materials and cranked out hinges, doorknobs, hooks, wooden trim, and railings in a dizzying variety of styles. One decade’s prohibitive luxury was the next’s affordable convenience and the third’s absolute necessity. A home was less a long-term investment—most people leased—than a consumer good, to be enjoyed until the next model came within reach.

The cultural implications of an always-on-the-move society were profound, and perhaps counterintuitive. As they observed the nomadic style of American life, some critics worried that the constantly shifting population would produce an atomized society, leaving people unable to develop strong ties, invest in local institutions, maintain democratic government, or build warm communities. In fact, that got the relationship between mobility and community precisely backward. Over the course of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.

The key to vibrant communities, it turns out, is the exercise of choice. Left to their own devices, most people will stick to ingrained habits, to familiar circles of friends, to accustomed places. When people move from one community to another, though, they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness. American individualism didn’t mean that people were disconnected from one another; it meant that they constructed their own individual identity by actively choosing the communities to which they would belong.

[Jacob Anbinder: The pandemic disproved urban progressives’ theory about gentrification]

All of this individual movement added up to a long, grand social experiment—a radical reinvention of what society could be. In the European lands that many immigrants had come from, successive generations lived in the same towns, inhabited the same houses, plied the same trades, and farmed the same land. Experience had taught them that admitting new members left a community with less to go around, so they treated outsiders with suspicion and hostility. They learned that rifts produced lasting bitterness, so they prioritized consensus and conformity. Village life placed the communal above the individual, tradition ahead of innovation, insularity before acceptance.

But when the earliest settlers crossed the Atlantic, they left behind their assumptions. They had moved once, so they should be able to move again. The Puritans soon codified into law the right to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony, likely the first time anywhere in the world that this freedom was put into writing and defined as a fundamental right. Two centuries later, as the midwestern territories competed to attract residents, they would add a complementary freedom, the right to arrive—and to stay, without the need to secure the formal consent of the community. Together, these revolutionary rights conferred on Americans a new freedom to move, enabling the American story.

Mobility was not always uncontested, of course. Waves of immigrants faced discrimination from those who had come only slightly before, turned away from communities just because they were Irish, or Italian, or Jewish. Laws excluded the Chinese, and vigilantes hounded them from their homes. Women seldom enjoyed the full privilege of mobility, constrained by social strictures, legal barriers, and physical dangers. And even after the end of slavery, Black Americans had to fight at every turn to move around, and toward opportunity, in the face of segregation and racist violence. But by the end of the 19th century, mobility was a deeply ingrained habit throughout the United States.

That habit has now been lost, and the toll is enormous. By one estimate, the decline in mobility is costing the American economy nearly $2 trillion each year in lost productivity. The personal costs may be even greater, albeit sometimes harder to recognize. Residential relocation is like physical exercise in this way: Whether you’re sitting on a couch or ensconced in a home, you’re unlikely to identify inertia as the underlying source of your problems. It’s only when you get up that the benefits of moving around become clear. People who have recently changed residences report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimism, greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives. And Americans are shifting from that first category to the second: Since 1970, the likelihood that someone who expects to move in the next few years will successfully follow through on that ambition has fallen by almost half.

Americans of previous generations would be shocked by our stagnation. The inclination to keep moving was long the defining feature of the American character. And yet today, we’re stuck. What went wrong?

II. Who Killed American Mobility?

Blame Jane Jacobs. American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. And Jacobs, the much-celebrated urbanist who died in 2006, played a pivotal role.

In 1947, when Jacobs and her husband, Robert, moved to their new home in Manhattan’s West Village, the area was still filled with immigrants and their children, with people constantly moving in and moving out. Before the Jacobses arrived at 555 Hudson Street, the building had been rented by an immigrant named Rudolph Hechler, who lived with his family above the store they operated. A large sign read FOUNTAIN SERVICE—SODA—CANDY, and a cheerful awning added cigars and toys to the list of promised delights. Hechler had come to the U.S. from Austrian Galicia when he was 13, and spent much of his life working in the garment industry, chasing the American dream. He moved between apartments and neighborhoods until he had finally saved enough to move his family from the Bronx to the West Village and open his own shop.

Bob and Jane were different. They were young, urban professionals, Bob an architect and Jane a writer for a State Department magazine. And they came to stay. With dual incomes and no kids, they were able to put down $7,000 in cash to purchase a house, placing them among the scarcely 1 percent of families in all of Greenwich Village who owned their home.

Instead of finding a new tenant for the storefront, the Jacobses ripped it out, transforming their building into a single-family home. They cleared the bricks from the lot behind the house, turning it into a fenced-in garden. On the first floor, they installed a modern kitchen, dining room, and living room, with French doors opening onto the backyard. “The front of No. 555,” a preservation report later noted, “was rebuilt in 1950 at considerable expense, using metal sash and two-colored brick to complete the horizontality of the wide windows. It retains no vestige of its original appearance.” (The new facade, the report concluded, had been “badly remodeled,” and was “completely out of character” with the neighborhood.)

That Jacobs would later celebrate the importance of mixed-use spaces to urban vitality, drawing a vivid portrait of the remaining shops on her street, presents no small irony. But in doing as she pleased with the property she had purchased, she was only upholding a long American tradition. The larger irony involves what Jacobs did next. Although she is widely remembered as a keen-eyed advocate for lively and livable cities, her primary legacy was to stultify them—ensuring that no one else could freely make changes as she had and, most important, ruling out the replacement of existing buildings with larger structures that could make room for upward strivers.

[From the August 2019 issue: The economist who would fix the American dream]

Jacobs arrived in the West Village just as many Americans were abandoning dense, urban neighborhoods for the attractions of suburbia. For decades, city officials and reformers had worried about the spread of urban blight. They looked at the crowding, chaos, and confusion of immigrant neighborhoods like the West Village with horror. They wanted to sweep away neighborhoods that grew and decayed organically and replace them with carefully planned blocks. Urban planners sought to provide families with affordable homes, consolidate the jumble of corner stores into supermarkets, and keep offices at a distance. Everything would be rational, everything modern. They wanted to take the rich stew of urban life and separate out its components like a toddler’s dinner—the peas to one quadrant, the carrots to another, the chicken to a third—safely removed from direct contact.

In 1916, the year Jacobs was born, New York City began an ambitious effort to achieve this sort of separation: enacting the first comprehensive zoning code in the United States. By the time Jacobs moved there almost two decades later, the once-radical scheme of zoning, with sections of the city separated out for different uses, seemed less a startling change than a natural feature of the city’s environment. Urban planners had hailed it as a cure for poverty and blight; it was supposed to ensure a better future for the city. But zoning failed to produce these benefits, instead limiting the ability of New York and like-minded cities to adapt to evolving needs. Officials soon embraced a more radical scheme of urban renewal: bulldozing old, dense neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance. And Jacobs, whatever her other sins, had the courage to stand up and demand that it stop.

From her renovated home on Hudson Street, Jacobs fell in love with the city as it was—not the city as urban planners dreamed it might be. She saw shopkeepers greeting customers and schoolchildren buying candy. She watched her neighbor wheeling his handcart, making laundry deliveries to customers, in what she later described as an “intricate sidewalk ballet.” She realized that many of the things professional planners hated about cities were precisely what most benefited their residents.

And so Jacobs sat down before her Remington and pounded out The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book, published in 1961, took aim at urban renewal and all that it destroyed in the name of progress. When, that same year, Jacobs learned that the city intended to designate her own neighborhood for renewal, she rallied a small group of residents to its defense. They wrote letters and showed up at hearings and plastered the neighborhood with flyers, creating the illusion of mass opposition. And it worked. Jacobs and her collaborators were among the first residents of a city neighborhood to successfully block an urban-renewal scheme. Jacobs’s book—its brilliantly observed account of urban life, its adages and conjectures—paired with her success as an activist to catapult her to fame. She became the apostle of urbanism, and eager disciples sought her out to learn how they might defend their own neighborhood.

But in halting the ravages of clearance, Jacobs advanced a different problem: stasis. For centuries, the built form of the West Village had continually evolved. Old buildings were torn down and larger structures were erected in their place. The three-story houses to one side of Jacobs’s, at 553 and 551 Hudson, which had once held small businesses of their own, had been bought by a developer in 1900 and replaced with a six-story apartment building. Zoning had already begun to put some limits on this evolution but had not stopped it.

Jacobs’s activism blocked efforts to add any more buildings like the one next to her house. Other three-story houses could no longer be consolidated and built up into six-story apartment blocks; the existing six-story walk-ups couldn’t be turned into 12-story elevator buildings. Such development would change the physical appearance of the neighborhood, and also risk displacing current residents or small businesses—eventualities to which Jacobs was fundamentally hostile. Before, the neighborhood had always grown to accommodate demand, to make room for new arrivals. Now it froze.

At an intellectual level, Jacobs understood that simply preserving historic buildings cannot preserve a neighborhood’s character; she warned that zoning should not seek “to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” A neighborhood is defined by its residents and their interactions, as Jacobs herself so eloquently argued, and it continually evolves. It bears the same relation to its buildings as does a lobster to its shell, periodically molting and then constructing a new, larger shell to accommodate its growth. But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.

To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, that idea would take hold throughout the United States. A nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.

Javier Jaén

Jacobs’s book marked a shift in American attitudes. Where civic boosters once sketched fantastical visions of future development, competing to lure migrants their way, by the 1960s they had begun to hunker down and focus on preserving what they had against the threat of what the architectural critic Lewis Mumford called the “disease of growth.” State legislatures had authorized local governments to regulate land use at the beginning of the 20th century, but now activists pressed for even more local control—for what the writer Calvin Trillin has called “neighborhoodism.” They were justifiably concerned that unrestrained growth was degrading the environment, displacing residents, and leveling historic structures. More than that, they were revolting against the power of Big Government and Big Business, and trying to restore a focus on the public interest. They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.

But in practice, the new processes turned out to be profoundly antidemocratic, allowing affluent communities to exclude new residents. More permitting requirements meant more opportunities for legal action. Even individual opponents of new projects had only to win their lawsuits, or at least spend long enough losing them, to deter development.

The preservation of the West Village itself, long celebrated as a triumph of local democracy, was in fact an early case study in this new form of vetocracy. What saved it from being bulldozed like other working-class areas in Manhattan was not the vitality of its streetfronts. Instead, it was saved because the displacement of working-class immigrants by college-educated professionals was already further along than the urban planners had appreciated when they’d designated it a slum. The night after the first public meeting of the Committee to Save the West Village in 1961, the activists reconvened in the apartment of a recent arrival who conducted market research for a living. He showed them how to survey residents to compile a demographic profile of the area. Jane’s husband, Bob, the architect, began looking at the condition of the existing buildings. Carey Vennema, who’d graduated from NYU Law School a few years before, began researching tax records. A sound engineer compared recordings he took in the West Village with those in affluent neighborhoods. This small group of professionals leveraged their training and expertise to mount a challenge to the planning process—a form of bureaucratic warfare unavailable to the great majority of Americans.

Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950. This represented, she argued, “unslumming”—what today we would call gentrification. As households more than doubled the space they occupied, amid rising standards of living, the neighborhood would have needed to replace its existing townhouses with apartment buildings that were at least twice as tall, just to maintain its population. Instead, the neighborhood kept its townhouses and lost most of its population. Despite her strident insistence that not a sparrow be displaced from the Village of the ’60s, Jacobs cast the displacement of a dynamic working-class community of immigrant renters in the 1950s by a stable, gentrified population of professional-class homeowners as a triumph. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out,” she wrote. Jacobs prized stability over mobility, preferring public order over the messiness of dynamism.

Yet in one respect, preservation proved more lethal to the texture of the community than redevelopment. Jacobs bought her home for $7,000 in 1947, rehabilitated it, and sold it 24 years later for $45,000. “Whenever I’m here,” Jacobs told The New Yorker in 2004, “I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.” Five years after that interview, it sold again, for $3.3 million; today, the city assesses it at $6.6 million. If you could scrape together the down payment at that price, your monthly mortgage payment would be—even adjusted for inflation—about 90 times what the Hechlers paid each month to live in the same building.

Jane Jacobs, of course, is not the only suspect in the death of American mobility; there are many others. People have always been most mobile while they’re relatively young, and the country is aging; the median American was just 16 years old in 1800 and 28 in 1970, but is nearly 39 today. The rise in two-career households might have made relocation more difficult. The prevalence of joint custody makes it harder for members of divorced couples to move. More Americans own their home, and renters have always been more mobile. Some Americans, perhaps, have simply grown more successful at locating jobs and communities that meet their needs, reducing their impulse to move someplace else. Some are relying on remote work to stay where they are.

But none of these answers can possibly explain the broad, persistent decline in geographic mobility. The country may be older, but the drop in mobility has been particularly steep among younger Americans. Two-earner households may be less mobile, but their mobility has declined in tandem with that of other groups. Mobility is down not just among homeowners but also among renters, and its decline predates the rise of remote work. And there is little to suggest that staying put over the past half a century has left Americans more satisfied with their lives.

Jacobs’s activism capped a century of dramatic legal change that eroded the freedom to move. Zoning may have been adopted, eventually, by well-meaning urban planners, but the process began in 1885 in Modesto, California, where bigoted local officials were looking for a tool to push out Chinese residents. The federal courts would not allow them to segregate their city by race, but they hit on a workaround, confining laundries—whose proprietors were overwhelmingly Chinese and generally lived in their shops—to the city’s Chinatown. Over the ensuing decades, other cities embraced the approach, discovering that segregating land by its uses and the size of the buildings it could hold was a potent means of segregating populations by race, ethnicity, and income. New York, for example, first adopted zoning in part to push Jewish garment workers down fashionable Fifth Avenue and back into the Lower East Side. As zoning proliferated, it was put to a wide variety of uses, some laudable and others execrable. The housing programs of the New Deal then spread the system nationally, by limiting federal loans only to those jurisdictions that had put in place tight zoning rules and racially restrictive covenants.

But zoning alone was not enough to halt American mobility, even if it did serve to widen inequalities. Zoning had introduced a new legal reality: Putting up any housing now required government approval. It was progressives like Jacobs who then exploited this reality, creating a new set of legal tools, beginning around 1970, for anyone with sufficient time, money, and patience to challenge government decisions in court, handing neighbors an effective veto over housing approval.

Not every place in America is having its growth choked off by zoning, or by the weaponization of environmental reviews or historic-preservation laws. The opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions; one study of California found that when the share of liberal votes in a city increased by 10 points, the housing permits it issued declined by 30 percent. The trouble is that in the contemporary United States, the greatest economic opportunities are heavily concentrated in blue jurisdictions, which have made their housing prohibitively expensive. So instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it—migrating toward the red states that still allow housing to be built, where they can still afford to live.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

It is hard to overstate how much is lost when people can no longer choose to move toward opportunity. Social-science research suggests that the single most important decision you can make about your children’s future is not what you name them, or how you educate them, or what extracurriculars you enroll them in—it’s where you raise them. But if Americans cannot afford to move to the places with growing industries and high-paying jobs, or if they can’t switch to a neighborhood with safer streets and better schools, and instead remain stuck where they are, then their children will see their own prospects decline.

Not far from where I live, in Washington, D.C., two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE FROM, WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE OUR NEIGHBOR, in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The other reads SAY NO, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign purports to welcome. Whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.

III. Building a Way Out

In December, the Census Bureau reported that the United States had set a dismal new record: The percentage of Americans who had moved in the previous year was at an all-time low. That same month, the economist Jed Kolko calculated that geographic inequality—the gap in average incomes between the richer and poorer parts of the country—had reached an all-time high. The loss of American mobility is a genuine national crisis. If it is less visible than the opioid epidemic or mounting political extremism, it is no less urgent. In fact, the despair it fosters is fueling these and other crises, as Americans lose the chance to build the best possible lives for themselves and their children.

Even partial analyses of immobility’s costs yield staggering results. Consider, for instance, just the economic growth that has been lost by preventing people from moving to where they would be most productive. The economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti recently imagined a world of perfect mobility, in which the three most productive U.S. metropolitan areas—New York, San Francisco, and San Jose—had constructed enough homes since 1964 to accommodate everyone who stood to gain by moving there. That alone, they calculated, would have boosted GDP by about $2 trillion by 2009, or enough to put an extra $8,775 into the pocket of every American worker each year. It’s a rough estimate, but it gives a sense of the scale of the distortions we have introduced, and the price we are each paying for them.

But the social costs are arguably even greater than the economic ones. Among academics, the claim that housing regulations have widened inequality is neither novel nor controversial. The economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag offer an illustration: If a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City, he would see his net income go up by about 39 percent, after adjusting for housing costs—the same as it would have done back in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he’d have done even better, gaining 70 percent more income. But by 2017, his gains in pay would have been outstripped by housing costs, leaving him 7 percent worse off. Working-class Americans once had the most to gain by moving. Today, the gains are largely available only to the affluent.

Many of the country’s more dynamic cities, along with the suburbs around them, have continued to wall themselves off in recent years, using any means available. In Manhattan, for instance, 27 percent of all lots are now in historic districts or are otherwise landmarked, predominantly in the borough’s most affluent areas. And once a neighborhood in these areas is designated historic, new construction within it drops dramatically below the city’s already grossly inadequate rate. In D.C., where nearly 19 percent of buildings are similarly protected, residents of the well-off Cleveland Park neighborhood once stopped the construction of an apartment building by getting the old Park and Shop on which it was going to be built designated as historic; it was one of the first examples of strip-mall architecture in the country, the research of one enterprising resident revealed.

The good news is that addressing this crisis of mobility doesn’t depend on your moving anywhere, if you’d rather stay where you are. It doesn’t depend on your surrendering your single-family home, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can keep your lawn, your driveway, your garden. Solving crises often requires great sacrifice. But the simplest solution to this one promises to leave everyone better off. All you have to do is make room for some new neighbors—maybe even new friends—to join you, by allowing other people to build new housing on their own property. Americans are generally skeptical of the hassles of development and tend to focus on the downsides of change in their neighborhood. But if you ask them about the benefits—whether they’d allow construction in their neighborhood if it meant letting people live closer to jobs and schools and family members—they suddenly become overwhelmingly supportive of the idea.

If we want a nation that offers its people upward mobility, entrepreneurial innovation, increasing equality, vibrant community, democratic participation, and pluralistic diversity, then we need to build it. I mean that quite literally. We need to build it. And that will require progressives, who constitute overwhelming political majorities in almost all of America’s most prosperous and productive areas, to embrace the strain of their political tradition that emphasizes inclusion and equality.

There are at least some signs that this message is taking root. California has enacted a series of legislative reforms aimed at paring back local zoning regulations. Cities across the country are banning zoning that restricts neighborhoods to single-family homes. Where older environmental activists rallied to block any new construction, a new generation of environmentalists sees building new housing near public transit as an essential tool in the fight against climate change. And national politicians have started to talk about our affordable-housing crisis.

These changes are encouraging, but insufficient. And sometimes the solutions on offer solve the wrong problem: Building subsidized housing in a place where land is cheap because jobs are scarce will help with affordability, but only worsen immobility.

Any serious effort to restore mobility should follow three simple principles. The first is consistency. Rules that apply uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses, while providing equitable protections to residents. Rules that are tailored to the desires of specific neighborhoods will tend, over time, to concentrate less desirable land uses and more affordable housing in poorer areas. Just as the federal government once used its power as a housing lender to force local jurisdictions to adopt zoning laws, it could now do the same to reform those laws, encouraging states to limit the discretion of local authorities.

[From the November 1961 issue: “Moving Day,” a short story]

The second principle is tolerance. Organic growth is messy and unpredictable. Giving Americans the freedom to live where they want requires tolerating the choices made by others, even if we think the buildings they erect are tasteless, or the apartments too small, or the duplexes out of place. Tastes evolve, as do neighborhoods. The places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs.

The third principle is abundance. The best way to solve a supply crunch is to add supply—lots of it, and in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard, launching people forward rather than holding them back.

How much housing do we need? For 50 years, we’ve been falling behind demand. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation estimates that it would take another 3.7 million units just to adequately house our current population, with the shortfall concentrated among starter homes. Treat that as the lower bound. The trouble is, most existing units are located where regulation is loose and land is cheap, not in the places richest in opportunity; a considerable amount of the nation’s housing is in the wrong place. Another recent estimate that tries to account for that, by the economists Kevin Corinth and Hugo Dante, puts the tally above 20 million. And even that might be too low.

Here’s another way to think about what we really need: As things stand, roughly 20 percent of American workers relocate from one metropolitan area to another over the course of a decade. If all the moves that would happen anyway in the next 10 years brought people to the most prosperous regions, where productivity is highest—places like New York and the Bay Area, but also Austin and northwestern Arkansas—we’d have to add some 30 million new units, or 3 million a year. That’s, perhaps, an upper bound. It’s an ambitious target, but at roughly double our current pace, it’s also an attainable one.

These three principles—consistency, tolerance, and abundance—can help restore American mobility. Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn’t be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans’ hopes and desires alight.

That would return agency to people, allowing them to pursue opportunity wherever they might find it and to choose the housing that works best for them. For some, that might mean reviving faded towns; for others, it might mean planting new ones. Whatever level of education they have attained, whatever city or region they happen to have been born in, whatever occupation they pursue, individuals—janitors and attorneys alike—should be able to make their own choices.

The genius of the American system was never that its leaders knew what was coming next, but rather that they allowed individual people to decide things for themselves, so that they might collectively make the future.

This article is adapted from Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Stuck In Place.”

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.

On Inauguration Day, many felt real euphoria at the prospect of a wholesale renovation of America’s institutions. And, as I’ve argued often, our constitutional democracy does need renovation—the various elites are disconnected from the people, bureaucracy afflicts everyone, and many of us find it impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. Yet I fear that the renovations we’re about to get will take us in the wrong direction.

Americans have been yielding sovereignty to tech magnates and their money for years. The milestones are sometimes startling, even if one has long been aware of where things are heading. I was astonished and alarmed when I learned, in the summer of 2023, that Elon Musk had, within a span of five years, built an orbital network comprising more than half of the world’s active satellites. His share has now risen to more than 60 percent. Already in 2023, he controlled battlefield communications infrastructure used in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Musk is currently the head of Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which is taking over the U.S. Digital Service. At the same time, he may be making a bid for TikTok’s American platform. Ownership of TikTok brings immense power. In December, the Romanian elections were canceled in the middle of voting because of fears that propaganda from Russia, by means of TikTok, was driving the election results.

Musk is well on his way to controlling the world’s communications infrastructure. This is not by accident. He swims in an intellectual universe, alongside his PayPal associates Peter Thiel (who funded J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign) and David Sacks (now Trump’s AI and crypto czar), whose writers advocate for replacing democratic leadership with a CEO-monarch, and argue that higher-IQ “sovereign individuals” should rule over people with lower IQs. Musk, Sacks, and Thiel all spent formative boyhood years in South Africa. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in The New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather took the family to South Africa for the sake of apartheid, having left Canada after being jailed for his leadership activities in the Technocracy movement, “whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule.” Thiel has made “freedom” his life’s pursuit. Since 2009, he has argued that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

[Brooke Harrington: The broligarchs are trying to have their way]

Two original MAGA leaders, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, have railed against this “techno-feudalism.” That is what they see Musk and his allies trying to bring about, whether in collaboration with Trump or by using him as their puppet. For the first time ever, I find myself agreeing with Bannon and Loomer.

The whole situation went from concerning to surreal when, two days before his inauguration, Trump issued a meme crypto coin, known as $TRUMP. A memecoin is a form of cryptocurrency that has no value-creating function in the crypto ecosystem. Instead, it references some popular phenomenon and gains its value only because of people’s interest in that popular phenomenon. Typically, memecoins also lack the security that could render them a stable part of the crypto financial infrastructure.

The fully diluted value (or market cap when the full supply is circulating) of  $TRUMP, 80 percent of which is owned by entities that the Trump family controls, shot up within 24 hours of its release to more than $70 billion. It is now bouncing around between $20 billion and $30 billion—meaning the president now holds something like 75 to 80 percent of his wealth in crypto. That goes well beyond monetizing the Trump brand through T-shirts, gold sneakers, and steaks. This time, Trump has auctioned himself. Leaving aside the technical substrate, there is arguably little difference between $TRUMP and the president posting a deposit-only Swiss-bank-account number online, into which people can deposit funds and privately show him the receipts for their deposits. His personal wealth now depends on these depositors. He has turned himself—and therefore his office—into a for-profit joint-share stock corporation. People with $TRUMP in their crypto wallets are the shareholders.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Who knows if the president intended this outcome, but leaders in the crypto space have long hoped for the replacement of nation-states with “network states” encompassing communities that come together on the blockchain. They are celebrating $TRUMP as the first crypto community to have gained control of a nation-state’s powers by capturing the president’s attention through control of his digital wallet. If what Trump has done is upheld as legal or becomes a norm, other global leaders have every incentive to do what he did, turning democratic governance into corporate governance. Melania Trump, for one, has already followed suit; her coin was issued a few days after Trump’s.

Last week, the DOGE homepage displayed the icon for Dogecoin, which Musk has declared to be his favorite coin, and which he holds. (He has faced litigation as a result of accusations that he sought to pump it up; the lawsuit was dismissed.) The icon appeared in vibrant color against a black background. It was removed within 24 hours.

Two features of the $TRUMP memecoin are especially troubling. First, there is the question of who owns the coin. Initial activity for sales of $TRUMP—and, therefore, its financial backing—came from buyers on the platforms Gate and Binance, which are restricted in the United States. Although it will take years of analysis to determine who the eventual beneficial owners are, the reliance on Gate and Binance suggests that early uptake occurred abroad, and particularly in markets controlled by U.S. adversaries—China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. As of 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. trading volume on Binance was very low. Users in China provided Binance with its greatest market share, at 20 percent of trading volume, and about 10 percent of Chinese customers were at the time identified as “politically exposed persons”—that is, according to the Journal report, “government officials, their relatives or close associates who require greater scrutiny due to their greater risk of involvement in bribery, corruption or money laundering.” Because memecoins depend on a collective belief in their value, investors (other than the issuer) who buy the coins are the people who hold up that value. Those early movers on the Gate and Binance platforms can be meaningfully understood to have handed Trump billions, at least on paper. (Steve Gregory, the Gate CEO, was invited to the inauguration.) They also hold power over that wealth. If they withdraw confidence and dump their assets, the value of the coin would trend toward zero. So Trump now appears to owe most of his new wealth to crypto investors in adversary states who are quite possibly closely connected to governments themselves—investors whom the rest of us are not able to identify, but who can identify themselves to him by proudly waving their $TRUMP-filled digital wallets.

[Read: Hawk Tuah wasn’t what it seemed]

Second, there is the question of what it means to convert political office into something that is subject not merely to the general pressure of financial influence but to the power of shareholders over an officeholder’s immediate personal wealth. This is of course why other presidents and senior executive-branch officials have sold off their investments or placed them in blind trusts for the duration of their terms. The neo-reactionary voices in the tech space—the NRx crowd, as they call themselves—have for some time wanted to take the powers of governance over territory out of the hands of nation-states and place them into the hands of platform-based collectives committed to capitalism first and foremost. For years we’ve watched the problem of money in politics get worse and worse, but the Trump coin takes the matter to another level. It provides the technical means for enabling the vision of total capture of governance institutions by tech communities.

What speculative futures are now possible? The president could easily organize a one-token, one-vote referendum—as many coins and decentralized autonomous organizations, which are built out of blockchain communities, already do—among asset holders on major U.S. public-policy issues. Think of it as a corporation giving shareholders their one vote per share. Yes, a corporation has to please its customers—in this analogy, American voters—but it really needs to please the shareholders who help sustain the share price. If $TRUMP were to introduce a voting mechanism for asset holders in this way, it would immediately implement the long-held anarcho-capitalist dream of converting global governance regimes into for-profit joint-stock corporations—minus any Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements, which the president has hinted about relaxing. If other leaders do what Trump has done, then we would see global governance structures generally privatized—and political leaders provided with great incentives to collude with the common interest of capital holders, rather than governing for a true cross-class common good.

Where would that leave voters? In a position somewhat akin to fans at WWE wrestling matches. Politicians, all beholden to a community of shareholders separate from their voters, would collude in steering toward benefits for those shareholders, while pretending to fight one another in public. Imagining such a possibility would seem crazy if people in the tech world hadn’t been writing so much about just this kind of governance structure—and if the technical pieces weren’t now all falling neatly into place.

Trump promised back in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” and he was correct, as I’ve written before, about the need to restore experts to their rightful place as servants of the people rather than quasi-autonomous technocrats who order the world as they think best. But instead of draining the swamp, Trump appears simply to be importing even larger crocodiles from Silicon Valley: multimillionaires and billionaires who mostly couldn’t give a fig for self-government of, by, and for the people. The man who vowed to slay the old “deep state” appears ready to accept a new, more totally controlling, one.

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

Speaking recently on NPR, Bannon used the term techno-feudalism again and went on to explain: “These oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves … They don’t believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.” This seems right. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed Lincoln, promising a new birth of freedom, but just a few rows behind him, among other tech luminaries, was Musk, nearly levitating with joy when Trump promised territorial expansion both on this planet and in space and cheered for DOGE—Musk’s agency and his favorite memecoin.

The principles of popular sovereignty were hard-won—principles that vest the ownership of government in we, the people, not they, the owners of memecoins. When early Americans before, during, and after the Revolution sought to make self-government durable, they circulated pamphlets that articulated the values and tools necessary for successful self-governance. The renovations we need will similarly depend on real understanding of self-government. I’ve been a civic educator my whole life, but now I see an even more urgent need to pick up the pace at which we spread the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers, as well as works that have updated those texts, to sharpen our collective understanding of what popular sovereignty requires.

After the British government first allowed the East India Company, traffickers in tea, to rule India, and then fell into a full fiscal entanglement with the company, Americans dumped the company’s tea in Boston Harbor. Maybe it’s time to dump Dogecoin.

Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, was initially considered one of his most endangered nominees. But after the MAGA movement organized a campaign to threaten Republicans who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s fitness, criticism dried up quickly. “We gave the Senate an attitude adjustment,” Mike Davis, a Republican operative known for his florid threats to lock up Trump’s political targets, told Politico.

That attitude adjustment was on vivid display in Hegseth’s confirmation hearing today before the Armed Services Committee. During the proceedings, the Republican majority displayed no willingness to block or even seriously vet a nominee who resides far outside the former boundaries of acceptability for a position of immense power.

Hegseth’s liabilities can be divided into four categories, each of them individually disqualifying:

personal behavior, including allegations of drunkenness on the job, of maintaining a hostile workplace, and of sexual assault lack of managerial experience, or at least positive managerial experience (According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Hegseth ran two tiny advocacy groups so poorly that he was forced to step down.) a disregard for the laws of war and a habit of excusing the actions of  convicted war criminals an enthusiasm for domestic political combat that blends into an inability to distinguish Democrats from enemy combatants

Hegseth’s strategy today was to evade these problems altogether. In this, he had the full cooperation of the committee’s Republican majority. If you’ve ever had media training for a television appearance, a common piece of advice is to use the prompt to get to whatever point you wish to make, rather than focus on answering the question. The method generally works on television because the queries are mostly just a way of saying, “Now it’s your turn to talk.” It isn’t supposed to work in a Senate hearing, especially one in which lawmakers have serious qualms about the nominee’s record or statements. But Hegseth, a slick and successful television talk-show host, employed it to great effect.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Democrats tried to probe Hegseth’s long record, only to meet endless evasions. Hegseth has categorically denied having sexually assaulted or harassed anybody. Senator Tim Kaine asked him whether the alleged behavior, if true, would be disqualifying. Hegseth refused to say, calling the question hypothetical. When Kaine asked whether spousal abuse would be disqualifying, Hegseth also declined to answer, likewise refusing to opine about the relevance of multiple alleged episodes of drunkenness on the job.

Hegseth has promised to abstain from drinking completely if confirmed. It is a puzzling vow given his unwillingness to concede that drinking on the job would be a bad habit for someone who runs the nation’s military. It is also one to which he’s apparently unwilling to be held accountable, even in spirit: In response to a question from Senator Mazie Hirono, who asked whether he would back that pledge by promising to resign if he violated it, Hegseth declined to answer.

One issue area where Hegseth might have expected more Republican resistance concerned women in the military. In the past, Hegseth has categorically opposed letting women serve in combat. After his nomination was announced, Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican member of the committee, publicly questioned that stance. Hegseth has since altered his position. He now claims that he objects only to lowering the standards of performance, and will permit female soldiers to serve on equal terms if they can meet standards of strength, speed, and other metrics. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to pin him down on that conveniently timed conversion, but Hegseth simply refused to admit to having changed his mind at all.

In one notable exchange, Senator Mark Kelly asked Hegseth to describe a series of allegations about drinking and sexual harassment as either true or false. Hegseth instead robotically replied to each answer, “Anonymous smears,” even after Kelly reminded him that he was specifically asking for an answer of either “True” or “False.” What could explain the nominee’s reluctance to directly state under oath that none of the alleged incidents took place, even as his answer attempted to imply as much? None of the Republican senators pulled on this thread. Their questions mostly consisted of talking points supporting Hegseth’s preferred themes about wokeness ruining the military and the need to restore “lethality” in the military.

Senator Markwayne Mullin proved an exception to the general trend of evading uncomfortable topics. He came to Hegseth’s defense by answering some of the hypothetical questions the nominee wouldn’t touch. “How many senators have shown up drunk to vote at night?” he asked, addressing his colleagues. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it, because I know you have. And then how many senators do you know have gotten divorced for cheating on their wives?”

Perhaps realizing that he was not painting the nominee in the most flattering light, Mullin followed up with the incisive question, “Tell me something about your wife that you love.” He even helpfully suggested that Hegseth mention her wonderful mothering of their children.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the panel complained that Hegseth had declined every offer to meet with them, solidifying the impression that he conceives of the position for which he has been nominated in purely partisan terms. They likewise complained that the Republican majority rejected their requests for a second round of questioning. Hegseth looked like a man who understood that the fix was in, and that all he had to do was run out the clock on the Democrats’ allotted time while dodging their questions. So far, his calculation appears to have been correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Rogé Karma: Reaganomics is on its last legs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

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

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

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