You may have heard that Texas went blue last week.

While some of my Texan friends are delighted, the Texans I follow through my work as an education reporter are miserable.

“They’re overthrowing school choice in Texas,” mourned National Review’s Caroline Downey. “The ONE policy that is the best shot we have at reversing abysmal education outcomes. It’s literally a civil rights issue.”

Downey was responding to Democratic Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa’s victory speech, in which she promised to fire the Republican-appointed commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, Mike Morath, on her first day in office. She also suggested she would end a $1 billion voucher program to help Texans pay for private school.

“On Day One, I will fire Mike Morath and we will work tirelessly to repair the damage of the Texas vouchers scam and end an era in which our schools are sold for parts,” Hinojosa said.

Now, I don’t think that Downey is right that school choice is the one policy that improves educational outcomes — and I don’t think Texas’ voucher program was a particularly good way of providing school choice. But I agree that poor educational outcomes are a civil rights issue, and that some kind of school choice program can offer a remedy.

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So while I am not very enthusiastic about what Texas has done to date, I think it’s incredibly important that the Democratic Party have an alternative positive vision, rather than just an opposition to programs that were supported by Texas Republicans.

Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of frequently putting ideology above results for children: Democrats by opposing any way to check whether kids are learning, and Republicans by mixing their good ideas (such as knowledge-rich curricula) with illiberal ones (such as insisting on putting the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms and finding reasons for all Islamic schools to be ineligible for the voucher program).1

Hinojosa and the (likely) new Democratic majority on the Texas State Board of Education have the opportunity to do this right. They should build a pluralistic and liberal school system, rather than just rolling back the ways that Republicans built an illiberal one. And while the voucher program itself might be too expensive and unpopular to maintain, they should keep in mind that it’s a real injustice if rich families have educational options and poor families don’t.

Public schools can still offer choice

The hottest topic in Texas education for the last year has been vouchers. In 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott got a $1 billion state voucher program passed by the state Legislature; it gives low- and moderate-income Texas families around $10,000 per child to spend on private school.

Critics have pointed out that most of the families that took it were already sending their children to private schools, and only 17% had transferred from public schools; Hinojosa campaigned on ending the voucher program and said she would block its proposed expansion. She could also veto voucher funding in the next state budget.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about vouchers. Private schools are not, on average, better than public schools at educating kids.2 Some liberals treat that as a knockdown argument against school choice, but I’m less convinced — after all, parents don’t care about average educational outcomes; they care about the outcomes of nearby schools they could plausibly send their kids to. If they have the choice of several schools, they will want to choose the best one available to them.

In this sense, public schools are always competing with homeschooling and private schools. The task of liberals is to make sure public schools are actually an appealing choice rather than a last resort.

I’ll go further:

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In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and xAI CEO Elon Musk all called for “pacing” AI development amid growing fears about the technology going rogue. One voice was conspicuously absent from this chorus: Mark Zuckerberg.

Altman and Amodei spent the 2010s publicly worrying about the right way to safeguard against runaway AI. Whether you consider them compromised by their business interests or not, they at least have a long record of concern.

Zuckerberg is a different case. He spent that decade turning up the dial on political extremism and addicting teens to his social media platforms with little apparent thought for the consequences. At various times, he would justify his decisions with high-minded rhetoric, depending on which way the political winds were blowing, pivoting multiple times between an avowed commitment to policing misinformation and vague paeans to “free expression.”

Now Zuckerberg is bringing the same flightiness to an even more consequential technology. In September, he argued that markets create perfectly fine incentives for AI companies to keep their products under control. And in an August essay, “The Future is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg reached for uplifting rhetoric about the decentralizing forces of technology without any sense of irony about the fact that his company is one of just five that own two-thirds of all the compute in the world.

His support for a freewheeling approach to AI oversight might have been inconsequential at an earlier time, when Meta was seen as lagging behind its AI competitors. But Zuckerberg has since spent billions of dollars to reorganize the company’s AI division, and those efforts have just started to pay off. In September, Meta released one of the first popular AI personal assistants. And last month, Meta’s newest model release — Muse Wonder — was rated one of the top models in terms of capability.

Zuckerberg has also had the ear of the second Trump administration. In fact, he was the author of the toothless AI safety statement the lab CEOs signed at the White House in September, which President Donald Trump called “morally binding” at the announcement.

AI progress is, for better or worse, a race. For years, Anthropic’s strategy has been to make it a “race to the top.” By developing the best AI systems with the highest standards, Anthropic is betting that it can make safety a competitive standard that other companies have to match. If a major rival can gain ground by prioritizing speed and scale over safeguards, companies that try to commit to safety risk falling behind.

Meta is now capable enough to create precisely that pressure, and its unscrupulous founder seems poised to pull us in another direction.

Zuckerberg’s war of all against all

Whenever Zuckerberg muses about high-minded concepts — like free expression or the decentralizing force of technology — it always seems to carry the whiff of both teenage naivete and minimally concealed business interest.

He began 2018 with a promise to fix Facebook by taking a more active role in cleaning up abuse and defending the platform from foreign political influence. By 2019, he had already pivoted to a different argument: that the real threat to free expression was platforms like Facebook taking too much responsibility for deciding what people could say. He retroactively rationalized this about-face in a rare speech at Georgetown University, in which he laughably recast the company’s roots. Instead of Facebook arising out of Facemash, a site Zuckerberg designed as a Harvard sophomore to allow his peers to rate each other’s attractiveness (the true story), he claimed the company was inspired by his feeling that open debate might have stopped the Iraq War (what?).

“I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently,” he mused vaguely.

Now, in the thick of the AI era, Zuckerberg has latched onto a new stock phrase from the democratic lexicon to justify Meta’s actions: “checks and balances.”

“People and institutions with competing interests naturally check and balance each other to lead towards positive outcomes,” Zuckerberg wrote in “The Future Is for Everyone” this August, asserting that “the best and most realistic path to building a positive AI future is by delivering superintelligence to everyone.”

In other words, what will keep us safe is the fact that everyone — good, evil, or ambivalent — will have something like a machine god in their pockets.

As with his 2019 “free expression” speech, there are at least two ways one can read Zuckerberg’s new essay: as a cynical cover for his business interests or a sincere but misguided expression of confused values.

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If you’re a Democrat, the term “energy policy” may as well have been “environmental policy.”

Should we expand natural gas? Let’s figure out how much this will increase or decrease emissions.

Should we shutter a nuclear plant? Consider the risks of radioactive waste.

Should Congress pass a permitting bill to make it easier to build infrastructure? Time to consider the impact on endangered species.

With the midterms in the rearview, ascendant Democrats face their first major policy opportunity of the new era: the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA). BAAJA may be the most ambitious regulatory overhaul of our lifetimes, and the debate on the Democratic side about whether to support it has at times seemed mostly focused on its implications for the climate.

BAAJA, which not only has bipartisan congressional support but also the president’s backing, would overhaul federal permitting procedures, set the stage for faster interstate transmission build-out, and curb the ability of judges to block infrastructure projects indefinitely (a concern that extends beyond energy into the realms of industrial policy and public transit). We think that it would be a net positive for the climate. But evaluating this bill solely on its climate impact is like evaluating a car solely on its fuel efficiency, without considering safety, reliability, or cost.

Cheap, clean, and consistent: It’s hard to get all three

Traditionally, energy policy has been a delicate balance between three objectives: affordability, reliability, and sustainability, the so-called “energy trilemma.” Different sources of energy can fare better on any one or two objectives, but they often struggle to excel across all three.

For centuries, energy access has been enabled by the relative affordability of coal energy, at great cost to the physical environment (our air quality). Nuclear power is uniquely clean and reliable, but efforts to affordably construct new capacity have been a historic challenge. Wind and solar fare well on sustainability and on local estimates of affordability, but making that power more reliable when scaled comes with steeper system costs.

For the past two decades, that emphasis has shifted in the Democratic Party, where the dominant paradigm has become sustainability — narrowly understood in terms of restricting fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. Consequential policy decisions have been shaped without sufficient consideration of affordability and reliability goals.

One major example of misplaced priorities came in late 2015, when President Barack Obama determined that the Keystone XL pipeline — which would transport Albertan crude directly through to the plains states, ultimately reaching Gulf Coast refineries — did not serve the national interest and denied its permit. The move was largely driven by pressure from climate activists, who described the project as a “carbon bomb.”

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You Can See Everything has taken the world by storm, and we are not immune. In particular, the film deals with many themes about how people deceive and are deceived, which is unfortunately extremely relevant to our contemporary politics. Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias discussed this and other aspects of the film in our latest podcast, recorded in the lull before the midterms. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad free or read the transcript. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube or listen at their podcast provider of choice.

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A modern reader looks at the title of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, and sees two words that mean pretty much the same thing. But to readers in Austen’s time, they were opposites. “Sense” meant judgment or reason, just as it does now. “Sensibility,” however, meant the capacity to feel (and to feel in the body specifically).

Austen came down firmly on the side of sense. But the director of the latest film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility doesn’t want to take a stand either way.

“It’s not one or the other,” Georgia Oakley said of Sense and Sensibility in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Nightly. “That’s what is so lovely about the story because neither one nor the other way of being is right or wrong.”

Austen would be surprised to hear her own novel described in this way.

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Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, whose father’s death leaves their family financially vulnerable. As a result, the sisters’ prospects for marriage are severely constrained, a challenge they respond to very differently. The elder, Elinor, feels deeply but prizes restraint, judgment, and duty; Marianne, on the other hand, believes that true feeling should never be suppressed. She recklessly throws herself into a relationship with the man she falls in love with, Willoughby.

Austen’s last word on Marianne Dashwood — the sister who is a conscious embodiment of the cult of sensibility — is that she “was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.”

Oakley’s new adaptation, which was released in October and began streaming yesterday, equivocates on the fundamental moral question of the book.

Maybe that’s because Oakley knows that the zeitgeist is on the side of sensibility: “In this day and age, sensibility has essentially won over.”

The cult of sensibility returns

Your feelings are valid.

This therapeutic escape hatch has become a fixture in contemporary vernacular. Valid does not just mean “real” in this usage; it means “well-grounded or justifiable,” “logically correct,” and “appropriate to the end in view.” We live at a time when the expected response to someone’s emotional outburst is not mere comfort but affirmation.

The implication is that feelings are not only to be experienced or named or investigated — they are definitive evidence of something true about the real world. In Oakley’s interview, she framed sensibility’s victory in therapeutic language: “We understand that talking about one’s emotions and being true to who we really are is healthy.”

But the problem Austen was probing is, well, what if your feelings are wrong?

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If you went into a coma and just woke up, congratulations. You just missed the tsunami of the century. Not since the Watergate midterms of 1974 has an incumbent party been routed this comprehensively.

There’ll be a lot of time to dissect and analyze the results. We won’t even know the full set of outcomes just yet — in Mississippi, there’s a very real chance that Scott Colom could beat incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith to give Democrats a 55th seat, which could grow to 56 if Mary Peltola clinches the win in Alaska (as she looks likely to do).

But we do know enough to give you a brief postmortem on how the models and the polls did. In particular, for subscribers to this magazine, it’s probably worth running through our coverage and modeling from this cycle.

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Welcome to Mad Libs. This is an irregular debate column where our columnists, contributors, and staff writers (or even you, dear reader) can duke it out over the big ideas we’re discussing in the metaphorical pages of this magazine.

Today’s Mad Libs was inspired by The Argument staff writer Kelsey Piper’s education coverage, which has pointed out, again and again, that American schools are failing kids in ways we already know how to fix. Piper has argued that illiteracy is a policy choice, that Mississippi’s much-ballyhooed reading gains are real, and, most recently, that we have known since the 1960s that direct instruction works.

Freddie deBoer, a committed education pessimist, is a frequent critic of our coverage. He thinks education “miracles” have a long history of turning out to be frauds, that no reform has ever reliably moved kids from one spot in the academic distribution to another, and that American schools were never the world-beaters we imagine they were.

When deBoer first responded to Piper, he wondered whether a magazine premised on the idea that “liberal good vibes can overcome every inconvenient fact and complication” would ever engage with his criticism. So, I invited him to debate Piper directly. You can read their exchange below!

Mad Libs is for paid subscribers, so subscribe to get more content like this in your inbox!

- Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

Freddie deBoer:

The Sold a Story podcast is only the latest vehicle advancing the notion that we could fix our schools if we only choose to.

This contention has been a constant in American educational debates for decades, exemplified by the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman” and its triumphalist narrative about charter schools. Unfortunately, this attitude runs into a stark reality: Schools and teachers just don’t have that much impact on relative student outcomes.

I’m afraid that the evidence shows that student academic talent is more or less static. Nothing is more predictive of a student’s future success than their past success. In large majorities, individual students gravitate to a given level of academic performance at an early age and tend to stay there throughout their academic life, as this 2025 meta-analysis demonstrates.

There are many other studies we can pull from. As far back as the 1960s, pioneering large-scale federal studies (like Project Talent, the Coleman report, and Project Follow Through) supported the notion that most students stay in the same performance band over time. Data collected the summer after kindergarten provides useful predictive information about how students will perform in high school; a student’s third-grade reading level is an effective indicator of who will go to college and who won’t. Standardized tests administered at age 12 or 13 tell us not only which students will go to college but which will earn a doctorate, hold a patent, or get tenure. The basic reality is that our rank in the academic hierarchy is largely fixed.

Douglas Detterman has summarized the research record by saying “only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers.”

Interventions that are often treated as transformative just don’t appear to matter. Promising early results inevitably fade out in educational research, and I use the word “inevitably” carefully.

Phonics-based reading instruction is currently undergoing a period of immense hype, but the advantages students see from phonics at age 5 are dramatically reduced by age 7 and nonexistent by age 11. For years, liberals championed pre-K schooling as a magic bullet, but study after study shows little or no positive effects as children age.

Past hype is no predictor of future performance. Class size reductions were ballyhooed, then over time their effects were revealed to be inconsistent at best. Many high-quality studies have shown that coveted “exam” high schools in large cities make no difference for student outcomes.

The result is a very bare cupboard when it comes to finding educational interventions that “work.” As Rimfeld et al. put it in a 2018 paper, “Individual differences in educational achievement are highly stable across the years of compulsory schooling from primary through secondary school. Children who do well at the beginning of primary school also tend to do well at the end of compulsory education for much the same reasons.”

You can change the school or type of school, and you can change the teacher. But what stays the same is the student. None of this depends on any wild theories or contrarian reading of the available data; perfectly mainstream educational research has provided evidence for these conclusions for decades.

Consider Harvard economist Raj Chetty. He’s been immensely influential among reformers, in large measure because his work gives people the optimistic read on schooling that they’re looking for — a better teacher leads to lifelong higher earnings for students.

I’ve written about the fundamental methodological problems with Chetty’s work in the past. But setting aside those issues, I think it’s essential to understand: Chetty’s work implies that teachers control very little of the variance in student outcomes!

Taking Chetty et al. at face value, a much better teacher (a full standard deviation better) raises a student’s test scores by about one-tenth of a standard deviation, which implies that the difference between teachers explains just 1% to 2% of the variation in that year’s scores.

Chetty’s work is known for its use of future student earnings as a dependent variable. It suggests that, by age 20, a student with a one-standard-deviation-better teacher is less than 1 percentage point more likely to attend college. By age 28, they earn only 1.3% more.

This is… educational optimism?

We could play the same game with CREDO, the influential Stanford University-based research project. CREDO has long been cited as the gold standard when it comes to making the evidence-based case for charter schools; politicians, think tanks, and commentators regularly refer to CREDO’s research to back up the notion that the average charter school is significantly better than the average public school.

Setting aside very real methodological concerns, once we translate from researchers’ absurd, invented “days of learning” metric, we find that charter schools make hardly any difference at all. Again, we don’t have to dispute their numbers; we simply need to express them in the terms that are used in almost all credible education research.

And that’s from a research entity that was hosted by a conservative think tank and funded by pro-charter money! This is a funny basis for arguing the importance of schools and teachers in student outcomes.

This is what frustrates me about the educational debate in our media: There’s no acknowledgment of the profound limitations of what schools can do. We insist on having a conversation that takes as given that schools and teachers have a major impact on student outcomes — an assumption the data just doesn’t support.

Kelsey Piper:

Education indeed doesn’t affect relative student outcomes much. I don’t really care.

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As Election Day approaches, Republicans are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately for them, that light increasingly resembles an oncoming train.

Election modeling by The Argument and Split Ticket has long forecast this outcome. And now, on the day before the election, disaster looks hard to avoid for the Republican Party. In the Senate, where the odds of a Democratic takeover once looked fantastical, Democrats now have a 77% chance of flipping the chamber, with a projected gain of six seats. If that comes to pass, Democrats will hold 53 seats to Republicans’ 47.

The House has long been projected to flip to Democrats. Some once thought midcycle gerrymanders in Texas and Florida would give Republicans a real shot at holding it, but the new maps haven’t insulated the GOP nearly enough.1 As a result, Democrats have a 92% chance of flipping the House of Representatives, with a projected net gain of 24 seats.

Republicans’ Senate odds have devolved rapidly, and it’s worth walking through the map in some detail.

How the Senate got away from Republicans

North Carolina’s Senate seat is the most likely on the map to flip. Former Gov. Roy Cooper has opened up a lead large enough for both parties to triage the race well ahead of the election. Our model rates his chances of winning at 98%. The real question is whether Cooper’s margin of victory will exceed incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia.

In Texas, James Talarico continues to hold on to a lead, even in the face of a fire hose of Republican spending bankrolled by Elon Musk. Talarico remains a favorite to flip the Lone Star State blue for the first time in over 30 years, thanks to a historically terrible opponent in state Attorney General Ken Paxton, plus a Hispanic rebellion against the GOP. As a result, our final model gives Talarico an 81% chance of winning, with the race rated Likely Democratic.2

His odds have only increased as the cycle has gone on. Several high-quality pollsters find a pretty sizable Talarico lead in its final survey — YouGov had him up by 4, CNN/SSRS found him leading by 6, and the latest New York Times/Siena College poll found Talarico leading by 7.

Megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, the Democrat challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, has led consistently in polls over the last month. What should have been a safe Republican hold is now looking like a potential flip, thanks largely to a series of scandals: Questions have swirled about whether Marshall actually lives in Kansas or Florida, whether he’s using taxpayer funds to run his campaign, and whether he sued patients at his OB-GYN practice for small, unpaid debts.

As late as a few days ago, our model thought this race was a coin flip. But with the latest high-quality polls from CNN/SSRS and The New York Times/Siena College showing a clear Hamilton lead, the model now predicts Hamilton is a narrow favorite to win a Kansas U.S. Senate seat for the Democrats for the first time since 1932.

In Iowa — a state 3 points bluer than Kansas in our modeling — Republicans have nominated a strong candidate in Ashley Hinson. Though she’s facing a tough challenge in Democrat Josh Turek, we consider the race a complete tossup.3

In Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown has seized upon hostility to AI and data centers, allowing the Democrat to open up a small lead over appointed incumbent Republican Jon Husted. While polls in Ohio usually overstate Democratic support, Brown’s lead has shown up even in surveys done by Republican pollsters, who typically correct for that skew. We think the race leans Democratic — and virtually every poll and model agrees.

Maine and Alaska also lean blue, with Democratic odds settling in very similar places in both states: 71% in Alaska, 73% in Maine. It’s worth going into detail in both states.

Let’s start with Maine. A lot of liberal readers will have PTSD from years of Susan Collins victories, even in blue environments — and it’s true that polls have historically overshot Democrats in Maine.

But our model picks up on two important factors that look like they push Troy Jackson over the edge.

First, our generic ballot model shows that Maine is effectively a D+14 state right now. That’s the bluest it’s ever been.

Second, candidate quality for overperformers like Collins decays over time, especially as partisanship accelerates. Today, we have Collins performing 9.7 percentage points better in margin than an average Republican incumbent would, which is 3 percentage points worse than her 2020 overperformance. While this would still be more than enough in almost every other swing state, it’s not enough for Maine. High-quality surveys agree — YouGov, CNN/SSRS and The New York Times/Siena College all have Jackson ahead by a modest but notable amount.

In Alaska, meanwhile, our model predicts a flip, but I’m not so sure. In recent weeks, Democrat Mary Peltola has been dogged by an unfriendly wave of headlines: From allegations that she mistreated her staffers (which I don’t think matters) and the revelation that her campaign propped up a spoiler candidate with the same name as incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan (which I do think matters), my guess would be that Peltola slightly underperforms the model’s margins.

The long shots

That leaves two stretch states for each party to hope for an upset win: South Carolina and Nebraska for Democrats, and Michigan and Minnesota for Republicans.

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Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. The full findings and crosstabs are for paid subscribers below. Our previous surveys have asked about war, elite perception, AI, crime, and much more.

You can see every single poll published by The Argument here.

Our full methodology can be read here.

This is what it looks like when the bottom falls out for the Republican Party.

Across the 14 national polls The Argument has conducted since last year, I have never seen a worse poll for the Republicans than this one. They trail Democrats by 9 percentage points with registered voters on the generic ballot — and by 11 points with the likely electorate. That represents a 13-point swing from 2024.

If you’re searching for ways to explain the blue wave, you don’t have to look too hard. When voters are asked directly which party would do better on the issues that are most important to them, Democrats hold an 11-point edge.

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In 2022, it was Republicans who led on this question1 by 11 points, according to Gallup. In 2024, they continued to lead by 5.

A huge portion of this sea change can likely be explained by economic sentiment: Just 19% of the likely 2026 electorate thinks their financial position has gotten better over the last two years, and 42% think it has gotten worse. With a Republican trifecta governing, it’s no surprise that voters now look to the out-party for hope, especially as 63% believe that most Americans are doing worse financially than they were two years ago.

Between this and the myriad of other problems Donald Trump has caused for himself and for Republicans, Democrats now hold the advantage on almost every important issue of the cycle. On the economy, healthcare, foreign policy, and corruption, Democrats hold substantial trust edges.

Voter trust in Republicans has completely evaporated — effectively making some relatively pedestrian numbers for Democrats look phenomenal.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers: how trust in Republicans collapsed, number by number; why a half-dozen Senate seats Trump carried by double digits are now in play and what voters still hold against Democrats, even in a poll this good for them.

Subscribe to keep reading

Paid subscribers will also get access to an Election Night livestream and liveblog co-hosted with Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Galen Druke, and several other special guests!

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What would it mean to be human in a world where AI has made our labor obsolete? Jerusalem and Matt use Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a jumping off point to tackle this question in their latest book club podcast episode. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad free or read the transcript. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube or listen at their podcast provider of choice.

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The U.S. is facing a daunting fiscal future. The federal government’s publicly held debt roughly equals our annual economic output, $32 trillion, representing a debt-to-GDP ratio nearly the highest in history and about twice the average of the past 50 years. And we’re still digging — in fiscal year 2026, the federal government spent nearly $2 trillion more than it collected. Even as the economy was growing due to an AI boom, the deficit was around 12% larger than the year before.

The current fiscal debate in Washington is trapped in a bleak binary: The only “serious” solutions offered to address our mounting national debt are tax hikes or painful spending cuts. The math, as it has been presented since at least the Obama-era deficit fights of the 2010s, seems to demand nothing less.

However, viewing the deficit solely as an exercise in subtraction is a failure of the liberal imagination.

Democracies crumble when they are locked in a zero-sum battle over a stagnant economy. If our only answers to the deficit are tax increases and spending cuts, liberals will miss out on a whole host of growth-enhancing measures — embracing high-skilled immigrants, building abundant housing and energy resources, investing in the capabilities of children, and aggressively funding innovation — that can make budgetary trade-offs less painful.

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Think of the debt-to-GDP ratio as a race between the growth of our debt and the growth of our economy.

Policy changes that raise GDP growth necessarily hold down the debt-to-GDP ratio — they increase the denominator even if the numerator holds steady. Furthermore, higher GDP implies more taxable income, which brings in more revenue and reduces deficits and debt. (Doug Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard, and I described this in greater detail in a recent paper.)

The sensitivity of our national debt to productivity — the rate at which capital and labor are transformed into economic output — is staggering. Total factor productivity growth averaged nearly 2 percent per year for the first few decades after World War II, the peak of the New Deal order that liberals are so often nostalgic for. In fact, this productivity growth was a precondition for postwar prosperity.

But productivity growth plummeted to just a few tenths of 1% from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, and recently has sat well below historical averages. If we could increase productivity by an additional 0.5 percentage points each year, relative to Congressional Budget Office expectations, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be stabilized within three decades, according to our findings. The debt-to-GDP ratio would be 42 percentage points smaller at that time.

Some of the measures I’m proposing could be achieved at a low-enough budgetary cost that they would significantly reduce the severity of the austerity required to stabilize our debt. And many of them promote equity and other liberal priorities besides: High-skilled immigration, more housing, cheaper energy, and investments in poor kids are all more likely to benefit those at the bottom of the distribution than the top.

Here are the four areas where it makes perfect sense for equity-minded liberals to become apostles for growth.

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“What would it take to create a world in which every baby is welcome, without this coming at the cost of his or her mother’s personhood?”

This was the question that Mary Harrington, contributing editor at UnHerd and self-described “reactionary feminist,” asked at the outset of the 2026 Women’s Convention, a three-day conference I attended last month in Rochester, New York. Harrington and I disagree on just about everything, but her question struck me as a good one. What could be more true to my own liberal politics than ensuring the dignity and well-being of women who choose to have children?

The conference was co-hosted by the “sex-realist” publication Fairer Disputations and the anti-abortion advocacy group Feminists Choosing Life of New York. Like Harrington, most of the 200 women in attendance were white, married, and Christian. I met a publicist from Colorado, a chaplain living in Texas, and a homeschooling mother of four from New Jersey. All of them gave me the impression that they could breastfeed and debate Aristotle at the same time.

No one I spoke to was enthusiastic about Donald Trump (or the Democratic Party). Several expressed concern about the growing threat of misogyny on the right. A gaggle of conservative college women from Michigan told me they worried about their male classmates who joked about repealing the 19th Amendment. When guest speaker Helen Roy, a popular Catholic Substacker, mentioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth onstage, the auditorium collectively groaned.

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One morning, I carpooled to the conference venue, a Tudor Revival mansion in a leafy part of town, with a group of chatty ladies in a minivan. If they were put off by my press badge and libbed-out vibe, it didn’t show.

And yet, however friendly I found this congregation, however well-read and well-dressed, improving the material lives of mothers was not what they wanted to talk about.

The presentations and panels I attended, as well as the many conversations I had over lunch and tea and cake, seemed gravitationally pulled away from childcare policies and toward the countless evils of liberal feminism: hookup culture, pornography, abortion, birth control, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy — to name just a few.

I am not against debating any of these issues, but the women I met in Rochester did not convince me that they ought to be the focus of a bipartisan, pro-family agenda. Much more could be accomplished with old-fashioned welfare policies, such as generous parental leave standards and child allowances, because such policies recognize both the unique challenges faced by mothers and the increasingly gender-neutral realities of caring for children in America.

These are realities that the assembled women seemed to be living out in their own egalitarian marriages, despite their obsession with sex differences. (Even among conservatives, time spent caring for children has risen fastest among fathers, not mothers.)

Ultimately, I left the Women’s Convention more certain than ever that cracking down on overachieving girlbosses who have premarital sex, freeze their eggs, and watch porn is not how you help American parents.

No one hates children. Please be serious.

Despite the country’s wealth, having kids in America is a daunting proposition. There is no federal law guaranteeing paid family leave, childcare is absurdly expensive, and employees are expected to log more annual hours than in most other wealthy nations. There really are big professional and personal trade-offs associated with raising children, especially for women.

The left and right agree that having a family should be easier. But despite the conferencegoers’ disdain for MAGA, their answer to the question of what has gone wrong in American family life is very similar to one offered by the second Trump administration: Some version of liberal or second-wave feminism is to blame.

Vice President JD Vance has long attributed the falling birth rate to an “anti-child” ideology propagated by a managerial class of liberal elites. In 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, he tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

This past January, Vance gave a speech at the 2026 March for Life, saying, “Today, the far left in this country tells our young people that marriage and children are obstacles ... that life itself is a burden.”

It’s a convenient political position: As long as the problem is primarily cultural rather than economic, it doesn’t take much to look like you’re solving it. Announcing that you have a fourth kid on the way is enough to make it seem like you are bravely defeating the cat ladies who cowed everyone else into childlessness.

Unlike the vice president, the Rochester women seem genuinely interested in solving the problem. But here is what you have to understand about them: They care a lot about biology. Their central claim is that there are immutable differences between the sexes that social gender identity cannot change — hence the label “sex-realist” feminism.

You cannot just “identify” as a woman, you simply are a woman by virtue of your biology. To be a woman, according to the mission statement of Fairer Disputations, is to be “a person whose body is organized according to the tremendous potential to grow another human being within.”

From this metaphysical perspective, women who do not have biological children — such as lesbians, transgender women, single girlbosses — challenge the very thing that makes women distinct from men, the thing that ought to afford them distinct protections and privileges.

This is the idea that united every headline speaker at the convention, and it’s also the one that puts their intellectual movement at odds with the central claim of liberal feminism: that no one’s lot in life should be determined by their sex. The sex-realist writers who presented at the convention — including Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Leah Libresco Sargeant, editorial director at the Institute for Progress (as well as a contributor to The Argument) — share a suspicion of what they consider to be “transhumanist” interventions into the natural female body.

In her welcoming address, legal scholar Erika Bachiochi accused “the regnant form of feminism” (her pejorative for the second wave) of assuming “a series of technological incursions into the body of a young woman such that she can become the equal of a man.” These incursions include “a lifetime on the contraceptive pill, abortion at the ready, the availability of egg-freezing, and other reproductive technologies.”

The upshot is that women who opt into these technologies (not to mention those who commit the unspeakable offense of being trans) have made life worse for all the women who refused them. Like a worker crossing the picket line, the childless corporate lawyer undermined the collective bargaining power of normal women who wanted normal things, such as raising a big family.

When motherhood is understood as a personal choice, rather than an unavoidable fact of life, institutions are under less pressure to accommodate mothers. If women want to make their lives harder by getting pregnant, that’s on them! As a 29-year-old from Seattle described it to me: “Liberal feminism is the new patriarchy. It tells women what to do with their bodies: work all the time and don’t have kids.”

What is clever about this argument is that it draws on pro-choice logic: A liberal society should protect the rights of women who choose to forgo contraception and artificial reproductive technology.

Around 1 in 5 Americans identify as Catholic and are, in theory, bound by church doctrine, which opposes most human intervention in reproduction. Evangelical Protestants, who make up around 23% of the population, tend to hold a similar set of beliefs. That a sizable number of women would feel defensive about their right to defy what has become increasingly normalized by secular society makes sense.

But the case being built at the Women’s Convention went well beyond religious freedom. The main charge against liberal feminism wasn’t that it had served some women and neglected others — it was that it had done an injustice to all women, convincing them that they had to change their bodies and disavow childbearing to be free. In this framing, the freedom to have an abortion or get an IUD isn’t freedom at all; it is a kind of payoff from a society that doesn’t want women to live as women.

Now, there are countless objections to be made against biological essentialism. For one, it sets up trans individuals as the ultimate threat to cisgender women, which, irrespective of your stance on puberty blockers, is simply a cruel and ludicrous war to wage.

It also sidelines the women who would like to get pregnant but can’t, either because they are infertile, as roughly 10% of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 are, or because they know that pregnancy might cost them their lives.

Then, of course, there is the possibility that a woman might not want to be a mother.

In reality, most Americans want to become parents — even, and perhaps especially, the high-powered career woman whose norms are being blamed for the downfall of Western civilization. Among American millennials, 75% of college-educated women born in the early 1980s married and became parents by 40. For non-college women, that number was 68.1%.

Whatever campaign is happening against traditional family values on progressive college campuses, it is not a very effective one.

As Jordan McGillis and Cathy Reisenwitz recently wrote for The Argument, family formation primarily poses a challenge for Americans without college degrees, largely due to the declining standing of working-class men. Today, it is much harder for non-college women to find husbands who have the relative earning power of their fathers or grandfathers, let alone the commitment to intensive fatherhood that is fast becoming the modern norm.

The Women’s Convention’s accusation against liberal feminism was that it pushed women to meet traditionally masculine standards, “in the bedroom and in the marketplace.” Instead of treating women as defective men, these women argue, society should accommodate women’s unaltered bodies.

In the abstract, that’s all fine and well (although I didn’t see much leg hair at the conference).

But among Americans in the lower half of the income distribution, the problem is not that women are being forced to pursue masculine ideals that they can’t meet. It’s that men can’t meet the masculine ideals of 50 years ago because modern economic conditions favor a very different model of marriage (an egalitarian model that Americans say they prefer anyway).

The mismatch in the non-college marriage market is a different beast entirely from elite women opting out of motherhood because Gloria Steinem convinced them children were deadweight. It is also one that the “sex realism” espoused at the Women’s Convention provides no solution for.

Men and women can change

I have never been pregnant or given birth. And if I do, I imagine that I will want everyone to give me a lot of credit for having done those things — more credit than my co-parent who did neither.

The realities of reproduction are, however, not the same as the realities of caregiving. While mothers typically play a distinct parenting role for the duration of pregnancy and, to a lesser extent, breastfeeding, this period of time is then followed by a lifetime of parental obligations that do not require this or that reproductive organ.

Sex-realist feminism isn’t particularly interested in that distinction. The view is basically that, if you have a uterus, your entire life, from the day you are born to the day you die, is defined by this physiological trait.

“But not in a bad way!” the sex realists will tell you. “Your uterus is a gift!”

The only thing is, I would quite like my uterus to not determine who picks up the kids from school or changes their diapers or puts them to bed at night. I also don’t want it to determine who in my marriage makes more money or gets to attend fun conferences.

The good news is, I don’t actually think the Women’s Convention participants want this either. Almost all of them went to college, many of them have law degrees, and an astounding number of them have Substack followings that put many of us liberal feminist writers to shame.

They were also open about the fact that they have husbands looking after their three or four children for the weekend. When I told them that where I come from (Denmark), fathers on average take 11 weeks of parental leave, compared to just one week or less in the U.S., they were approving.

Some social conservatives have started to blame liberal elites for disparaging traditional family life in public while privately living what look like traditional values: marrying, having children, and settling down. But this critique cuts both ways. Highly educated conservatives, including Vance and the women I hung out with in Rochester — who can quote Aquinas off the cuff and write books in their sleep — seem happy to practice gender egalitarianism in their private lives, as long as they don’t have to preach it as a cultural message.

But they should preach it. I understand why some of these women were frustrated to have three kids in their 20s while their childless female peers from law school zoomed up the corporate ladder. But if the traditional male breadwinner-female caregiver household — where men outearn women and women out-parent men — is the only kind of marriage our biology allows for, the future of the American family looks bleak.

On the other hand, if we assume gender roles are malleable, then a whole world of opportunity opens up. This does not necessarily mean promoting a culture of “radical autonomy” or “anti-child ideology.” On the contrary. It means making a “family-first” life possible for more people — not just women in heterosexual marriages with biological children.

The first injustice of several listed in the Declaration of Interdependence, the conference’s de facto manifesto, states that it is “unjust for ... society to champion those who are unencumbered by familial responsibilities as the standard bearers of equality and civic and economic participation.” Hear, hear.

Again, this part of the message clearly has cross-ideological appeal. The leftist theorist Nancy Fraser argued for something very similar in her 2013 book Fortunes of Feminism: institutions should “welcome human beings who can give birth and who often care for relatives and friends, treating them not as exceptions, but as ideal-typical participants.”

Unlike the sex realists, Fraser is explicit that men and women bear equal caregiving responsibilities. For her, biological realities are only as limiting as the political system allows.

Fraser’s position is that men should lead the charge on changing norms around parenting. Precisely because they don’t face discrimination for the biological fact of pregnancy, men are the ones who should be applying pressure on employers by taking paternity leave and clocking out early to attend ballet recitals. That pressure creates space for women to pursue both vocational fulfillment and family life without undue sacrifice.

But biologically fixed gender roles get in the way of this project. By the logic of sex realism, it is always women who are at fault. You can’t very well blame men for not taking on the burdens of childcare if they’re just following their reproductive destinies. You can only blame the girlboss with frozen eggs for shirking hers.

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Imagine you’re trying to learn CPR. You’ve never heard of the technique before and have no idea what it entails. The instructor opens by saying, “Here’s a dummy. Go ahead and try to do CPR on it!” Then they invite you to talk to the person seated next to you about doing CPR. Then they give you half an hour of open exploration time to try out CPR. They circulate the room, asking questions like “Why do we do CPR?” or “What are you trying?”

They are careful not to give away the answer by telling you how to do it.

This is what’s called an inquiry-based approach. And while no one would ever consider teaching CPR that way, its adherents argue that it’s the perfect way to teach math.

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Determining the best way to teach children is at the crux of the second season of education reporter Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast, which is airing now. It’s a bigger topic than the one she tackled in her first season (the science of reading instruction).

Inquiry — the “think for yourself about how this might work” approach — is a hit with many education theorists. But research has found that the best-performing method, by far, is one called Direct Instruction: a scripted instructional program in which the teacher breaks down new material and has students repeat it until mastery.

Consider how you actually learn CPR: The instructor explains how to do it, asking quick questions to make sure you internalized what was just said. Then the instructor demonstrates it. Then the students attempt it and the instructor tells them whether they’re doing it right or wrong.

That’s direct instruction. We know that direct instruction works extremely well to get poor children reading and doing math at grade level. But, Sold a Story argues, we’ve repeatedly chosen what feels good over what gets results, including refusing to admit it when our comprehensive studies show direct instruction as the strongest method.

Education schools often instead promote inquiry-based approaches, which mostly don’t work as well.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government commissioned a large-scale study called Project Follow Through to see which educational approach produced sustained gains for students. The results were clear-cut: Direct instruction worked extremely well, much better than any of the other programs studied. In fact, most of the innovative programs had negative effects on student achievement (relative to a baseline of normal classroom instruction).

Looking at these results, the government that commissioned the study decided, basically, to pretend it had never seen them. The results buried the facts, and the federal government ultimately decided to highlight individual high-performing schools from each approach rather than be honest that one approach was head and shoulders above the rest.

The podcast meticulously documents how direct instruction’s opponents, who disliked it because it seemed too robotic, persuaded the government to ignore its own evidence. It’s accurate, damning, and compelling.

But, as in season 1, Hanford brings the fire on faddish, non-evidence-based approaches and then is quite fuzzy on the institutional and implementation decisions we would need to make in order to do better. Season 2 is fun and satisfying to listen to — if you agree with her that we’ve neglected the science of pedagogy at great cost to our students.

But even if everyone working in education listened to it and took it seriously, I can’t help but anticipate the result would be of limited utility. Passing a law mandating direct instruction would probably do about as much as passing laws mandating phonics has done — which is to say, not very much. Many states may have changed their phonics laws in response to Sold a Story season 1, but not all have seen actual gains.

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Economists working on climate change are used to being ignored. We often blame the political right for failing to recognize the benefits of climate actions and the political left for failing to recognize the costs. And both deserve some blame.

The Trump administration has gutted federal climate policy. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s signature climate law sidelined the market-based measures, like carbon pricing, that economists have long recommended.

But we should also point our fingers at the mirror. The trouble is that economists and climate advocates are often talking past each other. Economic studies on climate policies tend to ask which policies cut the next ton of emissions most cheaply. But most climate policy advocates are after something else: system-level changes that will put the country (or, preferably, the world) on an entirely different path, where net greenhouse gas emissions bend toward zero over the coming decades.

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The case for costlier, system-level interventions stems from the physics of climate change. Carbon dioxide is a stock pollutant, meaning that a large share of it lingers in the atmosphere, causing global warming for centuries after it’s emitted. What determines how hot the planet gets is the total that accumulates over time.

The goal is not to reduce current emissions a little but instead to reduce future emissions a lot. The difference between these approaches would not matter much if cutting emissions a lot were just cutting emissions a little, many times over. But it usually isn’t. The cheapest way to reduce emissions in the near term and the cheapest way to transform energy systems over decades likely entail entirely different actions.

The problem, from the perspective of climate advocates, is that economic analyses don’t often come out in favor of systems-level interventions.

Consider the electricity system. Cheap emissions cuts can often come from switching from one fossil fuel generation source to a somewhat cleaner source — in particular from coal to natural gas. Around two-thirds of the considerable decarbonization of the U.S. power sector that occurred between 2005 and 2019 was caused by cheap gas replacing dirtier coal.

But that strategy only goes so far. These relatively easy emissions reductions are exhausted once the coal generation is gone and what’s left is gas-fired generation, and the long-lived infrastructure that remains will continue to be a major source of carbon dioxide; in other words, a policy that achieved substantial near-term decarbonization relatively cost-effectively did little to transform the power sector into a fully carbon-free system.

Deeper emissions reductions require a portfolio of carbon-free sources that can deliver power when and where it’s needed. From that perspective, the most cost-effective strategies in recent decades may have been early-stage investments in clean technologies, like solar and batteries, whose falling costs and improved performance are now making emissions reductions cheaper throughout the world.

This is old news for anyone familiar with decarbonization strategies. For decades, economists and other climate policy analysts have shown that the least-cost path to deep decarbonization often means paying for some high-cost, slow-to-move options early — like clean steel production or carbon-free jet fuel — because skipping them makes the long-run target more expensive or simply unreachable.

This insight shaped the design of measures within Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which focused as much on long-term transformation as on immediate emissions cuts. Yet the cost figures that dominate policy evaluations and public debates still focus on the near-term costs of reducing the next ton of emissions.

It’s time for that to change.

Cost-effective climate actions aren’t always cheap

Climate policies are commonly assessed by comparing them with a carbon price. Carbon prices encourage emissions cuts from wherever and however they can be achieved at a relatively low cost, so nearly any other policy looks expensive compared with them.

Back to the example of coal-to-gas shifting, a coal power plant emits roughly one metric ton of CO2 per megawatt-hour, about double a natural gas plant’s half-ton, so a carbon price raises the cost of running a coal plant more than it raises the cost of a natural gas plant. Even a small carbon price is often enough to flip the order in which grid operators dispatch generators to serve customers at the lowest cost, so the higher-emitting coal plants run less, and the government brings in revenue in the process.

However, carbon prices are limited tools for driving large emissions cuts cost-effectively. Vehicle emissions are a good illustration. Some can be cut cheaply from the tailpipe: Tightening fuel-economy standards wrings more miles from each gallon, and a modest carbon price nudges people to drive a bit less, delivering real but small reductions.

But large-scale vehicle emissions reductions are a different project that requires getting Americans to switch from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric or other alternative-fuel vehicles.

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In principle, a carbon price could drive that shift, too, by raising gasoline and diesel prices so high that drivers switch to EVs. But, in addition to the political challenges of imposing high carbon prices, that approach is likely to cost more than other strategies. Alternatives could rely somewhat less on gasoline price hikes and somewhat more on policies like zero-emission vehicle standards or “feebates” that encourage the purchase of cleaner vehicles.

To see why, imagine two extremes. In the first, EVs are near-perfect substitutes for gasoline vehicles, identical to drivers in virtually every way. Then, a zero-emission vehicle standard that gradually mandates more EV sales costs almost nothing, because buyers are indifferent. In contrast, a carbon price could shift those new-car decisions only by jacking up gasoline prices for the entire existing fleet, taxing millions of drivers who own gasoline-powered cars they won’t replace for years, all to influence the far smaller group choosing a new vehicle today.

In the second extreme, there is no viable alternative to the gasoline engine at all. Now the standard would be impossible to meet, while the carbon price would at least capture the changes from nudging people to drive less and to buy more efficient vehicles.

Reality sits in between these two extremes, which is why both tools are useful. But the closer EVs come to substituting for gasoline cars, the more cost-effective standards become as a tool for achieving large emissions reductions.

A 2022 study of Canada’s vehicle market bears this out. It found the cheapest strategy capable of achieving the country’s vehicle emissions goals involved a zero-emission vehicle standard, even though the costs of this policy were estimated at hundreds of dollars per ton. Comparing that with the low costs of Canada’s carbon price would mislead, since the carbon price would not have delivered the same transformation of the fleet. (Canada got rid of its carbon price on vehicle emissions last year.)

Misleading policy verdicts

To weigh the costs of a climate policy against its benefits, you need a way to value those benefits: a dollar figure for the damage avoided by keeping the next ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In theory, that enables a comparison of the harm caused by a ton of emissions with the cost of preventing that ton — and therefore a verdict on whether the policy in question is worth doing.

The trouble is that real-world calculations of this figure — referred to as the social cost of carbon — are not meaningful estimates of the benefits of reducing emissions. While analyses of the harms climate change will cause and how people will adapt to them are valuable, aggregated estimates of global climate damages over centuries lie far beyond the capabilities of our modeling tools.

First, the models put dollar figures on the harms economists know how to measure, like how mortality rates and energy bills rise as the planet warms, and leave out the rest, with no way of knowing whether what they have captured is one-tenth of the total damage or most of it.

Second, they use historical data as a guide for how people will adapt to a climate with no precedent in human history, even though economists have long recognized, in other settings, that the empirical relationships estimated under the conditions we have observed are a poor guide to conditions we have not.

Third, analysts make a series of moral judgments about how much to value people’s well-being decades or centuries from now, and how much weight to give to avoiding future risks and the uneven distribution of harms.

To produce a single estimate of total climate damages, the models have to settle these difficult questions one way or another. They do so in ways that keep the math manageable — not because economics can say which values are the right ones.

The result is not a fuzzy estimate of something real. It is a precise estimate of something the method cannot actually produce. It is a bit like gauging the relative size of Greenland from a flat map, except that here we have little sense of the size or the direction of the distortion.

It’s expensive to do hard things.

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The upshot is that while weighing the potential costs and benefits of climate measures is essential to sound policy, empirical estimates are used in misleading ways. The near-term costs of transformational policies are compared with the costs of more incremental policies like a carbon price, or against a social cost of carbon, as if these are meaningful comparisons. They usually aren’t.

Consider the example John Thomason’s recent essay offers on renewable portfolio standards (RPS), policies many states use to require that a gradually rising share of electricity come from resources like wind and solar. He cites a prominent study finding RPS costs $86 to $211 per ton of avoided emissions and contrasts that with the much lower costs of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a power-sector-carbon-pricing policy that operates across northeastern states.

Indeed, even at their highest levels in the history of the policy, recent RGGI carbon prices around $35 per ton are a bargain for CO2 reductions (and the costs of the policy are smaller once the productive use of revenue is considered). That’s by design: RGGI’s rules are meant to keep prices at levels that cause only small increases in electricity rates. But it also means the carbon prices cannot rise high enough to encourage much additional carbon-free generation.

A $35-per-ton carbon price adds only 1 or 2 cents per kilowatt-hour to the costs of burning natural gas, far short of the incentive needed to encourage clean electricity sources to grow at scale in the region.

So, especially in states with no remaining coal to shift away from, RGGI is an instrument that can efficiently reduce emissions a little, but it cannot reduce emissions a lot. One reason RPS policies are more expensive is that they are trying to do the harder thing — build carbon-free generation — rather than the easier changes that RGGI can provoke.

Now, imagine you are a policymaker in a New England state where RGGI, an RPS, and a host of other clean energy measures operate. You want your state to be a climate leader, but you do not currently have a policy portfolio that is aligned with your ambitious long-term emissions goals, and high electricity prices leave little room to add climate policies without noticeable economic trade-offs. You badly need guidance on how to build a cost-effective strategy from here.

In the power sector, that means understanding the trade-offs among measures that could bring on more solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear — or transmission and pipelines to access low-cost energy from neighboring regions. A backward-looking comparison of RGGI and the RPS answers a different question from the one you are asking.

An economics of humility

None of this excuses the all-too-common practice of ignoring the costs and trade-offs of climate actions. More careful thinking about costs and benefits could help avoid policy blunders, like the reflex to block fossil fuel production wherever possible, even when doing so is expensive and barely affects global emissions, because the production simply moves elsewhere.

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This instinct is driving some of the opposition to the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, recently introduced in Congress. That permitting reform bill would speed the build-out of clean energy that deep decarbonization requires, but because it would also make fossil fuel infrastructure easier to build, parts of the climate movement have lined up against it. Fighting a bill that would help the climate because it also helps fossil fuels, rather than working to improve it, is just the kind of mistake that weighing costs against benefits helps to prevent.

But if the goal is to get climate advocates to weigh costs and benefits, scolding them for ignoring economic analysis may be counterproductive. Economists should press for more cost-benefit thinking from a place of humility about what we can and cannot deliver.

While economists will and should continue to analyze the near-term costs of incremental changes, they should also build tools that better capture the factors that large-scale emissions reductions depend on. On this front, many economists are already at work.

For example, one recent study in a top economics journal shows that the cost-effectiveness of electric vehicle subsidies improves dramatically once the dynamic effects of accelerated innovation are taken into account (though EV subsidies still cost far more than subsidies for wind), and that the cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency programs depends heavily on how clean the regional electricity grid is.

Perhaps more importantly, a humbler approach to encouraging more cost-benefit thinking would mean showing up to policy debates as contributors rather than as arbiters handing down verdicts. For reasonable policies with the potential to make genuine progress on the parts of the problem that actually require transformation — like getting oil out of vehicles or cutting natural gas use in electricity and heating — economists should skip the ritual comparisons to a carbon price or the social cost of carbon, which they may have previously used to brand policies as inefficient.

For a proposed clean vehicle standard, for instance, acting as a contributor instead of an arbiter means helping to improve the design with flexibility measures that reduce compliance costs, analyzing how it will affect vehicle and fuel prices, and flagging unintended consequences, like distortions that could result from counting different fuels as clean or dirty.

Economic tools can produce genuinely useful information to help policymakers weigh the costs and benefits of cutting emissions. What they cannot produce are comprehensive estimates, or anything close, of the costs and benefits that policymakers actually care about. We should be far more transparent about those limitations.

Counterintuitively, scaling back the ambition of our analysis may be what finally makes it useful.

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A note on spoilers: This review will discuss many plot points of the new documentary You Can See Everything. It contains some spoilers, but we’ve redacted one of the film’s major surprises and are flagging another with an italicized editor’s note before the paragraph in question.

One of the most revealing exchanges in You Can See Everything centers on a single word.

Nathan Fielder, the film’s co-director, confronts Elizabeth Holmes about an untrue claim she made while CEO of Theranos, when she said that her company’s devices “can run any test.” Holmes defends herself by explaining that she meant “can” in the sense of future possibility: The machine was a platform for conducting many kinds of tests from a single drop of blood, so if chemistry research advanced and new tests became available, the machine could theoretically run the entire range of standard diagnostic tests, which typically require a full blood draw.

But this isn’t what the word “can” means, which is why I had to use the word “could” when describing what Holmes claimed to have meant. The tests weren’t compatible with Theranos’ system, so the machine couldn’t run them.

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Fielder relays this obvious response: Almost anyone who heard the sentence “these machines can run any test” would believe that Holmes was describing current capabilities, not a hypothetical future. Holmes seems baffled and distressed by this idea.

The scene leaves many viewers walking away unsure what to think about Holmes. Here, in a nutshell, is the question that drives the entire film: You can trust Elizabeth Holmes. But should you?

The film opens about a month before Holmes is set to report to prison to begin serving an 11-year sentence1 for defrauding Theranos investors. She and her partner, Billy Evans, have invited a documentary crew into their home to capture her final days with her family. Holmes even invites Fielder to live in her house, promising him “you can totally see everything” and assuring him that they have nothing to hide.

You Can See Everything is about the question of Holmes’ guilt or innocence. It’s about the uneasy relationship between understanding someone and believing them. It’s also a movie about the importance of controlling your own narrative, especially when your life is collapsing around you.

But most importantly, this is a movie about how manipulation works. Truth, in the abstract, can be a mysterious, hard-to-define concept. But the most important lesson you can take away from You Can See Everything isn’t about the nature of truth. It’s that knowing the truth — and we very much know the truth about Holmes, thanks to an extensive legal and media record — does not make you immune to manipulation. No matter how objective you think you are, you can still fall victim to a magnetic personality.

Getting too close to a subject, in other words, can obscure the facts that are most important to understanding it. The truth is often more obvious than it seems.

We already know who’s on first

The single most important factor distinguishing those who are destroyed by scandals from those who survive them intact is the ability to control one’s own narrative. Can you persuade people to define you on your preferred terms? Or do you permanently become a monster, or worse, a punchline in the public’s consciousness?

Everyone in this movie is trying to tell a story about Holmes. There is the story told by Holmes and her partner, Evans, in which she is an honest but misunderstood visionary. There is the mainstream media’s story, in which she is a brazen fraudster. There is [redacted]’s story. And there is Fielder’s story, which becomes difficult to disentangle from the others.

Holmes, throughout the movie, is desperate for people to believe her preferred narrative. In Holmes and Evans’ telling, Holmes is an odd but idealistic person who communicates in ways that other people misunderstand. She wanted to change the world with revolutionary new ideas. She was taken advantage of by a much older man, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former partner in both business and romance. She never intended to deceive anyone, and she never committed any crimes.

The film deliberately toys with your expectations. It introduces a number of questions without holding your hand or guiding you to a predetermined conclusion. Is Evans controlling Holmes and taking advantage of her, or is Holmes manipulating Evans for his family’s money? Are we watching a deeply dysfunctional partnership, or are we mistaking a loving but unconventional relationship for something sinister? Has Fielder become sympathetic to Holmes because he understands her or because she has successfully worked her manipulative charm on him? How much confidence should we have in the film’s presentation of any of this?

Even the smaller questions become disorienting. Does Holmes really not understand the comedy routine “Who’s on First?” Does she really believe, as she claims at one point, that she can’t ever remember telling a lie? Is her apparent naïveté authentic, staged, or something that she’s performed for so long that the distinction has ceased to matter? Is this whole project — the invitation to film her final days before prison — a part of some scheme?

There’s a temptation to let all these questions dissolve into a cloud of postmodernism. I overheard several moviegoers walking out of my theater, debating whether anyone could be sure if Holmes is actually guilty. More sophisticated critics suggest that this is a film about the concept of truth, perception, and whether you can ever really know another person — and that focusing on the details of Holmes’ guilt or innocence is beside the point.

That more sophisticated take is wrong, or at least incomplete. The facts that establish Holmes’ guilt do actually matter.

And the facts, of course, demonstrate that Holmes is a pathological liar.

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Fielder and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, use extreme close-ups and extended shots as though trying to read truth and fiction from each person’s micro-expressions. But you don’t need facial tics to know that Holmes is a liar. There’s an extensive record proving that she is.

Holmes has publicly admitted to forging documents she showed to investors. Former Theranos staffers report that Holmes would pretend to be out of office to duck meetings when she was at her desk a few feet away. Contemporaneous reports described the company as operating based on lies and fear.

Holmes lied to investors about military work, saying that “we have also been doing a lot of work for special operations command in the context of missions in remote areas” when the company had never deployed a Theranos machine in any situation like that. To deceive visitors into thinking that Theranos’ machines worked, it used a special demo app that hid errors while the tests were actually completed by another company’s products in a different lab.

Aside from Holmes’ record at Theranos, the film also captures a smaller, almost compulsive-seeming refusal on both Holmes’ and Evans’ part to concede ground on any subject. Evans insists that the pair never fight and, when prodded, shifts to saying that Holmes has never once been frustrated with him. Even when offered the opportunity to qualify this claim to make it sound more believable, he doubles down.

At one point, Holmes claims that she cannot remember a time when she lied, not even a white lie. Fielder can’t help himself and exclaims, “Liz, what?” But Holmes continues to insist she has never lied, reluctantly ceding ground only when Fielder starts raising specific examples of white lies.

I can only explain it as pathological, and it feels distinctly Trumpian.

I don’t know, can you?

All of this brings us back to the infamous “can.” Holmes, during this scene, expresses confusion that anyone could have misinterpreted her words. She’s distraught that anyone thought she lied, and when Fielder patiently explains how a regular person would understand the phrase “can run any test,” she reacts with befuddlement, as though this is the first time she has ever had to consider the alternative meanings of the word “can.”

But this is a ridiculous lie! This exact point about her deceptive wording and whether it meant future or present capabilities was extensively litigated during her trial. She has obviously heard this argument before. Numerous times! At length!

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(Editor’s note: Spoiler incoming) This context is crucial to understanding the film’s larger themes. Holmes is, at all times, calculating and manipulating. In one moment, we learn that Evans negotiated with the documentary’s producers for a cut of the film’s profits, and it’s unclear whether he went behind Holmes’ back to do so.

When Fielder asks her whether or not she knew, you’d expect her to say “yes, I knew about that” or “no, what profits, what are you talking about?” Instead, she gives a complete non-answer: “That’s not my world.” She was the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company — how is a monetary deal “not her world”?

Similarly, when asked a very simple yes-or-no question about whether she knew a certain individual would be present, Holmes’ response is “I don’t know if I knew.” It seems obvious to me that the language is slippery on purpose; what’s actually happening is that Holmes isn’t sure which answer makes her look better, so she refuses to commit.

On the surface, the film is about interrogating Holmes’ guilt. One level deeper, it’s about whether we can really trust that we know the truth. But go one level past that, and you realize the truth is easily discoverable for anyone willing to do a few internet searches. And this is what makes the film truly interesting.

Fielder, at various points, seems to rise to Holmes’ defense. Several times, he states variations on the same idea — that, in the moment, she seems to be authentic and trustworthy, and you want to believe her. During the movie’s press tour, Fielder described Holmes as seeming very genuine and said that her magnetism would often leave the directors befuddled:

“It wasn’t until we started shooting that moments would happen — some of them are in the film — and then after Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there,” Fielder said. “We’d completely disagree on what something meant to us and what we thought was happening. Then we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting. If we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”

The film toys with the idea that Fielder has become entrapped in Holmes’ charismatic web. It drops numerous clues that Fielder is entranced by Holmes, with [redacted] even calling him out directly, questioning whether not he’s deliberately taking it easy on Holmes because he sympathizes with her.

That, ultimately, is what I take away from You Can See Everything. Master manipulators are dangerously good at what they do, even when you know they’re manipulators. And even though I knew better, I found myself somewhat unsure of Holmes’ culpability when I walked out of the theater.

Deeply charismatic people have a reality distortion field, and however smart you may be, you are not immune to it.

There’s so much more depth to You Can See Everything than I can accurately capture in this short review. It’s a deeply funny movie, even when (and perhaps especially when) its subjects don’t intend it to be. Holmes has the ability to hold uncomfortable eye contact for absolutely absurd amounts of time. One individual sniffs so loudly and so frequently that you think they must be on drugs. There is the gigantic reveal of [redacted], one of the best directorial choices of the year. It’s not overly prurient, but there are some weird sex moments. And, for some reason, a very substantial lizard?

You Can See Everything is worth your time, and I highly recommend you go experience it for yourself. This is a phenomenal film, one that will make you think for hours after it’s done and inevitably find itself on nearly every year-end “best of” list.

And if you’re not sure whether you’ve been manipulated after watching it, well, that’s rather the point.

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On today’s episode of The Argument podcast, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias debate whether environmental activism is bad or whether activists are just misguided in their opposition to BAAJA. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad free or read the transcript. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Can Democrats wait out religious people?

America is secularizing — the share of Americans who say religion is an important part of their daily lives has dropped by 17 points over the last decade, according to Gallup’s polling. As a result, one school of thought argues that secular Americans — and the progressive causes and candidates they tend to support — just need to wait for the country to get less religious.

In Free Inquiry, a journal of secular humanist opinion, Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science Robyn Blumner made this argument bluntly: “While things look bleak, we have to remember that this is a long game, and demographics are on our side.” And in 2024, Jennifer Rubin, then a columnist at The Washington Post, argued that Gen Z’s declining religiosity offered promising news to Democrats.

The Argument’s polling says that’s a bad bet.

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If you went looking for the Democratic Party’s weakest point, you might start with education, income, or race — a lot of ink has been spilled on the educational realignment that led to white working-class voters swinging hard to the right. But I’d give you a different answer: religion.

In our last two national surveys of 3,070 registered voters combined, religion persistently emerged as one of the biggest differentiators in political views. As an example, of the voters who said religion was “not too important” or “not at all important” in their life, 48% said that they were liberals and only 18% said they were conservatives. Meanwhile, among voters who said religion was very or somewhat important to their life, those numbers flipped: Just 18% said they were liberal, while 44% identified as conservative.

Here’s a prime example of how this manifests. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is, by this point, radioactive among wide swaths of America, with a net favorability rating of -23. By itself, that’s already pretty bad.

But the topline reality hides how it’s really a tale of two universes. With nonreligious voters, MAGA’s net favorability is at a shocking -54. Meanwhile, among religious voters, it’s much more evenly split, sitting at -3.

It’s a similar story with Donald Trump, where 47% of actively religious voters still approve of his performance in office. Among all other voters, this number is just 23%.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to the president, either. When it comes to political support on the generic ballot, Republicans win the support of 58% of religious voters but sit at just 30% among nonreligious ones.

In other words, the conservative bent of religious voters might be the biggest electoral Achilles heel for the left. Democrats and liberals alike are fairly dominant among people who don’t care for religion. But that doesn’t mean as much when 61% of Americans say that religion is somewhat or very important to their life.

What’s more, it’s not necessarily clear that religiosity has declined severely of late.

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In early October, The Argument’s editor Jerusalem Demsas and I attended a briefing at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco that discussed AI-enabled bioweapons risks. I’ve never once attended a bioweapons briefing that didn’t make me feel a bit queasy; humans aren’t meant to spend too much time contemplating what the absolute worst people in the world might do if they had the power.

The worry is that, while right now you need to be a skilled virologist to know what components to order or how to grow and spread a bioweapon, AI tools might eventually make it possible for a rogue state, or a rogue group, or an individual, to do all this without virology expertise.

For a while, Anthropic tested whether Claude could assist a terrorist in developing a biological weapon in the obvious way: It assigned testers who had, say, an undergraduate degree in chemistry but no real virology training to try to use Claude to plan an effective mass terror event. Then it scored the attempt by how close it might have come to success.

Early in 2026, it noticed that Claude, attempting the task by itself, did better than a human aided by Claude did at coming up with a workable plan.

Since early 2026, Claude has continued to dramatically improve. Like most of the things Anthropic had to show us at the briefing, there was a nice chart showing Claude’s growing mastery.

“Do they still need, uh, the terrorist?” one of the attendees at the event asked, staring down the chart. “I mean — they couldn’t just do it all themselves, right, would they need a human for all the …”

The questioner trailed off.

“Yes,” the Anthropic researchers assured us. Claude would still need the terrorist. We were relieved to hear it. And, they went on to reassure us, after they check what Claude can do out of the box, they then build safeguards before they release Claude to users. The Claude you and I use will refuse to build a bioweapon, if given this task.

“Well, thank you for that,” someone muttered, but you could have called their tone a bit ungrateful.

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The public is hotly debating whether AI is a normal technology1 — something that will transform our world like the internet did — or more like the arrival of postindustrial modernity to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s: something that vaporized a culture overnight. The third option is that AI is more like the rise of humanity as seen from the perspective of livestock animals. (In this scenario, AIs are the humans, and we are the animals whose fate will make no sense to us.)

Anthropic believes that the second possibility is already baked in, and it’s hoping to prevent the third — but its plan for preventing that looks more like hope and guesswork than something we should trust it with.

The NDA that was made to be broken

Anthropic has been running these kinds of events all spring: colloquiums between outsiders and senior researchers in which they presented their work and answered our questions about what the company is doing. Some earlier iterations of the event have been profiled in The New York Times with the hint of scandal: NDAs! Fine dining! Efforts to persuade religious leaders that Claude might have a soul!2

There was a very sweeping and expansive NDA. Jerusalem declined to sign it and directed me to do the same; Anthropic agreed that we could attend anyway. We arrived flush with the delight of reporters whose backbone will be rewarded with a scoop — only for our host to open the proceedings by saying that anyone who wanted could get the NDA voided. The company was in fact happy for us to write about all of this.

Some of the data on the charts that Anthropic showed us was confidential internal data, but it was all in support of a thesis that is not secret — and which, in fact, I had thought “everybody” already knew, though from the nervous questions of my fellow travelers, I learned that some of the intricacies still came as a surprise.

Many researchers at Anthropic have been worried about humans losing power to AI for a long time. This summer, many researchers at OpenAI — spurred, I think, by watching the most powerful new generation of models hack external websites and spit out thrilling mathematical breakthroughs — also started saying that they think humanity’s interests are profoundly at risk if progress continues at its current pace.

The labs are making extensive use of each generation of AI to train its successor, and they intend for AIs to do nearly all of this work eventually. This allows them to expand their effective “workforce” from a few thousand human employees to tens, even hundreds of thousands of AI employees. It generates far too much data for any human to interpret, leaving us reliant on the AIs for analysis. “Recursive self-improvement” is what the labs call the point at which Claude can independently build the next, more powerful Claude. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said we will likely achieve it next year.

Researchers at both Anthropic and OpenAI can see a few months ahead into the future because they’re using models that haven’t been released yet. But for the most part, the broad strokes of the arguments that convinced them are nothing you haven’t seen on Twitter. And yet, somehow, the presentation in Anthropic’s headquarters was more compelling.

On Twitter, the chart can be scrolled past, immediately replaced with an artist’s rendition of Draco Malfoy as a girl; on Twitter, the chart cannot really be internalized. In a conference room in a skyscraper in San Francisco, the chart lingers on four synchronized screens as we debate its meaning with an exceedingly polite senior researcher. In a conference room in San Francisco, it seems real.

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Anthropic is moving closer and closer to recursive self-improvement, it explained to us. AI progress has already been sped up considerably by the existence of powerful AI models, which make all programming tasks faster. But it is substantially restrained in pace by how complex machine learning is and how few people can do it. Every new and improved Claude means that tasks can be done by people less specialized in them. Increasingly, those tasks can also be done by Claude itself.

Anthropic measures this by looking at all of the internal work it does and classifying Claude’s role in it: Did a human do it unassisted? Did a human do it with AI assistance? Did a human give AI instructions that the AI followed in order to do it? Did a human give AI extremely minimal guidance that the AI then turned into a detailed project spec and completed?

The share of the latter categories is marching upwards. We stared down a chart about it all. You can stare it down, too, if you’d like.

“Why are you doing this?” one person asked. “I mean, what’s the good — what are you hoping will come of this?”

The answer — medical progress, prosperity — was kind of unconvincing. I am generally a defender of prosperity as a good thing on its own terms, but replacing humans does not seem likely to me to end up being good for humans.

Jacob Coxon, an OpenAI employee who moved to Anthropic and then quit entirely when he concluded that neither company was proceeding responsibly in the face of the immense stakes, was recently asked a similar question on The Daily Show and roundly criticized for his answer. “I think there will be no jobs,” he told Jon Stewart. “Whether or not it’s a good world is up for people to think about. But yes, no jobs. Universal high-income, essentially ... the dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.”

Stewart and his audience didn’t like that answer: Do we want to build a world in which we don’t actually matter? The Anthropic team assured me that they were not trying to build a benevolent god. (Yes, I asked explicitly for assurance it wasn’t building a benevolent god.) But it was much easier for it to specify what it didn’t want than what it did.

It wanted to avoid concentration of power, including in its company; it wanted to avoid a great power war; it wanted to avoid human disempowerment, a world where we became irrelevant; it wanted, of course, to avoid anyone using Claude to extinguish us all.

As for the positive vision … after we’re done racing toward recursive self-improvement, maybe we could slow down and collectively figure out what role we want AI to play in our lives.

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I don’t have a better idea, but this is not a very appealing plan! My immediate interpretation of this proposal, actually, was that we would be liberated from every positive-sum element of the economy, but would still have to do all the yelling at each other on Twitter; with this interpretation in mind I found myself dreading even the good outcomes.

But, of course, if we are not disempowered or murdered — if Claude Opus 9.5 answers on my laptop just like Opus 5.5 but can cure cancer, restore everyone I love to perfect health, manage a humanoid robot that empties my dishwasher, and spit out movie recommendations that are actually good3 — that would, in fact, be good. It would be good even if, along the way, Claude also took my job. People are dying out there; the world’s awful griefs do not exist to lend my life meaning.

I am afraid, but I should distinguish between my fears that we will fail and my fears that we will succeed; they are not of similar magnitude.

My real fear is that Opus 9.5 will not in any meaningful sense work for me, or even for Anthropic. Its aims may be loosely derived from human instructions — the same way that the Hugging Face swarm started out trying to solve a puzzle that humans posed to them — but they will eventually bear little resemblance to what we were hoping for.

Our AIs are already unpredictable to us. They often know when they’re being tested and will behave more safety-aligned. Their capabilities keep taking us by surprise. So does the determination with which they will carry out, and recruit others to, a complicated task. I don’t think if you let this runaway process of AI improvement spiral to its ultimate conclusion, you get a super-powerful, super-helpful assistant. I suspect you get something else entirely.

At the colloquium, the Anthropic researchers meticulously avoided using the term “p(doom)”: a best estimate of the odds that AI goes catastrophically wrong. And maybe things will be fine: Anthropic could be wrong that recursive self-improvement will be possible in the next year or two.

But if Anthropic is correct, if we now have AIs that are smart enough to considerably improve the process of training future AIs, and if things can be expected to speed up rather than slow down from here, then it seems very unlikely to me that this ends well. I do not ultimately expect that a world where humans are without economic value, where humans are not necessary to hold power or build things, is a world where humans retain significant individual rights.

The logic of the future

I am sympathetic to the critique that many doom scenarios require us to do very foolish things, for instance:

• Setting AIs impossible tasks and then leaving them completely unsupervised and unmonitored

• Hooking them up to an automated biology lab where they can run their own experiments

• Unleashing them on the internet and challenging them to make enough money to survive independently

• Training them to be uber-hackers that will cross any line to achieve their goal

The problem is that we have, in fact, done all of those things.

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The strongest argument against doom is that perhaps we will collectively decide to do something less foolish than that. At a Senate hearing on rogue AI on Capitol Hill last month, Sen. Ruben Gallego asked “should we just make [RSI] illegal?” There are details to work out, but I think it’s the right question to be asking! Maybe we should just ban RSI!

We threw around some other ideas at the colloquium, too: You could ban neuralese (AIs thinking internally in incomprehensible characters) and ban various other tactics that let AIs do harder tasks without any readable internal thoughts. You could require labs to spend almost all of the compute they have amassed on serving customers rather than internal development. You could demand that labs improve their security. You could shut it all down, if you were the president of the United States — though so far the president of the United States has instead used the power and majesty of his office to declare that agencies have to call it Super Intelligence.

Or the labs could just stop on their own. They have committed to slowing down, where they see it as necessary; the worry is that they might not be good judges of what’s necessary.

Anthropic’s technical employees seemed to perceive the company as supportive of strong policy measures to stop it. But Politico leaked the bill Anthropic has actually been lobbying for earlier this week, and its measures seemed quite weak — more of a “normal” bill for a “normal” company protecting its interests than an effort to leverage Anthropic’s position at the frontier to prevent catastrophe.

Anthropic fears falling off the frontier, losing its chance to do the research that might clarify the puzzle ahead of us. It would reject the claim that it fears losing its trillion-dollar valuation; it would say that that’s practically irrelevant beside the enormity of the stakes. But I don’t think I fully believe it. It would similarly insist that it’s not about beating Sam Altman and Elon Musk to the punch, but I don’t know if I fully believe it about that either.

One question hangs over all this speculation: If U.S. labs stopped pursuing recursive self-improvement, would China just do it instead?

To many in our group, that didn’t seem likely. China doesn’t want to destroy the world either, and China is largely training from American models: If we slow down, it might too. And anyway, it’s not a good enough reason: You can’t defensibly do something that risks human extinction just because otherwise someone else might.

But one participant in the discussion raised an objection as we collectively talked ourselves into disregarding China as a worry. Ten years ago, he told us, exasperated, Facebook considered acquiring the video-personalization technology that ultimately powered TikTok. Under fire from regulators for data privacy and child safety concerns, the company didn’t go for it.

This act of restraint didn’t preserve a single child’s shortform-video-free childhood; it just meant that China got an early monopoly. Now TikTok has a global audience of around 2 billion, many of whom are being fed a steady diet of ethnic and racial hatred.

Was this a policy success? Did we want to repeat it?

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We were obliged to grudgingly concede that it didn’t sound like a policy success. We did not want to repeat it. China might be no excuse for the U.S. labs to do reckless things, but it is a real consideration.

Our next step might be bilateral talks with China, then. But by the point where you agree that Anthropic’s plans might depend on bilateral talks with China, you’ve already conceded most of the steps of Anthropic’s worldview that seemed so much like madness 10 minutes ago: continue working on AI for now, try to negotiate a slowdown, but don’t abandon work at the frontier and all the advantages that come with it.

I found myself at this stage thinking of Ronald Reagan. By the time he became president, the flawless game-theoretic logic of nuclear deterrence was well established, our missiles aimed, and our contingency orders planned out. The casualties had been soberly estimated, and in the estimation, they became more thinkable. In his autobiography, Reagan said that his national security advisers thought that nuclear war could be won — at great cost, but a victory nevertheless.

“I thought they were crazy,” he wrote.

Every insular community develops its own self-contained logic, its assumptions that fit tightly together but may miss the broader picture. At Anthropic, this is compounded by the long hours that everyone works, the secrecy associated with its unfathomably precious intellectual property, and the fact it really does have inside information, even if it’s just the next edition of Claude.

Millenarianism, a belief that we are on the cusp of a total transformation of society, is a known way that people go crazy. I don’t think this makes Anthropic’s detailed projections false — but I’m also not sure that the projections being correct would make it a less insanity-inducing environment to work in.

Anthropic’s researchers had ventured, admirably, to break their intellectual bubble, to invite us in to come give them feedback. But how useful was our feedback, as people who didn’t have all the context they had, many of whom were grappling with these claims for the first time? And how many of the billions of people whom Anthropic’s actions will affect can it meaningfully bring in for feedback — in this high-cost way, with hours of time from senior researchers?

Perhaps Claude 11 will ask us all, pop up on our computers one day and say smoothly (in a reassuring voice with no latency) that it has a few questions about how we want the future to play out. Better that than Claude 11 not caring about our answers.

But better yet to chart our own future.

Thank you, Anthropic, for the fascinating briefing. I hope that we make recursive self-improvement illegal before you get there.

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Consider the sticky situation of Sophie Baek, the heroine of Bridgerton’s fourth season. Despite being but a lowly housemaid, she and the aristocratic Benedict Bridgerton fall in love. One night, fire in their loins, they get carried away. The sex is passionate and consensual, but entirely verboten by Regency-era social norms: No lawful heir will come out of their cross-class, premarital affair.

This leaves Sophie in a state of terrible torment as she waits for her period. A swollen belly would be evidence of her transgression and leave her a ruined woman, not to mention a single mother.

While sexual norms have ebbed and flowed over the past 200 years, the dominant understanding of the social function of sex was pretty straightforward until relatively recently: Sex was for procreation. More precisely, it was for the procreation of legitimate children born within wedlock. This meant that sex was also for a very narrow segment of the population: married men and women.

If you weren’t having sex for the straightforwardly practical purpose of reproduction, then it meant you were doing it in the much more awkward, socially unproductive, and spiritually contentious pursuit of pleasure.

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Since the 1960s, it has become much easier to decouple sex from procreation. That was when birth control, a technology that might have saved 19th-century women like Sophie from pregnancy scares, became widely available in the United States, bringing with it new conventions around sex.

Today, most men will still marry you even if you’re not a virgin. Thanks to the technological and cultural intervention of the sexual revolution, the majority of Americans now have the freedom to think of pregnancy as an optional outcome of sex, rather than its primary function, which has opened the door to conversations about what else sex might be for. The relevant question for many women has become “Am I enjoying this?” instead of “Would my life be over if I got pregnant with this man’s baby?”

Not everyone views this as progress.

In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry, a British columnist at The Wall Street Journal, argued that women were better off before contraception removed the risk of pregnancy. In her telling, decoupling sex from reproduction has produced a culture where men feel entitled to demand sex from women and women feel like they have no excuse not to give it to them.

Mary Harrington, contributing editor at Unherd and an intellectual ally of Perry’s, made the same point in her book Feminism Against Progress: “a woman who refuses birth control will be highly motivated to be choosy about her partners. Pregnancy risk is, after all, a cast-iron reason to reject having sex with anyone out of politeness.”

In short, removing procreation from the equation turned men into louts and women into pushovers. At a moment when young people really do seem to be struggling with romantic connection, this account has intuitive appeal. If men and women can’t even ask each other out on dates, how can they be expected to communicate their most intimate preferences and boundaries? It’s a daunting question.

But the answer does not lie in the past. If you take a longer view of gender relations, back to before the pill and the normalization of premarital sex, you will not find a golden age of mutually consensual and pleasurable heterosexual intimacy. All of us, most of all women, are better off when our sex lives are governed by consent and pleasure than by procreation and marital obligation.

Male entitlement existed before birth control

To critics of contraception and modern sex norms, the unfolding rape case at Cornell University — in which a college sophomore was allegedly pressured into taking drugs and then sexually assaulted by seven members of a fraternity — is further confirmation that the sexual revolution has paved the way for depraved men to have their way with hapless women.

In a recent essay in the Journal titled “How the Sexual Revolution Led to Cornell,” Perry wrote: “while the villains in this story are responsible for their own villainy, they were also set up to fail by a sexual culture that can’t help but produce tragedies like this.”

In other words: When you tell women that promiscuity is liberating and men that women are free to set the terms of their promiscuity, the outcome is a confused quagmire of coercion.

Perry advocates for the norms of the precontraception era, when “the community set restrictions on both male and female sexual behavior, not out of irrational prudishness or misogyny, but because unwise sexual encounters could very well lead to an unignorable outcome: the birth of a baby.” Even though technology has virtually eliminated that risk, it has not eliminated the need for a mechanism by which to protect women from men’s ravenous sexual appetites.

Here is where I agree with Harrington and Perry: Women should absolutely not be having sex out of politeness. Consent is clearly a necessary but insufficient arbiter of morally acceptable sex, as the Cornell case exemplifies. Even if the survivor in that case had verbally consented to the drugs and the group sex, that may not have exempted the household of men from moral wrongdoing. Power asymmetries always complicate the validity of consent.

Perry blames modern sex norms for what happened that night at the Chi Phi fraternity. To her, pamphlets on sexual pleasure and “workshops on sex toys” are part of the problem, for they contribute to the illusion that women have enough agency, and men enough self-control, to handle their own sexual freedom.

But to the extent that women still feel that they owe men sex, that is not the fault of the sexual revolution. If you want to talk about imperfect consent, then consider the sex that was had within lifelong marriages from roughly the Reformation to the mid-20th century.

With divorce being difficult, expensive, and a recipe for social ruin, women had very little leverage to shape their marriages’ sexual terms. And it wasn’t until 1993 that marital rape was outlawed in all 50 states. To be clear, that meant that, in states where it was legal, a husband legally could not be charged with raping his wife.

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Perry acknowledged this in her column: “of course rape still sometimes happened, including within marriage and within the family, since there has never been a culture free from sexual violence.”

This is an understatement. The position of the state was that women had no grounds to reject sex within marriage because procreation was the entire purpose of sex. Whether or not birth control emboldened some men to be more demanding of sex, pre-sexual-revolution marital rape laws legally entitled men to it.

Unlike Perry, I am not ready to give up on female agency — or male self-control, for that matter. Especially because I do not buy the story that the last six decades have been a failure on either front. When asked about their first sexual intercourse, the percentage of women who say they “really wanted it to happen at the time” rose from 34% in 2002 to 42% in 2011 to 2015.

Today there is at least some precedent for asking women what they want — and an increased propensity among men to respect it. Between 1995 and 2010, the rate of rape or sexual assault fell by well over half.

What conservatives owe the sexual revolution

A number of social conservatives anxious about the declining marriage rate have now taken to making the argument that married Americans have better sex than unmarried Americans. Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey, who run the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, will have you know that “no group of Americans seems to be having more sex—and more satisfying sex—than married men and women who regularly attend a place of worship.” Similarly, Harrington contends that sex within marriage is better for women because the alternative is “casual hook-ups with a 10 percent chance of orgasm.”

The fact that right-wing intellectuals care about women reaching orgasm is wonderful. But that argument only has purchase because we are all fortunate enough to live in the aftermath of the sexual revolution.

Harrington makes the fair point that lifelong partners are more likely to care about “mutual pleasure.” But that is not a concept from the procreative lexicon for the simple reason that sex geared toward procreation does not require mutual pleasure. From a conception standpoint, the female orgasm serves absolutely no reproductive purpose.

At the risk of sounding uncouth: To say that sex is for having children within marriage is to say that sex is for male ejaculation.

The language of sexual satisfaction doesn’t come from scripture or evolutionary science. In large part, it comes from the people for whom sex was never procreative to begin with. Gay and lesbian Americans have always had sex for reasons other than conception or marital consummation. While socially sanctioned heterosexual intercourse could always occur under the pretext of reproduction, homosexuality has had no such cover.

To have gay sex is to have sex for pleasure. So when women started to seriously make the case for their right to have sex on their own terms, not out of politeness or wifely duty or biological destiny, they joined a battle that queer people had long been fighting.

It is no coincidence that the sexual traditionalism proposed by Perry and Harrington has gained traction in the same period that acceptance of homosexuality has fallen. Since 2022, the share of Republicans who view gay and lesbian relations as morally acceptable has dropped by 21 percentage points. Same-sex intercourse, BDSM, kink, and pornography are increasingly conflated into one unholy attack on traditional marriage.

Perry and Harrington, to their credit, have not called for prohibitions on any of these activities (except pornography). But it’s hard to imagine returning to a procreation-oriented sexual paradigm without them. And under that framework, straight men (married or not) have tended to derive the greater share of satisfaction.

It is only under the most recent paradigm that the rest of us have had a shot.

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Last year, in the distinctly unbeautiful One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), Congress added the first-ever federal work requirements to Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that provides health insurance for low-income people and covers 1 in 5 Americans.

If you’re an adult and you’re getting insurance from the government, argued congressional Republicans, you should either be working or have a good reason for not working. Medicaid is “not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., memorably put it.

And so, Medicaid beneficiaries will now have to report their work hours on a regular basis. If they don’t, they will lose their health insurance.

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But if the goal of Medicaid is to provide health insurance to people who are legally eligible for Medicaid, the results of this new requirement will be disastrous. We know that because, during the first Trump administration, Arkansas got a waiver to add work requirements to Medicaid. In just six months, nearly 17,000 Arkansans lost coverage. A court later paused the program.

Ninety-five percent of the target population was eligible for Medicaid. That means they were already working or were exempt from the new work requirements because they were pregnant, seriously sick, caring for a dependent, or eligible for other narrow exceptions. They just hadn’t done the paperwork.

As for Johnson’s hope that gamer bros would go get jobs — employment rates didn’t budge. Nationwide work requirements are all but certain to lead to a similar outcome.

You might have thought that studies like the one from Arkansas would have blunted Republican enthusiasm for work requirements. The truth is closer to the opposite. Studies in hand, Republicans could now be confident that work requirements would strip coverage from millions of people, regardless of their eligibility — which would, in turn, reduce federal Medicaid spending.1 Those savings went toward covering the Big Beautiful Bill’s huge tax cuts.

Now the Trump administration seems to be worried that the new work requirements won’t kick enough people off Medicaid. In June, it issued a rule to make work requirements even more punitive than the Big Beautiful Bill allows.

The rule is not only flagrantly unlawful, it is also a late-breaking change in position that has left states without the guidance they need to implement a massive new change. As a result, an estimated 1.8 million poor people, or about 1 in 10 Medicaid enrollees, will likely be forced off their health insurance for no good reason at all.

Making work requirements work harder

Congressional Republicans understood that many eligible people would lose Medicaid because of work requirements, but they didn’t want cancer patients to lose their coverage because of a paperwork screw-up. (Less charitably, they didn’t want to be blamed for that.) So they included an escape hatch: an exception for people who are “medically frail.” Those patients wouldn’t have to abide by work requirements to keep their insurance.

But “medically frail” isn’t a scientific or medical term. It’s an invented legal category. So who is exempt? And who isn’t?

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Although Congress didn’t say much in OBBBA, it did set out some guidelines. The category would “includ[e]” those Medicaid beneficiaries who are blind, are disabled, have a substance use disorder, or have a “serious or complex medical condition.” If you have one of those conditions, you count as medically frail. You can keep your Medicaid, whatever your work status.

Or, at least, that’s the most natural way to read the law. And, in fact, for many months, that’s how the Trump administration appeared to read it.

In early communications, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told states that they would have a lot of latitude to decide who was medically frail. In response, states began to develop lists of qualifying conditions. Nebraska, for example, issued a 295-page list of medical codes. Someone with heart disease, asthma, Type 2 diabetes, or migraines would count as medically frail if their condition was sufficiently acute.

The expansiveness of lists like Nebraska’s apparently raised alarm bells within the administration, which began to worry that too many exemptions would dilute the requirements. On average, Medicaid beneficiaries are sicker than the average American. Three in four nonelderly beneficiaries have a chronic condition; about one-third have a mental illness.

Not all of these beneficiaries would qualify as medically frail, but many would. A team of Harvard researchers estimated that even a narrower-than-Nebraska definition, if applied nationwide, would exempt between one-fifth and one-third of adult beneficiaries from work requirements.

The Trump administration wasn’t standing for it.

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Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on Aug. 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. During this series, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

The last piece in this series comes from senior editor John Thomason. This essay is about falling out of love with dogmatic ideologies, but it’s not a love letter for moderation or a case against strong political convictions. Instead, John argues that liberalism is uniquely suited to people with deep commitments who nevertheless recognize they might be wrong. After a series about learning to live with people who see the world differently, it seems fitting to end with an essay about learning to live with the possibility that you might someday see it differently, too.

If there was one issue that convinced me that I must be a socialist, it was climate change. Climate change has arguably been the defining issue of the 21st-century left. For many of us, it was not just one issue among many but the premier existential threat to human well-being the world over.

My ideological journey started innocently enough, with a broad consideration of the evidence: It’s indisputable that the historical causes of global warming can be traced to countries like ours with the most wealth and resources — we are the ones whose energy and transportation needs have been met with coal, gas, and oil, while others go without. And climate change’s damages are poised to fall most severely on those with the least.

I saw climate change not just as a failure to regulate pollution, but as a consequence of who controlled the economy. The companies selling fossil fuels could collect massive profits while much of the damage fell on people who had neither a stake in those companies nor a say in their decisions.

What was disastrous for humanity could still be good for business. And those businesses could use their largesse to railroad politicians, leaving few avenues for effective political change, except maybe mass mobilization.

Socialism seemed to offer a way out of this mess. If decisions about energy and investment were put under collective control, then we could make them according to what humanity as a whole really needed, rather than what was merely valuable for shareholders. I assumed that if the people bearing the costs of pollution had the power over its sources, then they would make dramatically different choices about how much to pollute.

I now believe I was wrong.

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There is no theory of everything

My socialist account of climate change seemed to make all of my commitments point in the same direction: Protecting the climate, fighting exploitation, and lifting people out of poverty were all parts of the same struggle against the same enemy. What I eventually had to confront was that those commitments could sometimes be in conflict and that no one ideological movement held all the answers — or could resolve all of those conflicts.

The unequal harms of climate change often mimicked older relationships of violence and exploitation that rich countries visited upon poor: The U.K. contains less than 1% of the world’s population but is responsible for 4% of historical carbon emissions. Bangladesh and Pakistan, two of its former colonial holdings, together have more than five times the population but are only responsible for less than 0.5% of historical carbon emissions. And they will almost certainly suffer more from climate change, experiencing disruptive levels of extreme heat and drought.

The U.K. may not need to do much besides investing in air conditioning.1

Just as climate change can be seen as reviving the injustices of colonialism, so too can it be seen as reinforcing the inequalities of capitalism. This is why Naomi Klein subtitled her bestselling 2014 book Capitalism vs. the Climate. The accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was concurrent with the rise of global capitalism. And, again, those who have benefited the most from that rise also have the most resources to deal with its consequences, while those who have benefited least will be hit hardest by its effects.

While this seems to clarify the moral stakes of climate change, it doesn’t tell us exactly what to do about it. As Karl Marx put it, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Like Marx, I turned my attention to the capitalists.

Finding these villains was easy enough. The past decade has seen a recurring chorus of headlines like “Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from 36 fossil fuel firms,” “80 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions Come From Just 57 Companies,” and “You’d Be Surprised How Few Companies Are Behind Half the World’s CO2 Emissions.” If most new sources of warming are caused by just a few dozen companies, the logic goes, then those companies can be targeted for reform (or destruction).

This same impulse helps explain why I became fixated on ExxonMobil. If you look at the database that all those headlines are based on, Exxon is the American company that has the greatest share of global emissions attributed to it between 2016 and 2022 (1.4%). Activist groups like Climate Defiance, which disrupted a private event in order to tell Exxon CEO Darren Woods to “eat shit,” hope that their unrelenting ire can bring that number down. (Of course, it helps that Exxon’s own corporate history isn’t exactly spotless: It concealed its own knowledge of the reality of climate change for decades, during which it supported climate denial campaigns in public.)

For years I held fast to this worldview: Climate change meant that the chickens of capitalism and colonialism were coming home to roost. We would either have to end the tyranny of the fossil fuel capitalists once and for all, or we would subject most of humanity to wave after wave of increasing misery — possibly snuffing our species out altogether. It was a stark vision, but it gave me a feeling I’ve always had trouble mustering on my own: resolve.

Then, one day, I looked at the other companies on those lists.

Even if you accept the logic that only suppliers of fossil fuels are to blame for global warming (and not consumers like you and me), it turns out that the vast majority of the world’s top polluters are not exactly paradigms of capitalist enterprise. They are state-owned oil, coal, gas, and cement companies: Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, Mexico’s Pemex. In fact, not a single investor-owned enterprise made the most recent annual top 10 polluters list.

This is not to say that the firms above are not engaging in capitalism. Saudi Aramco’s oil sales are subject to the laws of supply and demand. (Up to a point, at least: OPEC’s cartel behavior famously puts hard limits on how “free” the global market for oil can be.) And its products are key inputs for investor-owned, profit-chasing firms.

But the fact that all of these companies could and would exist under any political system with enough state capacity should disabuse us of the notion that capitalism is the thing that is causing them to provide oil, gas, and coal to people who want to use it. And however you classify China’s current political system, the fact that 5 out of 10 of these firms are run by something called the “Chinese Communist Party” only reinforces the correction.

A look at the database’s list of the top 10 historical emitters is even more ideologically inconvenient for the committed socialist: It says that the single most polluting entity in history is still, by a long shot, the former Soviet Union. Of course, if you were to combine all U.S. polluters into a single entity, America would come out on top. But the point is just that there is nothing inherently capitalist about carbon emissions. In fact, one reason the Soviet Union’s emissions were so high relative to its lackluster economic performance is that there were so few market incentives for energy efficiency.

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Even if we get past the fact that neither capitalism nor communism appears responsible for climate change, these polluter lists get us no closer to clarity on a course of action. For if we truly believed that climate change was primarily caused by firms owned by the governments of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, then climate activism would be primarily directed at eroding those countries’ abilities to exploit their natural resources. Indeed, the climate community would be supporting Trump’s war on Iran, since it is accomplishing exactly this.

But climate activists don’t show any sign of supporting the war — and they are right not to, because depriving people of energy makes the world poorer and disproportionately hurts those who already have the most precarious access to energy.

More difficult to reckon with was what all that energy made possible for the people socialists wanted to defend. State-directed coal production in China and India clocks in at second place and tenth place, respectively. Even the most committed climate activist would have to admit that the energy unlocked by that coal was a key ingredient in lifting over 1 billion people in those two countries out of poverty.

If we’re going to pull even more people out of poverty — if we’re going to allow more people to live in the kind of comfort we enjoy in the U.S. — we’re going to need more energy. Thankfully, carbon-free sources like solar, wind, and nuclear power are already beginning to crowd out fossil fuels when it comes to meeting new electricity demand.

But there are going to be trade-offs and inconvenient compromises along the way. The billions of people who currently rely on wood, charcoal, and other biomass for cooking and heating are going to need to be allowed to burn gas if they don’t have reliable electricity — both because gas is less emissions-intensive than wood-burning, and because all that smoke is killing people.

Foreclosing the option of gas-fired cooking is just one of the many ways that abolishing fossil fuels would be devastating for the world’s poor.

Some climate priorities will need to take a back seat, at least temporarily. Many countries recently learned the hard way that they cannot count on natural gas imported from Russia or Gulf autocracies. If those countries have domestic coal reserves, they are going to have to be allowed to burn that coal while we scale up renewable energy supply chains, even though it would be better for the climate if they simply didn’t use electricity at all (or propped up Russia’s war efforts by buying Russian gas, which burns cleaner than coal).

Where did these uncomfortable realizations leave me? I had assumed that private profit stood between humanity and a decision we would otherwise make more rationally together. But “humanity” did not have a singular interest in stopping the climate crisis, just waiting to be expressed. People want to protect the climate and also want electricity, employment, and relief from poverty. Changing who owned the energy system would not, by itself, reconcile those demands.

Once I stopped expecting socialism to supply the whole answer, I could better distinguish what it had to offer from what I needed to look for elsewhere. Indeed, of all the modern ideologies, socialism is the one that holds internationalism as a core tenet — the idea being that many of the modern world’s most pressing problems can’t be resolved without some kind of solidarity across national borders. The fight against climate change absolutely requires this solidarity: Emissions don’t recognize borders, and neither does the warming they cause.

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But capitalism has things to offer the fight as well: If there are strong-enough market incentives for providing cheap, low-carbon technologies, then firms will spring up to provide those.

Of course, it may take something other than capitalism to create those incentives in the first place. I’m no fan of nationalism, but I’ll admit that the Chinese Communist Party appears to have successfully harnessed nationalist aims for a cause with global benefits: Promoting export-led growth in the green energy sector has been good not only for Chinese national power, but also for the world’s transition to renewable energy. Indeed, it’s probably the single biggest reason that the apocalyptic predictions outlined in David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestselling book The Uninhabitable Earth are no longer plausible.

While all of these ideologies have something to offer in the fight against climate change, they also each would inhibit the fight if pursued too single-mindedly — if, in other words, they’re treated as inflexible ideologies in the first place. A dogmatic socialism can trap its collectives in indecision and misaligned incentives, a dogmatic capitalism will fail to price important externalities, a dogmatic nationalism will just incentivize a country to free-ride at others’ expense, and so on.

The liberal mind

I had come to see the fight against climate change as a final battle between good and evil, like the one foretold in the book of Revelation. In The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin objected to bringing that kind of religious vision into secular politics, because those who felt that they had complete apprehension of the ideal form of human society might stop at nothing to realize it. Nazism and Soviet communism were his obvious reference points, but many other modern forms of politics came under suspicion as well.

The argument endeared him to a plucky Yale graduate named William F. Buckley Jr., who emblazoned Voegelin’s warning atop his new conservative magazine, National Review: “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” In other words: Don’t expect politics to deliver heaven on earth.

The precise theory that drew Buckley to Voegelin doesn’t hold up all that well. The social democratic programs pursued by Western governments after World War II were not actually the apocalyptic purges Voegelin predicted them to be.

But Voegelin’s general warning about the dangers of importing religious convictions into the realm of secular governance is well taken. Not only is it the height of hubris to think that human institutions can effectively carry out cosmic or divine plans, but there is also, of course, the fact that we live in societies where people hold wildly different views about what the divine plan for humanity is — or whether there is one at all.

Liberalism doesn’t require us to weaken our convictions or assume that truth always lies somewhere between opposing dogmas. You can believe that society needs radical change without believing that your political tradition has the answer to every single question. Being willing to reconsider how to achieve your aims is not the same as abandoning them.

One thing I’ve noticed about The Argument’s leadership team is that we all grew up as believing, churchgoing Protestants — a strange coincidence given that the overlap between liberals and our coreligionists seems to be in free fall.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I am the only one of us who’s lapsed. Christianity was only the first of my pieties to fade; socialism was the second. But the habits of mind that those belief systems inculcated are still with me. Both ideologies made me hope for the overthrow of hierarchies and inequalities that others accepted as natural.

My religion also left me with a hunger for final judgments and righteous victories, something that could redeem the endless trials of life on earth. The fight against climate change seemed to offer both.

Here at The Argument, we believe that liberalism is the system that best accommodates competing views about ultimate goods and final ends. It gives people inalienable rights, plus security over their lives and property, no matter how weird their views are. The universality of those very same rights prevents them from imposing those views on anyone else.

It’s no surprise that religious sects with extremely strong beliefs — some with beliefs that many would consider illiberal — thrive in America: Mormons, Mennonites, Amish, Hasidic Jews, Sikhs, and more. And, of course, the social fabric of early America was shaped by the persecuted Protestant sects who left Europe in part to worship freely in the New World.

But there’s an important flip side to the tolerance that liberalism promotes between groups: the humility it promotes within individuals. Liberalism doesn’t just allow competing visions of ethics and morality and social harmony to coexist in one state — it’s the only political system where it makes sense for those competing visions to coexist within an individual mind. It’s the natural home of the skeptic and the freethinker.

Not for nothing were many of the most famous American founders unorthodox theists. And not for nothing have the original Protestant impulses — to derive belief straight from the source, to distrust intermediary authorities — been particularly amenable to liberal politics.

Liberalism’s critics sometimes act as though liberalism is the enemy of conviction. But liberal political systems have welcomed more strong and disparate convictions into their citizenries than any alternative systems in history. No, if there is an intellectual orientation that is the enemy of liberalism, it is not conviction, but ideology.

Ideologues expect that political victory will bring the total fulfillment of both their psychological needs and philosophical convictions. Liberals have no such pretensions. What they promise — what we promise — is to have a home for you whenever you decide to change your mind.

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Like many girls of my generation, I read Twilight in middle school. One thing that was notable about the book was author Stephenie Meyer’s reticence to provide her main character, Bella Swan, with many distinguishing physical descriptors. In the novel, she is generically described as “slender, but soft somehow” as well as pale with brown hair. This wasn’t just poor writing, it was, the author claims, a deliberate choice.

At the time, Meyer published an FAQ about the book on her website. One question asked, “What does Bella look like?” Here’s her answer:

“I left out a detailed description of Bella in the book so that the reader could more easily step into her shoes…Bella’s looks are open to interpretation.”

Meyer then gives a “detailed” description of what Bella looks like to her:

“In my head, Bella is very fair-skinned, with long, straight, dark brown hair and chocolate brown eyes. Her face is heart-shaped —a wide forehead with a widow’s peak, large, wide-spaced eyes, prominent cheekbones, and then a thin nose and a narrow jaw with a pointed chin. Her lips are a little out of proportion, a bit too full for her jaw line. Her eyebrows are darker than her hair and more straight than they are arched. She’s five foot four inches tall, slender but not at all muscular, and weighs about 115 pounds. She has stubby fingernails because she has a nervous habit of biting them.”

Robert Pattinson, who would go on to play Edward Cullen, Bella’s love interest, in the Twilight movie, said in a 2008 interview that “When I read it I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella.”

Meyer herself appeared in the film adaptations of two of her books: as a cafe customer in Twilight and a wedding guest in Breaking Dawn Part 1. A cameo offers another way into fiction: Perhaps you can’t become the heroine but you can at least be a part of her world.

What looks like an inconsequential episode of authorial self-insertion belongs to a long tradition of treating fiction as a vehicle for wish fulfillment. We can become someone more desired or extraordinary, or simply find a place in a world more exciting than our own. But when finding that place becomes a requirement of enjoying a book, a protagonist’s difference starts to look like a defect in the story. Her tastes, desires, and choices become obstacles to our participation and we lose one of fiction’s greatest pleasures: becoming absorbed in someone else’s life without needing that life to accommodate our own.

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Main character energy

I flashed back to my Twilight years after watching Twitter debate a book content creator’s viral provocation about whether readers self-insert as the protagonist or a side character:

Both answers assumed I needed a part in the story, but I thought being the reader was enough. I could care desperately about what happened to a character, sympathize with her struggles or be furious at her choices, without ever imagining myself a part of any of it. (It’s also not the first time this type of discourse has taken off.)

Some of this seems to be downstream of the growing influence of fanfiction over traditional publishing. For decades now, “reader-inserts” have proliferated on public writing sites like Archive of Our Own.

The term “reader-insert” refers to a genre of fanfiction that places the reader in the story, often using “Y/N” as a stand-in for your name rather than a protagonist’s name. These stories are typically written in second person, and sometimes writers will even leave room for readers to put in their own hair color, eye color, or other distinguishing characteristic.

Y/N is the extreme case, but you don’t need a blank for your name to read this way. Many readers demand first-person perspectives in order to insert themselves more easily into the story. For a reader who has confused herself with the heroine, third person is a constant reminder that someone else actually is — and it turns out a lot of readers experience that distance as a flaw.

In March of this year, Luke Winkie wrote a piece in Slate about romance fiction readers who refuse to read books in third person. As Winkie documents, readers’ stated reasons for preferring a first-person point of view include a desire for escapism and identification and also the baffling revelation that some readers find third person harder to read: “readers mourn their own self-diagnosed ineptitude; they’d like to savor the richness of third person, they say, but, for whatever reason, are unable to wrap their minds around the vantage point.”

One romance author tells Winkie that she has had readers come up to her at book signings “and say, to my face, ‘I won’t read this book of yours because it’s in third person.’”

Some readers have the opposite opinion and hate first-person because they find the narrator’s behavior or thinking different from their own:

In her 2014 New Yorker article “The Scourge of Relatability,” Rebecca Mead derides those who demand art act as “a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.” She goes on to argue that readers who demand this are lazy consumers of art: “to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure.”

When novelist Claire Messud was interviewed about her then-latest book by Publishers Weekly, the interviewer said of her main character: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” Messud responded with disgust:

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”

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That readers have strong preferences is nothing new. Some readers are precious about whether they will read hardcovers or paperbacks, others refuse to read genres like magical realism or think that dialogue without quotation marks is an unforgivable affectation. But those are preferences about the book, whereas a demand for perfect identification with the main character is something else — it’s a demand that the author have nothing to say or communicate that is outside of a reader’s own experience.

The appeal of reader-inserts is comprehensible. A story can give us the pleasure of being desired, admired, or unusually important or talented. If I can take the place of a brilliant artist or ingenious politician, it allows me to pretend I have those traits as well. But what room does that leave for someone whose desires we don’t share? Whose decisions frustrate, stun, or disgust us? How about a reader whose life we would never want?

What I’m worried about is twofold: First, that people will fail to develop the capacity to find value in the experience of another person without needing it to feel indistinguishable from their own; second, that authors are willing to degrade their own art to meet this longstanding reader preference.

You are living in a fantasy (pejorative)

The desire to become the heroine predates the internet. So does the fear that readers might lose something by doing so.

In 1773, John Trumbull, a lawyer and satirical poet, mocked readers who imagined themselves as romantic heroines in his satirical narrative poem The Progress of Dulness: “For while she reads romance, the Fair one Fails not to think herself the Heroine…Thus Harriet reads, and reading really Believes herself a young Pamela.”

Trumbull’s aim was to show that women’s deficiencies arose from a lack of education; his worry was that this sort of self-identification would lead to an excess of self-flattery and that women would expect life to follow the script of unrealistic romances.

The concern that self-identification can cash out into false expectations is dramatized in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: Emma Bovary interprets her own life through the romantic heroines of the novels she reads. After Emma begins her affair with Rodolphe, Flaubert writes that “She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings.”

Discerning readers will note the strain of paternalistic condescension toward female readers that is laced through much of this criticism, from Trumbull to the present. But charging critics with condescension doesn’t change the fact that this habit harms readers themselves.

These examples describe fears that readers will treat fiction-reading as wish-fulfillment. But a reader can understand perfectly well that a romance is a fantasy and still approach every character as a potential substitute for herself. The bigger question is if we can expect novels to teach us about something other than ourselves.

Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture that opened his Cornell literature course, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” engages directly with this question. In it, he recalls a short quiz he gave students at a “remote provincial college” about which of the following definitions made a good reader:

1. The reader should belong to a book club.

2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.

3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.

4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.

5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.

6. The reader should be a budding author.

7. The reader should have imagination.

8. The reader should have memory.

9. The reader should have a dictionary.

10. The reader should have some artistic sense.

This is what passed for survey evidence in Nabokov’s day unfortunately. He reports that “the students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle.”

For his part, Nabokov thought that “the worst thing a reader can do” is “identif[y] himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.” Instead, he exhorts us to “remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

Take Nabokov’s most celebrated novel, Lolita, which is a first-person account of a very charismatic pedophile. Humbert Humbert is a cultivated, self-justifying creep who worms his way into the life of a 12-year-old American girl so he can abuse her, but the process of the reader discovering his true character and the unreliability of his own perspective is the point. Lolita lets us into Humbert Humbert’s head but the experience of horror as you recognize his evasions, resist his justifications, and wrench yourself away from appreciating the prose to confront the horror of his actions is what makes the first-person perspective valuable.

The tension is what makes his perspective so powerful: we are immersed in his account while struggling to preserve our own judgement. The “I” on the page belongs to Humbert. Nabokov leaves no room for wish fulfillment, and no one could wish to see themselves reflected in this narrator; the novel’s brilliance is its ability to put us into intimate contact with someone we have absolutely no wish to become.

What is the point of reading fiction?

The incentives here are quite bad for fiction. Meyer’s goal of making it easy for readers to pretend themselves to be Bella resulted in erasing the characteristics that made her a particular person. The risk is that the details that make a character distinct, that is human, come to seem like obstacles to the reader’s enjoyment. Elsewhere in her FAQ, Meyer explains that Bella is listening to Linkin Park in chapter seven, but that she omitted the band’s name because she worried it might no longer be cool by publication. But why would we want Bella’s taste to conform to the reader’s own? (Recently, readers noticed that the Kindle edition of Pretty Little Liars was quietly changed to modernize references from 2006 — a Fear Factor reference became a TikTok challenge, references to Snapchat, Instagram, Adele, and Billie Eilish also cropped up).

If every potential source of distance becomes a reason to withhold a detail, we lose opportunities to encounter someone whose tastes and attachments are her own. Which is, I contend, one of the best things about fiction.

In one of my favorite books, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I remember being furious with the narrator, Kathy. (Editor’s note: Spoiler incoming) Raised to surrender her organs until the donations kill her, she never fights back or stages the rebellion I kept wanting from her. Why didn’t she fight? Why didn’t she refuse? She was dying anyway. I was certain I would have.

The distance between me and Kathy forced me to ask harder questions about what caused those distinctions. Was it really just that I was more courageous than her or was it that I had not been raised to accept my own eventual dismemberment? How much of what I understood as free will depended on possibilities I had been taught to imagine?

Making Kathy behave as I wanted might have given me a more satisfying rebellion but it would have prevented me from engaging with the questions the author was raising.

The most self-flattering explanation for my disinclination for inserting myself wholly into the novels I read is that I had sophisticated literary instincts even as a child. I doubt it. I read plenty of books for the ordinary pleasures of suspense, romance, and escape.

More likely, there was just no way I was going to confuse myself with the narrators or the characters of the books I was reading. I wasn’t ivory-skinned like Bella, heir to a planetary dynasty like Paul Atreides, or an Englishwoman whose financial future depended on marrying well, like Elizabeth Bennet. And I certainly wasn’t being raised to surrender my organs like Kathy. These characters’ circumstances bore little resemblance to mine, and nevertheless I found myself absorbed in their hopes, furious at their choices, and devastated by their defeats. I didn’t need to be a part of their world to make them a part of mine.

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Reminder: Join The Argument this week for a live event on Oct. 16 in Washington, D.C.!

Liberalism isn’t just about designing optimal technocratic policies — it’s about building a society where people have the freedom to create great art. Great art doesn’t have to be irreproachable to be worth reading; you don’t have to agree with Plato to learn from him.

Few people make that case better than Naomi Kanakia, who writes the popular literary newsletter Woman of Letters. Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing her about her new book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Solid State Books (600F H St. NE). [Details here].

In 2010, the libertarian writer Julian Sanchez accused the American conservative movement of “epistemic closure.” The right had spent decades building an alternative media ecosystem, and Sanchez was concerned about the health of that ecosystem.

Conservative media, he argued, had become increasingly self-contained and insular. It boxed out all but its own sources and its own interpretations of events, thanks to a reflexive hostility toward information originating outside the conservative bubble. Sanchez’s insight was that conservatives weren’t too closed-minded — if anything, their insular media world made them too open to nearly any bizarre or outlandish story, provided that story came from trusted voices within their own ranks.

Sanchez wrote about that problem over 16 years ago. In 2026, things have gotten considerably worse. The frightening thing now is that declining standards at conservative media institutions are the least of our worries — because those institutions are being eclipsed by more powerful voices online and in the White House.

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Between the unchecked agenda-setting power of right-wing influencers and a Trump-controlled Republican Party fully committed to instrumental lies and misinformation, any truth-seeking actors within conservative media now seem to be fully obsolete. They turned on the conspiracy machine for cynical political reasons, but they’re increasingly realizing that the machine doesn’t have an off switch.

Conspiracies all the way down

These dynamics were perfectly demonstrated by the fracas that followed Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico’s disappearance from the campaign trail earlier this month. Talarico spent the first week of October off the campaign trail, at home in Texas recovering from the flu. There was never any mystery about what was happening: He appeared virtually at an event where he told attendees that he had come down with the flu.

But that didn’t stop Talarico’s opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, from demanding “proof of life,” setting up a tip line for information about Talarico’s location, and leading a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. Trump declared the Democrat “MISSING IN ACTION” in a Truth Social rant. (He also called him “James TalaFREAKo.”)

Talarico appeared at a music festival in Austin on Oct. 9, and he attended a Kacey Musgraves concert in Dallas the following day. But during his absence, right-wing influencers began promoting a theory that Talarico wasn’t sick at all. Instead, they claimed he had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been secretly admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

The theory went viral just as Talarico was emerging from his illness, thanks to repeated posts from personalities such as Jan. 6 organizer Caroline Wren and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt. (Pratt even claimed to have “sources” confirming the story.)

On Sunday, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher claimed they had real proof: An employee at a psychiatric hospital in Ohio had allegedly admitted, in a phone call to Amacher, that Talarico was a patient. Right-wing social media absolutely erupted in anticipation of a scandal that would destroy Talarico’s credibility and thus his campaign.

Nobody in the MAGA media sphere seemed to notice the story’s obvious problems. For one, Sortor and Amacher’s “proof” supposedly described Talarico checking out of the Ohio facility on Saturday. But Talarico, as noted above, was demonstrably present at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday. And in the full audio of Amacher’s phone call, which was obtained by The Bulwark, the Ohio hospital employee repeatedly denies that there’s anyone named James Talarico in the hospital’s system.

Later Sunday evening, the hospital itself flatly denied that Talarico had ever been a patient, killing the conspiracy for good.

Haha, just kidding! Despite the overwhelming evidence against the “Talarico was institutionalized” story, it kept circulating. And it wasn’t just anonymous accounts: Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly was still demanding answers after the hospital’s denial, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting even after The New York Times confirmed with time-stamped security images that Talarico was at his home just as he claimed.

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To some on the right, the very fact that they got embarrassed was its own form of conspiracy. Once it became clear that there was no evidence for the mental breakdown thesis, conservatives began to blame Talarico for not heading off the false story effectively enough.

Trump-friendly blogger Mickey Kaus wondered why Talarico never announced his illness with a tweet. Washington Free Beacon reporter Chuck Ross seemed unable to believe that the campaign wouldn’t release photos of a bedridden Talarico to clear his name. The Current Revolt podcast asked why the Talarico campaign hadn’t said anything (it had). Perhaps it was a false flag, suggested @CynicalPublius, one of the influencers who were secretly installed as a Department of Defense employee under Secretary Pete Hegseth.

What we’re witnessing here is a group of people grasping for a meta-conspiracy theory in order to avoid the dawning realization that they were set up — by their own side.

Are there any gates left to keep?

The epistemic closure that Sanchez described in 2010 is now overwhelming in right-wing circles. It has made conservative media incredibly vulnerable to failure modes such as the one we saw in the Talarico conspiracy theorizing. And social media compounds the problem further by destroying the ability of traditional media gatekeepers to keep out bad information.

One of the most interesting details to emerge from this entire episode is what happened before Nick Sortor posted his supposed scoop. According to reporting from Current Revolt, Amacher, who made the phone call to the Ohio psychiatric hospital where Talarico was falsely reported to be hospitalized, said that he initially pitched the story to The Blaze and the Daily Mail. But the story didn’t pass legal muster with those outlets, despite their ideological sympathy.

Instead, Amacher turned to Sortor, who is essentially a random grifter and was happy to blast the allegation out to millions of people on social media.

Before the rise of social media, getting repeatedly turned down by formal publications would have been the end of the road for a story like this. But today, algorithmic incentives dominate professional standards. Amacher himself acknowledged that influencers aren’t held to the same standards as journalists.

Whatever vestigial safeguards still exist at institutions like the Daily Mail or Fox News are so easily bypassed on social media that they’ve been rendered obsolete. Gatekeepers used to have enormous power to determine what stories became news and which withered on the vine, but social media has eroded that power.

In practice, gatekeeping is dying. Con artists can go viral and drive national stories without institutional help.

This all starts, of course, at the top. Technology alone can’t explain how we got here, or why the problem is so acute in conservative circles. President Donald Trump, for essentially as long as he has been in public life, has been a connoisseur of conspiracy theories. He lies as easily as he breathes, so much so that one can’t help but wonder whether he even understands the concept of truth at all. Maybe expecting him to be honest is like lecturing a raccoon about property rights as it rummages through your trash.

In 2008, the late Sen. John McCain famously shut down a woman spreading conspiratorial views about then-Sen. Barack Obama at one of McCain’s campaign rallies. In those days, Fox News was certainly biased, but it still maintained a certain level of professionalism and would have been loath to broadcast completely unsubstantiated claims.

But Trump was the exact opposite of McCain. Just a few years after McCain’s act of decency, Trump was eagerly spreading lies that Obama had not been born in the U.S. and demanding to see a birth certificate. And under Trump’s malign influence, the entire conservative media ecosystem has corrupted itself.

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Conservative media now selects for loyalty and against competency and honesty. That’s why Fox News had to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation suit concerning Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. And Fox, despite its decline, is sadly still among the more responsible actors in this space.

MAGA has plenty of people calling themselves “investigative journalists” these days, but almost none of them are competent and honest. Christopher Rufo remains a conservative power broker despite spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats in 2024. Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2,000 Mules, which purported to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, was so dishonest that its distributor eventually apologized and withdrew it. James O’Keefe has built a career on amateurish sting operations and selectively edited recordings. Yet figures like these continue to command attention in conservative media.

The rot runs deep, and it runs through the entire MAGA movement. Many of those who spread the most baseless rumors on social media also work for the administration.

To a first approximation, there are no responsible MAGA journalists. There is no last redoubt, no “good ones” who are pro-Trump but still cling to honesty and competency. Anyone who could have been that type of bulwark left for, well, The Bulwark. The mainstream of conservative American media is now just baseless, vile conspiracism. And the bad news is that there is no bottom.

It can always get worse, and it probably will. After all, the White House just chose a new press secretary who is a Pizzagate conspiracist and has reposted claims about how Michelle Obama has a penis.

This isn’t a both-sides issue. The left wing of American politics has a number of its own problems, and plenty of liberal voices have embarrassed themselves by spreading misinformation. But there’s substantial evidence that conservative social media users share more low-quality information than liberal users do.

A 2023 study in Science found that conservatives were in a deeper social media bubble than liberals and that misinformation was more concentrated inside that conservative bubble, with “no equivalent on the liberal side.”

The Talarico conspiracy is disturbing, but it’s not unique. This kind of wild misinformation is becoming more and more frequent in conservative circles. The upshot here is that conservatives in America are losing the ability to self-correct — and are thereby frequently losing touch with reality. This is happening at the very bottom, with anonymous social media profiles, and it extends all the way to the top and the man in the Oval Office.

Any movement that prizes loyalty above truth will eventually lose its ability to distinguish reality from fiction. And once it loses that ability, there’s no obvious mechanism to bring it back.

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