Just winning the next set of elections won’t fix the underlying problems.

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Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York City’s mayoral primary, and his probable ascension to the office itself, sent shock waves through the Democratic Party and reopened many longstanding debates. Maybe the word “socialist” isn’t as toxic as many think it is. Maybe the party needs younger, newer faces. Maybe a positive vision is at least as important as standing against Trump. Maybe being Muslim or pro-Palestine does not alienate potential Democratic voters. And so on.

Those are all worthwhile points to discuss, but I worry that they all revolve around a goal — taking power back from Trump and the MAGA congressmen who hold it now — that is necessary but not sufficient to save American democracy. Too easily, we get lost in the search for a new face or a new slogan or even new policies, but lose sight of the deeper problems that allowed Trump to come to power in the first place.

Remember, we beat Trump soundly in 2020. His ego will never let him admit it, but Trump got his butt kicked by Joe Biden, to the tune of more than 7 million votes. Beating Trump is not an unsolvable problem, and we don’t have to convert the MAGA cultists to do it. All we have to do is win back the voters who already voted against Trump in 2020.

But beating Trump did not end the threat then, and it won’t do it now either. We need to understand why.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and if all we do is get rid of Trump, they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter.

I do not have solutions for the problems I’m pointing to, but I think we need to keep them in our sights, even as we look for the next face and slogan and message.

The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes. All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak Math and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Here’s why this is such a big problem for democracy, and how it turns into a liberal/conservative issue: Ever since the progressive era and the New Deal, the liberal project has been for government to take on issues that are too big and too complex for individuals to handle on their own. When you buy a bag of lettuce at the grocery store, how do you know it isn’t full of E coli? Some corporation has a dump somewhere upstream from you, so how can you tell what dangerous chemicals might be leeching into your water supply? How do you know your workplace is won’t kill you or your money is safe in a bank? What interest rates and tax/spending policies will keep the economy humming without causing inflation? Stuff like that.

The conservative answer to those questions is to trust corporations to police themselves subject to the discipline of the market. (So if the lettuce producers keep selling E-coli-spreading produce, eventually people will catch on and stop buying from them and they’ll go out of business.) Historically, that solution has never worked very well. Corporations are too rich and too clever and too chameleon-like for market discipline to keep them in line. But we’ve had regulations for over a century now, so most of the bad-example history happened a long time ago. (We wouldn’t have OSHA today without the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.) The only people who still remember it are themselves experts of some sort.

The liberal alternative is to have what has come to be called an “administrative state”. The government runs a bunch of three-letter agencies — FDA, EPA, SEC, CDC, FCC, and so on, with an occasional four-letter agency like OSHA or FDIC thrown in. These agencies keep track of things no individual has the resources to keep track of, and they hire experts who spend their lives studying things most of us only think about once in a while, like food safety or how much cash banks should keep on hand to avoid runs or what kind of resources need to be stockpiled to deal with hurricanes.

And the liberal administrative state works like a charm as long as two conditions hold:

• The experts are trustworthy.
• The public trusts them.

It’s not hard to see that there are problems with both of those propositions. In his 2012 book The Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes.

And then there’s the challenge of globalism: It was supposed to benefit everybody, but in practice, working-class people lost good jobs while professional-class people got cheap products made overseas.

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

In a series of books, most recently End Times, Peter Turchin describes two conditions that historically have led to social unrest, revolution, or civil war: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. In other words: Ordinary people see their fortunes declining, and the elite classes expand beyond the number of elite roles for them to fill. (Think about how hard it is for recent college graduates to find jobs.) So there are mobs to lead, and dissatisfied members of the would-be ruling class trained and ready to lead them.

Truth Decay. Democracy is supposed to work through what is sometimes called “the marketplace of ideas”. Different interest groups have their own self-interested spin, but when people with a variety of viewpoints look at the facts, truth is supposed to win out.

If you are younger than, say, 40, you may be surprised to realize how recently that actually worked. There have always been fringe groups and conspiracy theorists, but there were also powerful institutions dedicated to sorting out what really happened and how things really happen. The two most important of those institutions were the press and the scientific community.

Those two institutions still exist, and (with some exceptions) still pursue capital-T Truth. But they have lost their reality-defining power. (Part of the problem is that journalists and scientists are part of the expert class that working people no longer trust.) No current news anchor would dare end a broadcast with “And that’s the way it is”, as Walter Cronkite did every day for decades. And no scientific study, no matter how large it is or where it was done, can settle the questions our society endlessly debates.

So: Is global warming really happening, and do we cause it by burning fossil fuels? The scientific community says yes, and the experts whose livelihoods depend on the answer (like the ones in the insurance industry) accept that judgment. But the general public? Not so much, or at least not enough to commit our country to the kind of changes that need to happen.

Was the Covid vaccine safe, and did it save millions of lives worldwide? Do other vaccines (like the ones that all but wiped out measles and smallpox) bring huge benefits to our society? Again, the scientific community says yes. But that answer is considered sufficiently untrustworthy that a crank like RFK Jr. can get control of our government’s health services and put millions of lives at risk.

Did Trump lose in 2020? By the standards of objective journalism, yes he did. He lost soundly, by a wide margin. The diverse institutions of vote-counting, spread through both blue states and red ones like Georgia and (then) Arizona, support that conclusion. Every court case that has hung on the question of voter fraud or computer tampering has come out the same way: There is no evidence to support those claims. Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than argue that it could have reasonably believed Dominion’s vote-counting machines were rigged. (Not that they were rigged, but that there was any reasonable doubt about their accuracy.)

But none of that matters. No institution — not even one Trump cultists establish themselves, like the audit of Arizona’s votes — can declare once and for all that Trump lost.

Loss of Depth. Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — Marjorie Taylor Greene confusing “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” comes to mind — are now everyday events.

Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Remember George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism“? The idea in a nutshell was that if conservative policies produced a more prosperous society, the rising tide might lift more people out of poverty than liberal attempts to help people through government programs. Things never actually worked out that way, but the intention behind the phrase was clear: Conservatives didn’t want to be seen as selfish or heartless bad guys. They also want a better world, they just have a different vision of how to get there.

Later Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney worked hard to build images as good, decent men, reasonable and courteous to a fault. If the policies they supported might lead to more poverty, more suffering, or even more death, that was lamentable and surely not what they intended.

But in 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer made a shocking observation about the first Trump administration: The Cruelty is the Point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

In the second Trump administration, this tendency has become even more blatant. Consider:

• Pete Hegseth marked Pride Month by renaming the only Navy ship named for a gay man.
• After California Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for attempting to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question, Vice President J. D. Vance referred to Padilla as “José”, a reference to José Padilla, who is a convicted terrorist.
• After admitting in court that deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador was an “administrative error”, the Trump administration kept him there until they could gin up a criminal case against him. Now they are preventing his release from the criminal charge by threatening to re-deport him somewhere else. And they have assembled testimony against him by making deals with criminals who have done things far worse than Garcia is accused of.
• Trump referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor … of the great state of Canada“.
• Associated Press reporters have been banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One because AP still calls the Gulf of Mexico by its true name rather than the idiotic name Trump made up for it.

I could go on. It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

You might think this intentional assholery would get Trump in trouble with his Evangelical Christian base, because — I can’t believe I have to write this — Jesus was not an asshole. Jesus preached compassion and empathy.

But Evangelicals are making this work out by turning their backs on the teachings of Jesus. Recent books like The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy explain how empathy is a bad thing — precisely because it might cause you to regret the pain that the policies you support inflict on other people.

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Where does a recognition of these issues leave us? Don’t get me wrong. I would like nothing better than for a Democratic wave to sweep the 2026 midterms and then give us a non-MAGA president in 2028. But that is the beginning of the change we need, not the end.

What America needs runs far deeper than a new set of political leaders. We need some sort of spiritual or cultural reformation, one that rededicates Americans to the pursuit of truth and the responsibility to be trustworthy. It would cause us to care about each other rather than rejoice in each other’s pain. It would start us looking for leaders who bring out the best in us rather than the worst.

How do we get that reformation started? I really have no idea. I just see the need.

The most dangerous feature of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is one of its least publicized: ICE becomes a massive federal police force, overseeing a system of “detention” centers that could easily become concentration camps.

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Despite all the side deals necessary to get it passed, the basic structure of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill never changed from proposal to signing: It cuts rich people’s taxes (with a few crumbs like no-tax-on-tips thrown in for working people), and partially pays for those cuts by also cutting safety-net benefits like Medicaid and SNAP (i.e., food stamps). What those cuts don’t cover gets added to the deficit. So:

• benefits for rich people
• cuts for poor people
• more debt for everyone.

Probably you knew that, and maybe you also heard that there was money for immigration enforcement. But the sheer size of the new anti-immigrant money hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. NPR estimates the total immigration enforcement appropriation as “about $170 billion“. That’s larger than the defense budget of Russia.

The bill includes $45 billion to build Trump’s border wall. (So much for claims that he nearly completed it during his first term or that Mexico would pay for it. He didn’t build much of it and Mexico isn’t contributing a dime.) But the scarier piece of this is the additional $45 billion to build more ICE detention camps. The WaPo reports:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they plan to use the [$45 billion] to roughly double the nation’s detention capacity to 100,000 beds, giving them more capacity to arrest undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation.

Lincoln Square’s Don Moynihan puts this in perspective.

For context, this is more than the combined budget for all 50 state prison systems. The current budget for the federal Bureau of Prisons is just over $8.3 billion.

There is also money to hire many more ICE agents.

The agency, which currently has about 6,000 deportation officers, would also receive billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029.

Masked ICE agents kidnapping people off the streets and making them disappear is already a cause for concern. So is the Trump administration’s claim that ICE’s victims should not have due process rights. Now consider the possibility that the majority of these new agents will have less loyalty to the Constitution than to Trump personally. They will be Trump hires empowered to carry out a Trump mission (with the perk that they get to beat up a lot of brown people).

Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol comments:

Last spring, when Dan Ziblatt and I taught a comparative course on democratic backsliding, our study of the Hungarian and German (1920s-30s) cases left me slightly reassured about the United States today.  Hungary is highly centralized, and in Germany the most important state transformation happened just before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, when the previous government nationalized the Prussian police and bureaucracy, removing it from Social Democratic control in federated Germany’s largest state.  Not long after, unexpectedly, Hitler could easily turn the centralized agencies into his Gestapo core.  I thought last year that the USA was somewhat protected against any similar coerceive authoritarian takeover by its federal structure, given state and local government rights to control most U.S. police powers (I presented this argument in my Madison lecture for the Sept 2024 American Political Science Association). 

But now I see that the Miller-Trump ethno-authoritarians have figured out a devilishly clever workaround.   Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice.  Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources – much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens.  The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants.  They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can. 

Jay Kuo draws a worrisome conclusion that I share:

Once you spend that much on internal security, the system—which is profit-driven by the companies providing the apparatus—begins to feed on itself. It will demand ever more bodies in a supercharged prison/industrial complex.

And fascism expert Timothy Snyder is using the C-word:

With the passage of Trump’s death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.

In particular, Snyder worries that the detainees might become slave labor, which makes a perverted kind of sense: As Trump causes a labor shortage by rounding up immigrants, the detained immigrants might be rented out to do things like pick crops.

If these fears seem over-the-top, consider a little history. The Nazi concentration camps were not originally conceived as death mills. Hitler used the Reichstag Fire (in February, 1933) as evidence that a Communist revolution was at hand, and began rounding up his political enemies as Communist co-conspirators. Needing a place to put them, he opened the Dachau concentration camp in March.

At the time, Dachau was just a place political opponents could be kept outside the ordinary legal process. But as time went by, the convenience of having a black hole they could drop people into was just too tempting for the Nazi government. The mission of Dachau and the subsequent camps kept expanding, until they became the horror we now associate with concentration camps.

I find it too easy to imagine history repeating itself. ICE already sees itself as unencumbered by law, and its targets as undeserving of human rights. ICE may not, at the moment, be a Gestapo, and places like the new Alligator Alcatraz in Florida may not yet deserve the Alligator Auschwitz label critics have given it. But what prevents that progression from taking place?

All the visible forces push that way. We have already seen reality drift from the Trump administration’s rhetoric. Supposedly ICE was “making us safer” by rounding up violent criminals. But now they’re grabbing harmless people who are simply raising their children and doing their jobs, like the wife of this Marine Corps veteran and the father of three Marine sons. TracReports estimates that 71.7% of ICE detainees have no criminal record. CBS discovered that a similar percentage of the Venezuelans flown to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison had no criminal record.

Here’s a simple example of ICE’s sense of license: Florida law gives members of the legislature the right to make unannounced inspections of any state-run facility. Five Democratic legislators showed up to inspect Alligator Alcatraz and were denied access. Law? What law?

Imagine that someday you get scooped by ICE, maybe because you have brown skin and Spanish surname, or maybe because some AI has determined that your blog is too critical of Trump. There you are in Alligator Alcatraz or some other camp designed to hold undesirables. The letter of the law favors you, but the lawyers your family hires get the kind of run-around Kilmar Abrego Garcia has gotten. Where does your story go from there?

When I began as a scientist-turned-Senate staffer 20 years ago, I momentarily thought the “R&D” my new colleagues mentioned had to do with research and development. Minutes later, I realized they meant Republicans and Democrats, but that moment told me everything I needed to know: I was in a new world, with new rules.

Since then, I’ve spent two decades moving between academia and the Hill—under both Republican and Democratic majorities—with one goal: helping science inform policy. But I’ve also seen why many well-meaning efforts by scientists fall flat.

The truth? Policymaking doesn’t work the way most scientists think it does. And the real gatekeepers aren’t always who you think.

I’ve written a new piece for Issues in Science and Technology that distills what I’ve learned from both first-hand experience and my research interviewing senior congressional staffers about how scientific information is actually received, filtered, and (sometimes) used on Capitol Hill.

A few surprising takeaways:

• Not one staffer said they’d turn to scientists first when facing a science-related question.

• Party leadership, lobbyists, and trusted friends-of-friends often have more influence than peer-reviewed studies.

• Scientists are unintentionally sidelining themselves by only engaging with one side of the aisle.

If you care about science shaping real policy outcomes, the article lays out what it really takes to be heard—and how scientists can start showing up more effectively.

👉 [Read it here]

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been a while since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.” So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the United States. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the NFL. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

Reading

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

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I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.

This study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer. Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.

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Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.

Writing

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

Either that, or it looks like this:

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man paradoxically rejects the idea that people always act in their own self-interest, arguing instead that humans often behave irrationally to assert their free will. He criticizes rationalist philosophies like utilitarianism, which he sees as reducing individuals to predictable mechanisms, and insists that people may choose suffering just to prove their autonomy. However, his stance is self-contradictory—while he champions free will, he is paralyzed by inaction and self-loathing, trapped in a cycle of bitterness. Through this, Dostoevsky explores the tension between reason, free will, and self-interest, exposing the complexities of human motivation.

That’s right, ChatGPT. The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.

What’s changed?

The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection.

What has changed exactly?

• Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”

• Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop out or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the students, “Look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”

• They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting their phone fix.

• It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology, or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

Hilarius Bookbinder is the pseudonym for a tenured professor with an Ivy League PhD who writes Scriptorium Philosophia.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Scriptorium Philosophia.

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In April 2025, while most of the world was clutching pearls over trade war tit-for-tat tariffs, China calmly walked over to the supply chain and yanked out a handful of critical bolts. The bolts are made of dysprosium, terbium, tungsten, indium and yttrium—the elements that don’t make headlines but without ... [continued]

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Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition,
and they haven’t even taken power yet.

---

When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.

Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.

But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?

First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.

But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)

But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.

Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.

It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.

In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.

Trump did not get the extra he wanted: suspending or eliminating the debt limit. But Musk did get what he wanted: The original proposal included an “outbound investment” provision limiting how American companies could invest in China.

We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.

Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.

One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.

Lo and behold: The outbound investment provision vanished from the final version of the continuing resolution. In other words, Republicans in Congress spent their negotiating chips getting what Musk wanted, not what Trump wanted.

Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.

However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.

Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.

The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.

Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:

The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.

This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.

Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.

Then Musk was attacked back, and responded by taking away privileges on X from people who criticized him. (Remember when Elon was a “free speech absolutist“? It turns out that just applies to Nazis.)

I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:

Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.