Persuasion

Democrats did so well in last Tuesday’s midterm elections that for a few days afterwards it was possible to imagine we’d just lived through the end of the Trump era.

On social media and podcasts, pundits took note of the fact that the president appeared to accept the outcome without a fight. Could this mean he would be open to bipartisanship with the new and sizable Democratic majorities in Congress? Or perhaps that he would recede from governing altogether, allowing aides to run the show while he all but retired to the White House? Or might it even be possible he would resign the presidency, allowing Vice President JD Vance to take over and the country as a whole to move on from the anxiety and dramas of the past decade?

Such musings were nice while they lasted—but they didn’t last long. The fantasies came to an abrupt end on Friday, when the president announced on Truth Social that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would be stepping down to be replaced by Stephen Miller.

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Miller served as a senior advisor to the president in the first Trump administration, with special focus on immigration policy. Since the start of the second administration, he has been Homeland Security Advisor and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. But this rundown of Miller’s resume fails to capture what is most distinctive about him. Miller is a true-believing MAGA ideologue, a fiercely committed Trump loyalist, someone convinced Judeo-Christian white civilization is fatally threatened with a “great replacement” by people from other races and religions, and a man who longs to see the president assert and wield unconstrained power.

Far from signaling the conclusion of the Trump era, the midterm elections of 2026 now look likely to be viewed as the moment when the country began to confront an even more intense challenge to liberal democratic principles from the hardline xenophobic right than the one we’ve already been enduring for much of the past 10 years.

When Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama saw their parties’ congressional majorities swept away by midterm discontent, they were chastened. Their embrace of greater moderation after electoral rebukes flowed partly from an acceptance of political reality: With Congress lost, governing required the trimming of sails and a willingness to compromise with ideological opponents.

But there was more to it than this. Politicians in a democracy typically defer to and respect public opinion, even when they disagree with it. Just as a solid electoral victory bestows a sense of democratic legitimacy on a governing agenda, a drubbing does the reverse. It conveys vital information about how the American people are responding to that agenda. When the response is sufficiently negative, the former sense of legitimacy diminishes or vanishes altogether, leaving a president and his party weakened.

Though only if the president is open to receiving the message.

Trump’s decision to promote Miller to the position of White House Chief of Staff is an undeniable sign that the president has no intention whatsoever of deferring to the message of displeasure the midterm elections conveyed. On the contrary, the president appears eager to defy that message. Rather than feeling chastened, Trump seems committed to moving further away from anything resembling moderation and compromise. Whereas the election showed that many more Americans disapprove of how Trump is governing the country than support it, the president thinks the right response is to double down on a maximally MAGA agenda.

Miller is passionately devoted to the cause of doing exactly that. In addition to strongly supporting Trump’s protectionist tariff agenda and the vaccine skepticism of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he is an unapologetic anti-immigration zealot. Miller wants ICE and the Border Patrol to deport as many people as possible as quickly as possible, without regard for the effect this will have on immigrant communities, families, and children, or for whether the immigrants have committed any crime since arriving in the country. (Miller was the primary advocate behind the highly unpopular policy of family separation that generated considerable controversy and was eventually abandoned during the first Trump administration.)

This makes Miller an extremist on the issue. But it’s not merely his goals that are radical. It’s also the means he believes should be employed to achieve his preferred ends. When an ICE agent killed anti-ICE protester Renee Good in Minneapolis last winter, Miller immediately labeled her, without evidence, a “domestic terrorist,” just as he described protester Alex Pretti, a nurse shot to death in the same city 17 days later by two federal immigration agents, as a “would-be assassin.”

These hyperbolic lies were not exceptions for Miller. They were expressions of a worldview rooted in panic and alarm about the existential threat immigration and its defenders pose to the American way of life. The threat is so acute that Miller has long advocated suspending habeas corpus (the requirement that government officials must legally justify detaining a person) for noncitizens, despite its presence in Article I of the Constitution. The rule has been suspended four times in American history, each time in conformity with the constitutional stipulation that a suspension can only be put into effect in times of rebellion or invasion.

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That’s why Miller consistently calls, and urges the president to call, immigration a form of “invasion” that is leading the country to being “conquered”—that is, in order to lay the legal groundwork for such a move. (Miller has also called birthright citizenship “a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic” that will produce the “suicide” of our “civilization,” and has denied the Democrats are even a party, preferring to call them “a domestic extremist organization.”) As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times reported, others in the administration have actively opposed Miller’s efforts in this area, though with Miller set to run the White House, such opposition will now likely be neutered.

Miller (along with Vance) has likewise been a leading advocate of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act against those protesting deportation sweeps. Doing so would give the president exceptionally broad powers to deploy military forces on American soil. As with the suspension of habeas corpus, Miller favors Trump asserting these powers in order to test the limits of what the system will permit the president to do in emergency situations.

The emphasis on emergency is key. Political philosophers as different from one another as Aristotle, John Locke, and Carl Schmitt have recognized that legal norms, and even the rule of law itself, can be justly set aside in emergency situations in which the very survival of the polity is at stake. The question then becomes: What constitutes a genuine emergency or situation of existential threat? The answer can ultimately be determined only by elected officials, judges, and citizens exercising independent judgment.

That points to an exceedingly dangerous possibility. What if someone in power continually describes the status quo as a situation involving a dire threat—or even behaves in such a way as to provoke the very chaotic conditions that would justify their own seizure of post-constitutional rule? The first option (threat inflation) is something Miller, along with the president and countless right-wing “influencers,” regularly engages in. Meanwhile, the second (acting to cause the very crisis that justifies an extralegal seizure of power) is what Miller seems to have been hoping for last winter in Minnesota.

In the end, cooler heads in the White House prevailed, leading ICE to back off its highly aggressive actions in the state.

Who were those cooler heads? We have reason to suspect that one of them may have been outgoing Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. According to the reporting by Haberman and Swan, the push to suspend habeas corpus for noncitizens was abandoned after an “archconservative” White House lawyer named Will Scharf wrote a confidential memo to Wiles making the case against any such move. Did Scharf write the memo unbidden? Or, more likely, did Wiles ask him to put his misgivings down on paper in order to provide herself with legal justification for quashing the power grab?

Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, it’s clear where Miller was eager to go—and equally clear that he has now been elevated to a position within the administration that will enable him to make the crucial judgment calls about what the nation’s ongoing immigration “emergency” requires with regard to habeas corpus and the Insurrection Act. He will be making these calls with no oversight at all, besides the minimal and mercurial one provided by the man who just promoted him.

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We should be very grateful that the president and his fanatical enabler will be facing broad Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress come January 3, 2027. But we shouldn’t downplay the threat that they nonetheless pose to the competent and lawful functioning of democracy in the United States over the next two years. Those in charge of the executive branch may well actively seek to precipitate a constitutional crisis in the hope of testing the outer limits of presidential power.

That’s a situation no American should hope for—though it is one all of us need to be prepared for.

Damon Linker, a contributing writer at Persuasion, writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

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After being massively repudiated in Tuesday’s midterm election, Donald Trump has become a lame-duck president with significantly curtailed authority. What is likely to happen in the remaining two years until a new chief executive is sworn in on January 20, 2029?

It should be obvious at this point that Trump will not bow to the popular will and move away from those policies that have proven to be so toxic. Completely in character, early signs are that he is doubling down, as indicated by his replacement of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with hardliner Stephen Miller, and the weird choice of offering Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a man described by Trump as “a violent Fighter and Warrior,” the role of press secretary. Meanwhile, lame-duck presidents of the past have embarked on new foreign policy initiatives in their remaining years, since the Constitution gives them much more discretionary authority than in domestic policy.

So what can we expect?

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at The Financial Times. His latest book is The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, now out in paperback with a new chapter on Donald Trump’s second term.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Martin Wolf discuss whether democratic capitalism can recover from the damage done by populists like Donald Trump, how artificial intelligence might upend both the economy and humanity’s control over its own fate, and whether a bursting AI bubble or France’s fiscal woes could trigger the next financial crisis.

Note: This episode was recorded on November 3, before the election results were available.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Martin. I’m really excited to talk about a bunch of the contemporary economic issues facing the United States, Europe, and the world today. But I want to start by revisiting The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, your really magisterial book about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It is now a few years old and has just come out in a paperback edition with a new chapter.

Looking back from today’s vantage point, do you remain optimistic that, for all of the challenges we face, we are capable of continuing to reconcile our capitalist system with our democratic institutions, and that we will be able to avert the threats that risk undermining each of those elements?

Martin Wolf: Overall, I’m a little less optimistic. Not dramatically less optimistic, but less optimistic. Very briefly, I feel two things. The first relates to a basic theme of my book. Quite apart from the benefits of moral development in some sense, education and so forth, the capitalist economy that we created in the 19th century and roughly the first three quarters of the 20th century quite naturally generated a redistribution of power in society.

We moved, as it were, from feudalism and pre-modern structures based around land ownership to the modern capitalist economy, with an increasingly organized and powerful working class. Workers were genuinely powerful because they had education and they could easily coalesce and coordinate. That was an environment in which there was a very real risk of major war, and we saw that linked with the formation of the nation state. But there was also tremendous democratic pressure.

In the end, we seem to have reconciled all of that in the post-Second World War period, which was really very important. That underpinning has very obviously been cracking, and that was a theme of my book. But when I wrote it, I still thought that if we understood how damaging and how dangerous this was for living tolerably, we would prevent the worst.

That leads to the second theme, which is very much the theme of this revision. It contains an extra chapter on the Trump experience, Trump’s second term and so forth. What has become obvious is that we do now elect really quite radically reactionary governments. Maybe that’s not the right word, because they’re more complex than that: radically demagogic, populist governments. And we seem likely to do so now in other countries in Europe, which also seemed to be stable. The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems to undo that, because of the damage that is done.

You start not with something that is mildly damaged but with something that is, in some respects, wrecked. Finally, there are changes in technology and society, of which AI is obviously the most important and the most recent. But we’ve had others before that, social media and all the rest of it, which make it so difficult for people to organize politically in the way they used to. The parties of the left and right are just different institutions from what they were when I was young.

So I now begin to think that reversing all this and going back to the things we were familiar with is just a pipe dream. What that means for the future is really open, but in this respect I’ve become more concerned. We’ll see about the Trump experience in the next few years, perhaps. But undoing the damage he has done domestically and internationally—and the U.S. is so pivotal—is going to be an immense task.

One very last comment on this. The Polish experience, which I discuss, is actually live right now as we talk because of the argument with the president. It shows just how difficult it is to reverse.

Mounk: I’m struck by how much more negative and pessimistic the tenor of this added chapter is compared to the overall tenor of your book. The book was obviously written in alarm and with concern, but it still seemed to have a certain baseline confidence that, in the end, the enormous advantages and achievements of democratic capitalism would allow it to persist.

Perhaps we’ve gone on slightly different trajectories over the course of the last 10 years. Perhaps I was much more alarmed in 2017 than you were, and perhaps I’m a little less alarmed than you are today. Your book came out, if I remember correctly, before Donald Trump was reelected.

Wolf: Yeah, it came out in early ‘23.

Mounk: So obviously the fact that Trump was able to get reelected was very concerning and upsetting. But look back at January 2025, when Trump was taking office. He seemed to have a much more efficient staff than in 2016. He had control of a much more unified Republican Party. He seemed to be implementing Project 2025 and other plans for remaking the state very quickly. The Department of Government Efficiency was trying to dismantle large parts of the federal bureaucracy.

He was talking about taking possession of the Panama Canal and of Greenland. He wanted to introduce sky-high tariffs across the board. He had total control of the government. That felt like a very perilous moment. Internationally, it was a moment in which Narendra Modi was riding high in India, and in which there was good reason to believe that democracy had basically been abolished in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Serbia by Vučić, and in other places.

A couple of years on, it feels to me that Trump is now finally fading from the American political system. Many of my colleagues have written this once a week for the last 10 years, but I only wrote it for the first time a few months ago. He is at record-low approval ratings. We happen to be recording this on the day of the midterms, and it is very likely that Democrats will win the House of Representatives, and probably the Senate.

Most of the governorships are going to go to Democrats, so it’s going to be very hard for Republicans to skew the vote in 2028, because the vote will be administered by and large by Democratic governors and secretaries of state. More broadly, Trump has done a lot of damage. He has been enormously corrupt and has shot his own country in the foot. But the Supreme Court has struck down a lot of the tariffs. The U.S. economy continues to be surprisingly robust. The attempt to dismantle the federal bureaucracy quickly stalled. They have effectively managed to abolish USAID, but beyond that there haven’t been changes as big as were expected.

Internationally, Viktor Orbán has gone as a result of free and fair democratic elections. Even Vučić appears to be stepping aside. Modi looks more vulnerable than he did recently because of the cockroach movement.

So perhaps we need to move away from the idea that there’s a functioning set of democracies facing threats from populism outside, and either we win or we lose. Instead, we’re going to be in a period of much lower-quality governance, with many more irrational policies and bad governments that do really damaging things. But perhaps the threat to democracy and to the capitalist system is a little less existential than I might have thought five or 10 years ago. Am I really naive to try and see this optimistically, in this vein?

Wolf: I don’t think you are, because the truth is we don’t know. I’ve tried to think hard about historical analogies, and there’s never one that’s perfect.

So I’m beginning to think that maybe the best model for how politics might work in many countries is South America. They have dictatorial regimes, but those regimes don’t last very long. At some point they’re cajoled into elections, partly because of outside pressure, though a lot of the pressure has come from within. Then there is a democratic government, and there’s some respect for civil rights. But the fundamental problems aren’t resolved.

At one stage I called this a populist cycle, but perhaps you could call it a populist-democratic cycle. It goes on. Government is never really efficient, because institutions don’t last long enough. They’re not stable enough. The people in them aren’t secure enough or valued enough to be really very good. But on the other hand, they’re not catastrophic either.

You go on like this. When I look at the government of my own country since the financial crisis, it increasingly feels like that. We’ve had a succession of governments, none of which is really in control. They’re not really effective. All over Europe, I think it’s similar. They will quite possibly be replaced at some point by some sort of populist government of the right or left, but that won’t end democracy. It’s just dysfunctional. That’s much worse than what we had before, but it’s not a properly functioning autocracy.

In many of these countries—India is another example—you won’t end up with a Putin-type regime, because that’s very specific. But you will end up with regimes that oscillate between attempts to create a properly functioning, old-fashioned democracy and, on the other hand, decidedly corrupt, ineffective, but still malevolent populist dictatorships, which could be of the right or the left.

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That now seems to me quite a plausible future. In that respect, the parallels I once saw with the 1930s don’t seem right anymore. But at the same time, I don’t feel that the stable, self-confident democratic systems of my youth will survive, except perhaps in countries like Switzerland. Maybe the Netherlands, though that’s not so clear. Scandinavia, I think—small, very solidly bourgeois countries. But in the rest of the world, it doesn’t look like that. You could think of this as optimistic or pessimistic, but it’s not what I would prefer.

Mounk: I think we’re converging on a shared interpretation of a glass of water that is a quarter full or three quarters empty. One way of thinking about this from the perspective of political science is through regime types. I’ve been saying for a very long time that it’s not helpful to think about democracy and dictatorship as ones or zeros.

Wolf: Yes, of course. That was the Cold War scenario.

Mounk: Yes, but no system is perfectly autocratic and no system is perfectly democratic. There’s a huge range of gradations between them. One helpful political science concept is that of competitive authoritarianism, or at least of an uneven playing field, where somebody like Orbán or Vučić is able to capture power. They make the playing field uneven, and they favor themselves in all kinds of ways. That makes it hard for the opposition to displace them. But there is a genuine competition between the government and the opposition, and when the government becomes sufficiently unpopular, the opposition might be able to come in. And perhaps the opposition is great and democratic for a few years. But perhaps they themselves start to emulate the same norms and govern in abusive ways. And at some point a party that really doesn’t care about democratic norms is going to be back in power.

Another way of thinking about it is perhaps as what my colleague Roberto Foa and I once called a “dirty democracy.” Instead of the rules being set for everybody and everybody competing to get into government by the existing rules, a lot of the game consists in influencing, manipulating, and exploiting the rules of the game in such a way that you’re more likely to stay in.

That’s still a game, right? You’re not able to capture the rules to such an extent that the opposition can never win. But a lot of the effort in this polity is then taken up not with putting forward the better ideas for governance, not even with a battle of values, but with trying to maneuver in complicated ways to shape the rules of the game in your favor, to make it more likely that you then win the next election.

Wolf: But there is an important point, at least I as an economist would insist on. What you’re describing is a massively costly regime type, particularly for any functioning economy. So what makes a functioning economy work? People have to make really long-term, risky investments. And by long-term, I mean decades.

If they are to do that, they need to feel that the rules of the economic game, by which I mean the rule of law, their ownership of property, and the ability to trust contracts, are secure. They need to be able to assume that the government services they will need will be provided reliably, consistently, and without corruption, and that the trade regime and the monetary regime they’re operating under are predictable. And if those are changed, they’re changed as a result of a legislative process that involves serious debates and discussions.

It’s a slightly naive way of defining it, but this is pretty close to what was created in the West after the Second World War. And it launched a period of just staggering economic advance. I was lecturing about this yesterday to a group of Chinese business people, and I said that the world order created after the Second World War is incomparably the most successful in world history. And it was because of this, and because of the opportunities that it also extended to people in developing countries, including China.

Now, the world you describe—the world of South America, which, by the way, has done particularly badly in this period relative to what it should have done—is very, very far from that. It’s a world in which you constantly have autocrats and their coteries coming along and acting in whimsical, willful, and corrupt ways. Whether you can go ahead with your project will depend to some extent on whether you can seduce or corrupt some bunch of bureaucrats to help you. Of course, that means you will use them to help you against your rivals, whom they will have to act against.

So everything is politicized, as opposed to everything happening in accordance with well-established principles. The support for science, technology, free inquiry, and genuine free debate will again be politicized. And societies like this—indeed, this is mostly what we have in the world now—in my view don’t perform very well.

I agree with you that the U.S. is doing reasonably well economically, but I would say that’s because it is pursuing a radically unsustainable fiscal policy in the long run, which is, of course, generating demand in the short run. And there’s the AI boom, but the AI boom is the fruit of decades of technological development that happened to come to this crescendo right now. It’s got nothing to do with what this administration is doing.

So I would say you’re absolutely right: there are far worse things than this. It’s far better to have this than Stalinism or Hitler, obviously. On the other hand, it’s going to be pretty unpleasant, and everything will be, as it were, for sale. Everything will be unpredictable in every possible dimension.

And this comes back to the point we were discussing. I think the damage from the Trump experience has been bigger than you suggest. Telling people “we’re going to go back to the way it was before,” when they’ve lived in these circumstances I’ve just described—well, they’re not going to believe it. They’re not going to behave as they used to, because they’ll ask: “Can you promise us that there won’t be someone like Trump, or worse, soon? Can you promise us that the bureaucrats I’m going to be dealing with will be honest, honorable, non-corrupt people, which they used to be?” And I think the answer to that is no, you can’t.

So I think you’re absolutely right that there are far worse things. And it’s very encouraging that these would-be autocrats have had their wings clipped, and I assume that’s going to happen now in the midterms. But it’s very far from what we had before, when we could be confident that the system would work.

Mounk: Look, I think that’s right. Living in Argentina is a hell of a lot better than living in North Korea, or for that matter in Russia. But at the same time, while a hundred years ago it famously might not have been clear whether you’d rather emigrate to Argentina or to the United States, today, if you have a choice between living in the United States, with its economic opportunities, or in Argentina, it’s relatively obvious that you would choose the United States, because the country has done a lot better. And as you’re pointing out, that’s not because of the governance we’ve had for the last 18 months—or the last 24 months—it’s because of the governance we’ve had for the last 60 or 200 years. So I think we’re on the same page about that.

One of the ironies I find about this moment is that the world is being radically and fundamentally transformed by artificial intelligence, and we’re going to have to think very hard about the kind of government response we need. That’s partially about regulation, to make sure that people can’t steal financial information and bankrupt you through cyberattacks. It’s partially about making sure that people can’t manufacture viruses that are going to kill millions, or tens or hundreds of millions, of people. But it’s also about thinking about how to preserve and reinstitute the basic structural preconditions for a middle-class economy and for inclusive political institutions.

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Now, 20 or 25 years ago, it feels to me like a lot of the major democracies in the world might have had the self-confidence, and perhaps the lack of polarization, to go about that in a rational way. Perhaps that was never really the case, but at least there would have been grand commissions by think tanks involving a bipartisan set of people that would have done briefings for top officials. There would at least have been the expectation that there would be some rational analysis of the problem, a set of proposals being debated and discussed, and policy made on the basis of that.

It’s very hard to imagine that world today, right? And so we’re confronting this huge challenge of artificial intelligence at a time when our collective self-confidence in being able to govern it is much lower than it would have been 25 or 50 years ago.

Wolf: Yes, I think that’s clearly right. I’ve suggested this in a few of my writings on AI. The first column I wrote on this, and I still think the best, started off with the history of the horse, which is quite well documented. I pointed out that up until the end of the 19th century, the horse was really—we could argue a bit about the sailing ship—the most important transport technology in the world. And now horses are just for entertainment.

So it seemed to me that there’s a lesson. Of course, my economist friends say, “Well, of course, we’re much more complicated than the horse.” Yes. But if it turns out that the most important thing human beings can do is to think, which I think is true—and that doesn’t just mean thinking intellectually, it means thinking in everything we do—and we can create AI and robots (I was just talking to somebody who does robots yesterday), then it doesn’t seem impossible to imagine a world in which everybody who has any money would rather have, apart from their few loved ones, machines around them. It’s an interesting question what having money will even mean in the future, but let’s leave that aside.

So what is the rest of humanity for? I sometimes begin to wonder whether the really deep reason why nobody’s having any children anymore is that, at some deep psychological level, they’ve realized that there is no future for their children, so they are acting preemptively. I’m not suggesting that’s true, but it does seem fascinating that there is this coincidence in time.

But the fundamental point you make is obviously right. This is a revolution. Now, here it interacts with politics in the following way. The most striking feature of the politics of the last 30 years—and it was essential in my book, though lots of others have written about it—is the rejection by the body politic of “experts,” of intellectuals, who have come to be seen and portrayed as the enemy.

I understand why, because the sort of policies the intellectuals and experts recommended, very much including economists, don’t seem to have worked from the point of view of most people. And so that opened room for people to get into power essentially by running against them. The most striking feature, in some sense, of the Trump revolution, or attempted overthrow of the old order, or whatever it is, is the war against universities. It’s a war that was possible because the intelligentsia here discredited itself. I think it did so.

Now, 40 years ago, the idea that any government in America would plausibly run against Harvard, or here against Oxford and Cambridge, would have been unthinkable. So that comes back to our thinking about AI. The process you are discussing should have involved ordinary people. I very much believe in citizens’ assemblies; it’s one of my democratic romanticisms. But of course, in discussing AI we’d need very high-level expertise, and indeed a royal commission would be the obvious thing to do if you were Britain or the equivalent. In the same way—though I know all the differences—when in the ‘50s and ‘60s they were thinking about how to control nuclear weapons, they talked to people like Thomas Schelling, very famously. And I think if we’d really been asked, we could have thought at least moderately intelligently about the real risks.

The idea—I’ve got this in my column for tomorrow—that Anthropic would put out in its IPO, for a business that seems likely to be valued in the trillion-dollar range, that, well, one of the risks is that we might end humanity, as it were, en passant Anthropic IPO risk disclosure. It’s a reductio ad absurdum of learned helplessness. I do think the reason we can’t do it is that, somehow or other, the intelligentsia has discredited itself, and it has been successfully discredited by its enemies. Running a really sophisticated, complex modern polity embedded in this complicated world, while being against the intelligentsia—any form of it—just seems crazy. It’s a theme of one of the things in my book.

Compare it with what the New Deal was like. I wrote a bit about Dean Acheson recently. And then you look at what the Trump administration has done to the State Department or the intelligence services. And then you look at what they’ve been saying about the Iran war. It’s all crazy stuff. Admittedly, it was pretty crazy in Vietnam too.

But the point is, I don’t think we can recover that confidence in our ability to control these things. So they are uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and the Anthropic IPO shows that.

Mounk: If they’re likely to be uncontrolled, what do you think the economic impacts of this AI revolution are going to be? On the one hand, if intelligence was the ingredient of the economy that was scarce, then suddenly having a country of geniuses in your laptop, or whatever the phrase is, should unleash huge amounts of productivity and that might produce more goods and services in ways that make us all wealthier.

At the same time, there’s deep concerns about the distribution of those goods and services, and there’s deep concerns about whether or not human workers will still be needed in the ways they are today, and what that might do to the size of the middle class, which is something that I’ve been thinking and worrying about. Stepping back, to what extent can we predict what’s going to happen? How should we go about thinking about what this totally uncharted territory might look like?

Wolf: I think all those questions are the right questions. But I actually begin to think they’re not the most important questions. I may be completely wrong, but perhaps because they’re so predictably economic sort of questions, I’ve been wondering whether we’re not being radical enough in our thinking about what this means.

First of all, we live in a world in which literally everything is run through the digital economy. I mean, just everything. It seems to be absolutely inevitable that AI-enabled computing, which will be everything, will take this over. They’re gonna run it. We’ve already seen pretty clear signs—to which, of course, Dario Amodei has been referring—that they’re not necessarily gonna run it in ways that we would think are sensible or right or moral or anything. They seem to be extraordinarily willful and erratic and out of control. So in some sense, they can do anything, whether on their own or when guided by hackers.

In Europe just today, in Sweden, I think it is, we’ve got a story about some hackers—might be an AI bot, might be some hackers—that have got control of the freezers in supermarkets and have decided to raise the temperature to levels that rot all the food. These all look like terrorism.

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What happens if that’s the normal state? My nightmare—and it just seems impossible—is that we wake up one morning and discover that every single bank account in the world has been nullified. Everyone’s. In which case, the world economy stops. Period. It’s done. Can we guarantee that won’t happen in this world? I don’t see how.

Mounk: I’ve been thinking about whether I should take printouts of my bank accounts regularly, so that in such a world you at least have some kind of proof.

Wolf: Yeah, I think you probably should. Every day, the businesses of the world—every single business—are doing trillions of dollars, collectively, in financing on a daily basis. They can’t do that without the system. The electric power systems of our world, everything else, can’t do that. So we are going to lose control of the core institutions, the core operating system of our world. I don’t think it is possible to guess what that will mean.

The second thing I was thinking about—we have this idea that at the end of this, we go back, as an extreme, and it’s suggested by your model, to a sort of feudal economy, but accept that the vast majority of human beings actually have no labor value, because machines will do all that stuff. We won’t even need serfs, as it were. Most human beings are completely redundant. The machines that run the economy will be owned by a tiny elite of super wealthy people—the likes of Elon Musk and so forth—and all the goodies will go to them.

I don’t see why that should happen, because why should these machines pay the slightest attention to these notional ownership claims of these fragile little human things? They have their own purposes and aims. Why should we assume—I’m being very, very science fiction—that... So I think everything you say is right, these are all good questions, but I think AI is more radical, potentially more destabilizing, less controllable than that.

But, of course, just one last thing: it’s perfectly possible to imagine an upheaval which will make the deindustrialization process, itself radically destabilizing, look like a garden party, because people won’t be doing what you or I do. Most physicists and others will be replaced by brilliant machines. How quickly that will happen, I have no idea. Maybe human originality will survive. But the fundamental question, of course, is: what value do humans have? An even more fundamental question is: do human beings continue to control things?

Mounk: No, and I think those questions about existential risk—which come in different forms—are absolutely fundamental. One way it could go is that a machine decides to eradicate humanity, either because it wants to take over or because it’s misaligned in some kind of way. Another is just that machines might have some kind of use for us, or perhaps they want to keep us around as a museum of their own prehistory, of their creation, or something like that. But they’re going to be the ones in control.

It’s very interesting to think about bullfighting in this respect. I went to a bullfight many years ago; I was kind of dragged there by somebody, I wasn’t particularly keen to go. But I did actually enjoy it greatly, because I started to realize at a certain point during the event that, when it’s done really, really well, it’s not about celebrating the person with the biggest muscles, or the person with the biggest cojones. It’s not just about muscles or bravery, though those things are involved.

It is principally about the triumph of the human spirit and of intelligence. It is a human standing in front of a beast that is greatly stronger and more powerful than any human being can be—greatly more powerful and stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger or anybody else. But it is through our intelligence that we are able to master the bull. So that raises the question: why should we expect that, in the long run humans, even if we created these AI machines, which might give us some kind of advantage for a while, should continue to be able to govern these weird creatures that are already about as intelligent as us, and in many ways more intelligent, and probably one, three, five years from now will be vastly more intelligent than we are? Why should we have all of that confidence? I think that we should both be thinking about those questions and thinking about the question of how, if we do manage to control AI, it’s still going to transform our social and economic world in deep, deep problematic ways—because both of those are deep threats to our world. But I certainly take the existential risk points very seriously.

Wolf: Well, one thing that is clear is in the world that you described—assume away the existential stuff, just look at the economics—I think in the world we can imagine, in which AI is the dominant instrument of organizing production and so forth, if humanity is to continue in some sense collectively to be the master of its fate, collectively and individually, then there’s going to have to be a far greater degree of socialization of the means of production and distribution and exchange than any of us have thought about. Because it’s very easy to imagine that the marginal product of a great many human beings, compared to the most efficient alternatives, will be negative, or at least not really at what we would consider subsistence level. What are people for in this situation?

Now, there are clearly some things we would still want other people to do—I’m assuming here that there are still people in charge. But I think we’d have to start thinking that the assumptions we have about how the economy will work, how the output we are potentially able to produce will be distributed, and what you need to do to get the things you need to survive and lead a good life—whatever that means in this context—how that will be done, would be radically different from the ways we have organized them.

One way I thought about this is that essentially this could be a world, at the most extreme, in which everybody lives like the aristocrats of old. The aristocrats of old didn’t do anything, basically. They owned land, and they owned the fruit of the labor of the people on the land, and they had soldiers who were theirs who controlled the latter. Well, they could live without actually producing anything. They were rentiers. In the world of AI, if all the production is essentially done by AI, we all become rentiers, and a decent society would share the rents. So we would live not on our ability to produce, but on our right to consume. I’ve never actually written about this. I suggested this in a seminar about 15 years ago in Washington. You could imagine a world in which everybody became an aristocrat. If we’re rich enough, we could organize that world. Everybody could enjoy lots of stuff. They couldn’t enjoy everything—you can’t all have the most beautiful view in the world—but you could imagine that sort of world. Politically, though, it involves a complete transformation of the fundamental assumptions of our economic, social, and political order.

Mounk: Let me ask you about two things here. The first is that I find that analogy imprecise in two ways. The first is that many aristocrats had a lot of leisure, but they were actually responsible for something. In some ways, they were running, in our language today, small- or medium-sized enterprises. A profligate duke could spend money and not care about his fields falling into disarray, and then he would leave a relatively destitute heir. But their social role was to make sure that the heir would get about as much money and fields and so on as they did. So they were responsible for managing, essentially, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of employees. Now, they did that in a relatively arm’s-length way, and the people they employed to go around and look after that did most of the dirty work. But they were actually, in that sense, running little enterprises.

They had a sense of responsibility, and were judged on whether or not they were able to pass on to their heirs what they had received from their parents. The other point you hinted at is that, of course, the lives of aristocrats—insofar as they were happy, and if you read Brideshead Revisited and other kinds of works, there are good questions about the extent to which they were happy; many of them probably had quite empty lives and felt that emptiness—but insofar as they had meaning, they had meaning in part because they had high social status. They had a high positional good. They could go around and say, “I’m a duke.”

I have a whole social world of which I’m a part, and in which I play an essential role in the legitimization of this strange political order, because of my social position. I’m somebody. But not everybody can be somebody by virtue of who they are by birth.

Wolf: That is right. That is something we can’t arrange. We can only arrange that they consume. We can’t arrange to give them this exalted status. I agree with you absolutely, of course. A book that influenced me a lot in thinking about how the morality—the sense of purpose in life—of people like that might collapse, because it’s a brilliant book, is Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose idea was, in a sense—here are these signs of the French aristocracy; of course, when it was written is important—who basically thought, particularly the male ones, that all they can do in life is destroy the lives of young women by seducing them and abandoning them. That’s clearly part of how they lived. So it can be very, very destructive.

I think I’m obviously one of those people—a classic modern person, perhaps pre-modern given where we are now—who thinks that the value in life consists of fruitful work and contributing to society and being part of it. I justify what I’ve done in my life as contributing in some way to political and economic life. That’s value, and I’m paid for it, and I feel very good about it.

In a world in which those functions wouldn’t exist, because they will be done better by an AI program, or because there’s no political system left to advise, then I don’t know what I would do. I do think that without some sense of contributing through one’s own efforts to society... You’re right, of course, dukes felt that too, in the way they did things. Certainly people who held serious positions in the state as a result of their rank. If you take that away from human beings, they basically never grow up. They’re never adults. They are perpetually looked after. That’s not a life. This is, of course, what Brave New World was about.

There are lots of major contributions to literature which play around with exactly this theme: what do you do if there’s no struggle, no effort, and no reward for effort, when you’re basically playing, and you know you’re playing? Well, I think it’s poison. I’m in complete—poison, which is why, as I said, if I were dictator of the world and invited to this commission, I would say this whole thing should be banned, closed, finished. I’ve said this many times. It’s what I believe. But of course it’s not gonna happen.

Mounk: I’m not sure I agree with you on that, for I am very conscious of the dangers of AI, but I actually want to ask a question that brings the conversation a little bit full circle, back to the concerns of your book. You rightly defend the triumph of democratic capitalism in your book, and explain the dangers that await us if that system breaks down. But let’s try and imagine the world fifty or a hundred years from now, if the AI revolution totally takes place. If it does turn out that a lot of the ingredients to productivity that used to be scarce, and that therefore needed to be distributed by markets, no longer are scarce in that way—we have much greater material plenty, nearly unlimited compute, and we have intelligence at our beck and call for negligible or nonexistent prices—most people can be idle, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, and live in material splendor where we find it hard to imagine, and yet we somehow keep control of the AI.

I know these are all very, very large “if” statements, and I think there’s good reason to think a bunch of them don’t turn out to be true. But let’s take that as a premise, as a question, for a moment. Do we still need capitalism in that world? Is capitalism still the right economic system, or will we have to envisage a totally different economic system to govern that kind of a world?

Wolf: The answer, in a way, would relate to where I would challenge the assumptions—and, implicitly, the assumption you’re making, and this, of course, goes back through a whole history, including the prophecies of Karl Marx about the future. It’s been picked up strangely in a very popular recent book, which I’m sure you’ve read, on abundance.

The idea of limitless abundance seems to me to be very difficult to imagine. The reason is there are things that are intrinsically scarce. As long as the things that are intrinsically scarce exist, they have to be allocated in some way. The market is only one way, and some of them probably don’t want to be allocated in that way.

Let’s think about what might not be abundant. First, in your world of limitless abundance, you’re assuming away resource constraints—that means we have limitless energy, we can recycle things freely, as it were, at zero cost, and the basic raw materials for production, metals and all the rest of it, will be freely available. But the most important of these things, unquestionably, is energy. So the world you imagine must, I think, have a limitless energy source, and it probably would have to be fusion. So there are quite big technological problems to solve, which may or may not be soluble.

Then the second set of things—if we don’t solve them, things will continue to be scarce, and we have to have a mechanism for allocating them. It’s either through markets, in some way, which is capitalism, or it’s through hierarchy of some kind. The hierarchies are political, and we have to discuss how those will be organized.

Then the other set of things, which was introduced into my thinking by a magnificent book published in the ’70s by a man called Fred Hirsch, which you might know, called The Social Limits to Growth—which is basically about what are called positional goods. There are a vast number of things that are valuable because they’re intrinsically scarce.

Mounk: Well, and that goes back to the idea that not everybody can be an aristocrat, because the core of being an aristocrat is to be superior to most people in the relevant social hierarchy.

Wolf: Not everybody—for example, think about houses. Land is not freely available. Land is intrinsically constrained. We need houses, and I live in a particularly nice suburb of London, and everybody can’t live here. The result of that—the fact that everybody can’t live here—is that houses cost millions. They didn’t when I bought mine, but they do now.

The point is, everybody can’t live here. Everybody can’t have the perfect view. Everybody can’t own a Swiss lake or a beautiful island in the Caribbean. In other words, there are positional goods which are intrinsically limited by virtue of the demand from all the other humans. Somebody has to allocate this somehow, through social status or market competition. We do it through a mixture of the two. Above all, market competition generates the wealth. If you win in market competition, then you can buy the island in the Caribbean. But these are not things that can become abundant, and positions in society can’t be, by definition. Only one person can be the president or the prime minister at any time. We could imagine a competition which isn’t through voting, as we do it now, but one can manage.

Essentially, a world in which goods are freely available—that is imaginable for many goods anyway—but there are lots of things we really care about which will remain scarce, and they’re really important because they’re about social status. If they’re not done through the market, which is perfectly possible, then you have to manage them through some other allocation, and, by and large, historically, it’s been done through force.

That was, of course, Marx’s great mistake. He thought that if we got rid of private property, all these problems would be solved. I’ll leave aside his problem about abundance, but the problem he found was that it wasn’t solved, because somebody with the biggest gun—and the largest number of guns—simply took whatever he wanted and allocated the rest to the people who supported him. So I think the problem is much more profound than you suggest, even in this world.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Martin discuss whether we are in an AI bubble, what would happen if it burst, and the state of the European economy. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

During the brief period in which corporations thought it would be a good idea to indulge the political sensibilities of their junior employees, it became fashionable to adopt “mission statements” that expressed the supposedly higher purpose sought by the firm in its branches and divisions. This attracted a certain measure of ridicule, such as the case of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which decided that its real purpose was not to produce mayonnaise, but rather to “reduce food waste” by transforming leftovers into “delicious meals.” The obvious objection to this, expressed in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, was the tacit assumption that the product itself could not be the purpose. This appeared to concede the essentially anti-capitalist idea that there was something unworthy or grubby about just making mayonnaise and selling it to people, which then created the need to identify a “higher,” non-pecuniary purpose in order to edify the entire operation.

The mayonnaise mission statement became the object of public controversy when a major shareholder in Unilever (the parent corporation) complained that “a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” I found this a bit uncharitable, since it’s not difficult to imagine why the company would have thought the mission statement to be not only good PR, but also good HR. For most people, sitting around at work every day thinking “I’m here to make money for Unilever” is less intrinsically motivating than “I’m on a mission to reduce food waste.”

I think about this episode sometimes as I’m driving to work. Technically, my job is to teach courses in philosophy. Students pay tuition, the university pays me, everyone goes home happy. The product is the purpose. No one thanks me, that’s what the money is for. I am, however, sometimes tempted by the idea that my work might have a loftier objective. Pressed to put it in the form of a mission statement, I might go with something like this: “reproducing the foundations of Western civilization, one lecture at a time.” Like the junior employees at Unilever, I find this more elevated statement of my task to be a greater source of motivation.

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Of course, as in the case of mayonnaise, some people might find my mission statement a bit too lofty. In my defense, I should note that I don’t see myself making any particular contribution to human civilization or improving it in a noticeable way. I gave up on that a long time ago. Now I’m just trying to do my part to keep the show on the road, to discourage people from throwing away the stuff that works. Unfortunately, this leads to a natural follow-up question, which is why anyone would think that the reproduction of civilization requires help from the likes of me. That is something I also think about while driving to work, so here is my best response.

Allow me to kick things off with an observation made by Pierre Manent in his very interesting history of liberalism:

A singular feature of the present historical situation is that political thought and political life are, in modern times, intimately linked. This is something new. The political history of Greece or Rome can be related without referring to “ideas” or “doctrines.” In his work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides does not devote a single page to what we would call the “intellectual” or “cultural” life of the period … This fact is all the more remarkable since Greece was the birthplace of philosophy, and in particular of political philosophy. It was from the experience of life in the Greek city-state that Plato and Aristotle elaborated their interpretations of human life, which constitute the matrix of all subsequent philosophy. But these interpretations emerged after the great cycle of Greek politics occurred. The case of modern political philosophy is completely different. One is tempted to say that it was conceived and chosen before being implemented.

There are two points that I would add to this. First, because the ideas preceded their institutional realization, the reproduction of these institutions also requires the reproduction of the ideas. A generalized loss of conviction in our inherited principles of political philosophy would constitute a functional challenge to our institutions. Second, the ideas are unobvious; they do not coincide with anyone’s untutored intuitions. As a result, they must be explained to each new generation in order to carry any persuasive force. This has two enormous consequences. Sociologically, it means that the formal education system becomes an essential component of the core institutional structure of our society. Culturally, it means that cognitive elites become essential social actors, since they are the ones who do the explaining. (This has certain unfortunate byproduct effects, with perhaps the most important being that those who do not make it very far in the formal education system wind up being more or less out of the loop when it comes to the reproduction of civilization.)

What makes the reproduction of these ideas challenging is that the two sets of governing principles in our society—liberalism for the state and capitalism for the economy—are second-best arrangements. In other words, they do not coincide with most people’s sense of what an ideal world would look like. (Just to be clear, they are not second-best in the real-world sense. In the real world, they are the best that we can hope to attain, at least for the foreseeable future. The problem is that they are second-best with respect to most people’s personal values and moral ideals. They are not à la hauteur de nos espérances. This is why people got so annoyed at Francis Fukuyama for declaring the end of history. As Andrew Potter put it, “The suggestion that the endpoint of human development, the culmination of the ancient struggle for recognition, amounts to little more than the admixture of the Bill of Rights and Best Buy does not fill everyone’s heart with joy.”)

We have names for the first-best arrangements—those that most people come into the world wanting and wondering why we cannot obtain. In the domain of politics, the ideal is normally some form of communitarianism. People want to live in culturally rich communities with shared values and a dense network of high-trust social relations. In the economic realm, the ideal that corresponds to our everyday moral intuitions is socialism. Since the division of labor that characterizes our economic life is, fundamentally, a system of cooperation, it seems only natural that it should be governed by norms that directly enjoin cooperative behavior. We should all pitch in and do our part, selflessly devoting ourselves to the larger social project, sharing equally in the benefits.

And yet looking at the world we live in, what stands out most prominently are institutional arrangements that not only fail to promote these ideals, but in certain ways block their realization. In the political realm, we have a system of individual rights that recruits the power of the state to provide legal protection for self-evidently anti-social or self-destructive behavior. So we wind up living in a world of 4chan memes, Twitter Nazis, Russian trolls, Instagram thirst traps, mail-order drugs, etc. In the economic realm, instead of promoting cooperation, we instead strive to instill competition, creating winners and losers out of what should be a system of mutual benefit. And so we get a world marred by extreme inequality, environmental destruction, renegade billionaires, precarity for the young, etc.

When confronted by this spectacle, it is extremely natural to suspect that the profusion of anti-social behavior is elicited, to at least a large degree, by the legal protection that it is offered by our institutions. This leads many people to wonder why, instead of following this path, we do not use the power of the state to promote shared values or shared cooperative endeavors. Again, this is a perfectly natural thought. It is why, historically, the first pass at producing a political philosophy—whether it be in Plato or Confucius—came back with the same idea, that the law should be used to enforce morality and promote social cohesion, by rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked.

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A dangerous fatalism is settling in about America’s place in the world. After Donald Trump became president for the first time in 2016, many around the world—government leaders and analysts alike—hoped that the outcome was a one-off protest vote, a very narrow one at that, and that that victory and Trump’s ideas did not signal a permanent change in American foreign policy. After Trump won a second time, however, a new conventional wisdom settled in: Trumpism represents America’s new and enduring approach to international politics. Trump is not the cause, but a symptom of deeper structural trends in American society, the argument goes.

This analysis is flawed. Without question, President Trump has done real damage to American power and purpose in global affairs in ways that will take years, if not decades, to repair. His second term has wreaked more havoc than his first. But to assume that this current trajectory is permanent is analytically inaccurate and prescriptively dangerous. Trumpism may be the symptom, not the cause, of some trends in domestic politics. I am not sure; I am not an expert on domestic politics. But when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, President Trump is out of step with American society. In his second term, Trump has not followed or reflected the will of the majority on foreign policy. Instead, he has pursued a series of foreign policy initiatives driven solely by his own desires. During his last presidential campaign, Trump did not seek, nor therefore win, endorsement for most of his new foreign policy actions. American voters most certainly did not ask for them back in 2024. In 2026, much of Trump’s foreign policy agenda is deeply unpopular.

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Trump the individual, not innate structural forces, is the cause of much of the irrational, imprudent chaos unfolding in American foreign policy today. And therefore, the current trajectory of American foreign policy can change radically in a post-Trump era. There is no going back to the “glory days” of the 1990s—but that doesn’t mean we are destined to stay on a course that is suicidal for American national interests. Change is possible. Change is even probable.

Presidents in the American political system have significant autonomy and influence over foreign policy. That presidential power has grown in recent decades, especially as the U.S. Congress has refrained from exercising its power to shape foreign policy as outlined in the U.S. Constitution. Of the 292 executive orders that Trump has issued since the start of his second term, 70 have impacted foreign policy (President Obama issued 276 executive orders across his entire two terms in office). In his second term, more confident in his own ideas and less constrained by professional national security officials who held major positions in his first administration, Trump has personally impacted U.S. foreign policy in dramatic, consequential ways—almost all of them bad.

Trump has radically damaged American alliances, disrupted trade practices, and demolished American foreign assistance. His failed war against Iran has weakened America’s position in the Middle East and empowered China. His decision to cut aid to Ukraine and leave that fight to the Europeans, coupled with his embarrassing threats to annex Greenland, has deeply diminished American power and influence in Europe. His capitulation in his game-of-chicken trade war with China, combined with his decision to substantially reduce military exercises with South Korea and praise North Korea’s communist dictator, has compelled many in Asia to embrace Beijing’s line that the United States is a declining power. Closer to home, Trump has alienated one of America’s most loyal and enduring allies: Canada.

It is important to remember, however, that these dreadful foreign policy decisions resulted from Trump’s independent actions. They do not reflect the will of the American people, nor are they an expression of some innate structural variables guiding American behavior such as power, history, or culture. In international relations, power and the balance of power of course matter. But individuals matter, too.

As a presidential candidate in 2024, Trump did not pledge to annex Greenland, invade Iran, fight with allies, embrace dictators, or blow up the international trading system. Instead, Trump’s campaign focused successfully on his proposals for new economic policies, especially taming inflation. These domestic economic concerns resonated with his voters. According to the Pew Research Center, one of America’s major polling organizations, the economy was the most important issue for Trump voters in 2024. The only “foreign policy” issue that Trump campaigned on and then delivered was his promise to close the border with Mexico and reduce illegal immigration. Beyond border security and immigration policy, foreign policy played a very small role in the 2024 presidential election. The rise of China, the threat from Iran, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine generated very little attention.

However, Trump’s departure from the will of the American people—including, on some issues, his own electoral base—is now catching up with him. Increasingly, Americans are paying more attention to Trump’s foreign policy decisions—and they do not like what they see. Much of Trump’s foreign policy is not just unpopular abroad; it is also unpopular at home.

Trump’s overall approval rating is very low. Even before the midterm results yesterday, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 33% of Americans supported the president, the lowest number of his presidency. Therefore, it is difficult to untangle disapproval of his foreign policies from his overall decline in popularity.

But when polling agencies ask specific questions about foreign policy issues, nearly all of Trump’s major initiatives prove unpopular.

Near the top of Trump’s most unpopular foreign policies is his decision to go to war against Iran. He did not warn American voters of this plan. On the contrary, both during the 2024 presidential campaign and for many years prior, Trump had promised to keep the United States out of wars. In the run-up to initiating this war, Trump did not bother to explain to the American people why it was necessary to go to war with Iran at that time, nor did he seek congressional authorization for it. Once the Iran war began, Trump promised a short and decisive victory that he claimed would (1) eliminate Iran’s nuclear program forever; (2) end Tehran’s support for terrorism; (3) reduce Iran’s missile production to zero; and (4) produce democratic regime change. None of these goals has been achieved.

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Instead, new challenges to America’s national interests, including most prominently the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have resulted as a direct consequence of Trump’s war. And the costs of this war for achieving so little have been substantial: (1) the deaths of 23 U.S. soldiers, 865 more wounded, and thousands of casualties, including civilians, in Iran and countries in the region; (2) the depletion of American military stockpiles, especially missile defense interceptors, which would make it very difficult to come to the aid of allies in Asia or Europe in the event of war; (3) skyrocketing energy prices that have directly impacted American consumers, but also consumers around the world; and (4) deep damage to America’s global reputation, making the United States look like a rogue country that does not abide by international laws or norms. The last is a giant gift to China, which can instead present itself as a more law-abiding great power. Polls show a dramatic fall in America’s reputation around the world, even among allies, and a rise in China’s reputation.

Trump’s war against Iran is very unpopular. A YouGov/Economist poll revealed that 57% of Americans think that Trump made the wrong decision to go to war with Iran; only 25% approve. A poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 86% of respondents blamed the war for the rising cost of living, and more generally blamed numerous setbacks from the war for America’s international reputation and national security. Unlike previous American wars, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq (both times), Trump’s war against Iran was unpopular from the very beginning and has declined in popularity ever since.

Another deeply unpopular element of Trump’s foreign policy is all the fights he has picked with allies, especially in Europe. As mentioned, he has threatened to invade Greenland—a territory of American ally Denmark. He has started a trade war with Canada, even though he negotiated a new trade treaty with that country in his first term. He then exacerbated tensions by publishing all sorts of demeaning AI-generated memes about Canada, including, most embarrassingly for me as an American, reposting an image of himself in hockey gear, standing threateningly over a cowering “Governor” Mark Carney. His publication of a map of North America described as “the United States”—including not only Canada and Mexico, but even Iceland—was juvenile and insulting.

The vitriol for democratic allies extends well beyond North America, however. With the possible exception of Israel (and even this relationship is showing signs of fissures), every bilateral relationship with an American ally is more strained today than it was in 2024.

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Americans do not like fighting with allies. They especially do not like spats with democratic countries. Public opinion polls show very clearly that Americans value their allies, even when the current U.S. president does not. According to a 2025 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which has been tracking Americans’ views on foreign policy for more than 50 years, 60% of respondents thought that important foreign policy decisions should be made in consultation with major allies, compared with just 21% who favored the United States making decisions on its own. A whopping 91% of respondents believed that maintaining U.S. alliances was an effective way to achieve foreign policy goals.

Regarding NATO, a solid majority of Americans—68%, according to a June 2026 poll by the Chicago Council—favored maintaining or increasing U.S. commitment to the alliance, though that number has dropped from a 2022 high of 81%, in large part due to declining Republican support. Majorities of Americans also view Canada and South Korea as “allies” or “friends,” according to a recent YouGov/Economist poll.

Regarding Ukraine, the Trump administration has maintained intelligence-sharing with Kyiv and allowed the Ukrainian government to purchase some American weapons. But it has also cut military aid to nearly zero in his second term. Just 22% of Americans say they want to decrease or stop this aid to Ukraine entirely, according to a recent YouGov/Economist poll. Most Americans say they want to either increase aid to Ukraine (27%) or maintain what we are giving them now (28%). The latter figure suggests that many Americans do not know just how little we are currently giving to Ukraine.

Furthermore, Trump has adopted a neutral position on the Russia-Ukraine war, never blaming Putin for starting this war, but instead urging both sides to negotiate a “win-win” deal. American society does not share that approach. Most Americans (62%) sympathize with Ukraine, while only 2% sympathize with Russia, according to the latest YouGov/Economist data. Relatedly, 49% of American adults disapprove of the way Trump is handling the war, while only 28% approve. Trump’s embrace of Russia’s imperial dictator, Vladimir Putin, is not a foreign policy shift that sits well with Americans. The latest Pew Research Center data shows that 83% of Americans polled report that “they do not have confidence in the Russian president to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” Few issues in the United States enjoy such bipartisan support. This is one of them. Trump’s long-term embrace of Putin is very out of step with American society.

Even Trump’s tariffs are not popular. He has tried to explain his implementation of new tariffs on nearly every country in the world (Russia, strangely, gets a pass) as a way to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. To date, the American people are not buying it. According to Pew, 63% of Americans express little or no confidence in Trump’s handling of tariff policy. An even higher number of Americans, 74%, see a direct relationship between Trump’s tariffs and higher prices. More broadly, 82% of Americans view trade as “an opportunity for economic growth” through increased exports, while only 13% think that trade is a “threat to the economy” through increased foreign imports. Again, the gap between Trump’s trade policies and the views of the vast majority of Americans is very wide.

Most strikingly, Trump’s slashing and burning of U.S. foreign assistance programs, including most dramatically the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), have not generated new popular support. Americans have long been somewhat skeptical of foreign assistance, in part because they have held an exaggerated view of how much the United States spends on aid. But public opinion polls still show general support for foreign aid. A June poll by the Rockefeller Foundation found that 54% of respondents supported foreign assistance—a figure that grew when specific examples were provided, e.g. humanitarian relief (90%), preventing disease outbreaks (90%), and peacekeeping and conflict resolution (78%). The same survey found that eight in 10 Americans believed that the right path was to reform and strengthen foreign aid with better safeguards, rather than to eliminate it—including 83% of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents.

One of Trump’s most radical foreign policy departures from previous administrations over the last century has been his complete rejection of democracy promotion abroad. Camouflaged as “realism,” Trump does not believe that it is in the American interest to support human rights, freedom, or democracy around the world. Instead, he seeks to do deals—transactions—with autocrats. Shockingly, the Trump administration removed from power the long-standing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, only to then pivot to deepening cooperation, including signing a multibillion-dollar oil deal with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Generally, Trump is more friendly to autocratic leaders in China, North Korea, and Russia than he is to democratic leaders around the world. Only very rarely has Trump met with human rights activists or democratic opposition leaders from other countries.

When it comes to foreign policy priorities, polls show that Americans do not rank democracy promotion at the top of their lists; not surprisingly, preventing terrorist attacks and nuclear proliferation are considered more important. But these same polls demonstrate that most Americans still care about supporting human rights and democratic values abroad, even if they are a secondary priority. According to a recent Gallup poll, 88% of Americans say that promoting and defending human rights in other countries “is very or somewhat important,” while 75% of Americans say the same of helping other countries to build democracy.

That support also crosses partisan lines. In a 2025 Reagan Institute survey, 83% of those polled—including 87% of Democrats and 81% of Republicans—agreed that the United States has a moral obligation to stand up for human rights and democracy whenever possible. Trump’s indifference to defending these values does not align with American society. His transactional—and, in the case of Venezuela, imperial—approach to foreign policy is not what most Americans want.

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Even Trump’s immigration policies have lost support. The majority of Americans want border security and checks on illegal immigration. At the same time, most Americans do not support the methods that the Trump administration has been using to arrest and deport undocumented migrants. The killing of American citizens by ICE agents has produced real backlash; so too have the numerous stories of wrongly arrested American citizens and detentions of children separated from their families. In a February 2026 Ipsos poll, 62% of Americans said ICE’s immigration enforcement efforts had gone “too far.” Strikingly, 45% supported deporting undocumented immigrants, but were uncomfortable with the government’s current enforcement tactics, compared with just 26% who supported deportation and were comfortable with those tactics. By late July, 58% of Americans in an AP-NORC poll disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 58% said ICE had used too much force.

Trump’s foreign policy is not rooted in American traditions, nor is it the result of a major shift in the balance of power in the world. Neither has Trump’s foreign policy produced tangible results for American security and prosperity. Consequently, Trump’s foreign policy is generally unpopular.

This current trajectory in U.S. foreign policy should not be interpreted as the new, inevitable, enduring way that America will behave in the international system. Maybe, but probably not. Analysts in the United States and around the world who proclaim that everything has changed in global politics because of the Trump era are exaggerating the long-term effects of the current moment. Nothing Trump has done is immutable. The next president can reverse many of these policies and will be applauded by most Americans for doing so—even if repairing the damage they have caused will take time.

Rejecting policy is one thing; proposing an alternative is another. If Democratic 2028 presidential candidates, first and foremost, but Republicans as well, want to garner popular support for their foreign policy proposals, they must break radically with Trumpism. Instead of unilateralism, new American leaders must embrace cooperation with allies and renewed participation in international organizations. Instead of the imperial, lawless use of force, new American leaders must pledge only to use force when vital national security is being threatened, and then only with the support of the U.S. Congress. Instead of amoral deal-making with autocrats to enrich those connected to the White House, new American leaders must reaffirm a long-standing American tradition of supporting freedom, human rights, and democracy abroad.

These policy changes will be popular at home—and over time, after a period of healing, maybe abroad as well, especially among our democratic allies and partners. Most importantly, they will be much more effective for advancing U.S. interests and values.

Michael McFaul is a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is the author of Autocrats vs. Democrats (2025). He writes at McFaul’s World on Substack.

A version of this piece was originally published on Michael McFaul’s Substack, McFaul’s World.

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This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

In this year’s midterm elections, I voted absentee from Prague, and I voted for the Democrats. That is not a sentence I expected to write when I left for the United States some 20 years ago on a scholarship from the free-market Earhart Foundation. Yet here I am, back in Prague in a self-imposed exile of sorts—in no small part because of what has become of the Republican and conservative politics I once looked up to.

I am far from the only European in America who has ended up worrying about the future of its democracy. The political scientist Juan Linz spent his career asking why democracies collapse. His essay “The Perils of Presidentialism,” published in the very first issue of the Journal of Democracy in 1990, was decidedly out of sync with the optimism of that year.

Linz’s concern was that, in a presidential system, both the president and the legislature claim a direct mandate from the voters—a “dual democratic legitimacy.” What happens when the two collide? In a country like the United States, there is no mechanism for resolving a deadlock between, say, a failing president and an antagonistic Congress. The bar for impeachment and removal from office is high, and it ought to remedy “high crimes and misdemeanors,” not ordinary political conflict.

Without the possibility of an early election or a no-confidence vote, constitutions modeled after the United States lack an important release valve built into parliamentary systems. This increases the risk of democratic breakdowns—self-coups, military takeovers, the hollowing out of unfriendly legislatures, and unresolved constitutional crises.

For Linz in 1990, the United States was an exception, which he credited to the loose, non-ideological nature of America’s parties, making bargaining across the aisle a routine part of governing. Today, those conditions are gone. As the legal scholar Miguel Schor observed, American presidentialism worked from the 1930s through the 1990s because its parties were moderate and willing to deal with each other.

Today, polarization, gridlock, and governance by executive order are the norm.

Yesterday’s vote was a sizable repudiation of the first two years of Donald Trump’s second term. Sixty-one percent disapprove of the president’s performance. A plurality say their vote for Congress is a vote against him. Democrats have taken a large majority in the House and have flipped the Senate, too.

So what happens next?

The United States will soon have a Democratic House that will attempt to use the power of the purse to roll back Trump’s agenda and will likely try to impeach Trump as well as individual cabinet members. All of that is welcome and indeed overdue.

Here’s the problem. A president who retains the fervent loyalty of at least a third of the country—as Trump does—is not going to go quietly. He is bound to treat the new congressional majority as an illegitimate obstacle, keeping him from his work on behalf of “the people.”

American Purpose at Persuasion is a registered nonprofit that relies on reader support to pay our staff and keep our content free for everyone. If you value our work and want to fight for liberal democratic values wherever they are threatened, please consider becoming a paying subscriber today!

For this reason, the flurry of executive orders and lawsuits that have characterized Trump’s second term is unlikely to give way to a more orderly form of governance over the next two years. The president isn’t surrounded by figures who will restrain his worst impulses, or stand in his way, as Vice President Mike Pence did on January 6. Vice President Vance infamously argued back in 2021 that if the Supreme Court blocked a purge of the civil service, Trump should simply say: “The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.” If Trump wants to do something and Congress votes to stop him, he may do it anyway—reprogramming money Congress refused to appropriate, ignoring subpoenas, and complying with court orders only selectively.

Some critics of Linz argued, fairly, that the problem with presidential systems is not inherent to their design, but rather a result of their disproportionate presence in countries with legacies of military rule. If that is the case, presidential systems would be expected to work much better in the United States than in, say, Latin American countries where military coup is a much greater threat.

But military rule is not the most likely source of damage to America’s democratic institutions. The bigger risk is that the system becomes unable to resolve political conflicts, resulting in a slow-burning, and possibly permanent, constitutional crisis.

Poland, with its recent episode of unrest surrounding its Constitutional Tribunal, is a case in point. When it came to power in late 2015, the populist Law and Justice (PiS) government took many illiberal steps, including refusing to accept judges appointed to the Tribunal by its predecessor. Over the following years, it simply ignored the Tribunal’s rulings.

More than a decade later, despite the election of Donald Tusk and his Civic Platform government in 2023, the system is still broken. The current government still does not recognize the Tribunal’s rulings, on the grounds that some of its judges were illegitimately seated. Meanwhile, the PiS-friendly president, Karol Nawrocki, agreed to swear in only two justices to the court’s six vacant seats. There is no institutional way out of the impasse, and Poland now effectively has no judicial review of legislation.

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The Latin American example should give us pause, too. In Argentina, as part of his effort to cut government spending, President Javier Milei responded to Congress’ overrides of his vetoes on disability benefits and university funding by… suspending them by decree. Courts struck the suspensions down, but the government simply rewrote them.

This shows that simply getting through the immediate post-election period is the easy part. Keeping America’s democratic institutions in good working order will take much more than that. Imagine a scenario in the coming weeks in which Justice Samuel Alito retires from the Supreme Court, and a lame-duck session of Congress confirms a Trump-picked successor before the new Congress is seated in January. That would be perfectly legal, but it could easily set in motion a dynamic that would delegitimize the Court or render it dysfunctional, just like in Poland. It is possible to imagine many other such scenarios over the next two years.

Beyond domestic dysfunction, the rest of the world should not expect much to change after today, either. Foreign policy is the domain in which presidents are least constrained by Congress. Trump’s diplomatic improvisations, including the war in Iran, are unlikely to be meaningfully tempered by a Democratic House or Senate. The United States will continue to be an unreliable ally, led by a divided political class in disagreement over America’s role in the world.

A Nordic diplomat here in Prague recently told me that Europe just needs to wait out “two more years.” But that fundamentally misreads the nature of the challenge that the United States and its political institutions face.

Dysfunctional presidential systems can recover only if both parties are committed to liberal democracy, and ideally share a vision of the nation’s role in the world. Right now, that is far from the case. In his article, Linz coined a term that perfectly describes what drove me away from the Republican Party: “semi-loyal,” referring to actors who are nominally committed to democratic principles but ignore them in practice.

For as long as that remains true, and the nature of the presidential system makes it impossible to resolve deadlock between various political actors and an entrenched president, alternation of power will mean only that the crisis changes hands. Yes, Trump’s party just lost control of Congress. And yes, in two years, Trump will leave office. But the damage is bound to outlast him—perhaps permanently.

Dalibor Rohac is the Director of Research at GLOBSEC and a contributing editor at American Purpose.

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In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Larry Diamond, and Arlie Hochschild explore what the Democrats’ historic midterm landslide reveals about Donald Trump’s waning hold on American voters, how Democrats can balance accountability with a positive agenda ahead of 2028, and whether democratic institutions have proven more resilient than many feared.

Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy.

Arlie Hochschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We thought we couldn’t quite torture our East Coast contributors at 2 a.m., so we have this amazing West Coast panel. Or a bicoastal panel, since I’m currently in Europe. To update people on the current state of the election results: Democrats will control both the House and the Senate, and they will do so by really quite astonishing margins. According to the betting markets I’m looking at right now, they will likely control 56 Senate seats, up from 47.

They will win not just in swing states like Ohio or Michigan. They will win not just in blue states that have had Republican senators for a long time, like Susan Collins in Maine. They will win in Texas. They will win in South Carolina. They will win in Iowa. They are at the moment favored to win in Mississippi, though that race is currently too close to call. As we are recording, we have the Democratic candidate there ahead by 28 votes. They will win in Kansas. These are really quite astonishing results.

In the House, we are likely to see not a close race—not a slight Democratic lean, but a solidly Democratic House. At the moment, 261 seats are projected to go to the Democrats with some amount of certainty, and only 173 seats to the Republicans, with a number of seats still too close to call.

And then, of course, the governors’ races tell an astonishing story of their own. Republicans win in places like Florida, where they seem to be winning across the board. They are able to hold the governor’s mansion in places like New Hampshire or Vermont, where they have popular local moderate Republicans. But Democrats will win not just in California and Illinois and New York and Massachusetts, where you’d expect it. They will also win in Texas. They will win in swing states like Nevada and Arizona, in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania.

That is my attempt to summarize what just happened: a midterm blowout for the Democrats of historic proportions. Arlie, what do you make of all of this?

Arlie Hochschild: Well, when I stop jumping up and down, I think we should remember that Europe and the whole world have been tuned in to this election. What it tells us is that we’re awake, and that democracy, although it has been laid low, is functioning. So I think this is a really big deal. We can’t take it for granted, and we have lessons to learn from this, but it’s great news.

Mounk: Larry, what is your first reaction?

Larry Diamond: Well, I don’t know how partisan you want to get. I could express my purely partisan preferences, but as a democracy scholar, I think it’s great news in several respects.

First of all, we have an authoritarian president who has had authoritarian ambitions and an authoritarian agenda. Fortunately, he’s been too incompetent to make a great deal of headway in achieving them. But he has represented the most serious challenge to American democracy, I’d say, from presidential intent in American history. And he’s now been rebuked decisively and across the board. He has been rebuked geographically, politically, and demographically in the United States to an unprecedented degree.

Secondly, he’s going to be checked by large Democratic majorities. That’s true not only in the House, with dozens of Democratic seats as the margin, but also in the Senate, where it’s looking like the Democrats might potentially have something like a 55-to-45 majority. People thought it would be a miracle if the Democrats picked up four seats and won control of the House, but they may pick up seven or eight.

And then Democrats are winning governorships in states like Texas that were thought to be off limits. It’s not just Jon Ossoff in Georgia, but James Talarico in Texas. And you have Keisha Lance Bottoms, an African American woman, being elected governor of Georgia and Gina Hinojosa, a Latina woman, being elected governor of Texas. These people are not winning by small margins. They’re winning by large, and in some cases double-digit, margins.

And I’ll say one other thing that I think is encouraging. As social scientists, we thought for a long time now that the geographical political map had shrunk to a small number of swing states. We thought there were many states that couldn’t be flipped. That included not only the blue states in the West and the Northeast, but also solid red states like South Carolina and Texas and Kansas, and not least Mississippi. We thought that partisan orientations had crystallized to an unmovable degree. The fact that people have become open-minded again about their partisan preferences and their willingness to exact accountability is, I think, a very hopeful sign.

Mounk: One of the things I’m thinking about in a purely analytical mode today is that there’s a lot of talk about America being very polarized and divided. Of course, that is true in some important respects. But I think sometimes this is presented as if we are Bosnia-Herzegovina, as if there are these immovable blocks of voters who are either on the Democratic or the Republican side. In this picture, if I knew who your parents and grandparents voted for, I’d know who you’re going to vote for. Every election is just an attempt to mobilize your base and get them out to the polls. There’s really no movement between the parties, so we have to live in this era of very close-run politics forever.

I think there’s been very good evidence all along that that’s not true, because the demographic coalitions within each party have shifted very rapidly. The way that Trump won in 2016 was very different from how he won in 2024. And I’ve been arguing for a while that it is possible for both Republicans and Democrats, if the stars align, to build a really convincing majority. I think we see that in the midterms today.

This was not really because of Democratic strength. It was because of a deep rebuke of Donald Trump. Democrats were able to build such a broad majority against Donald Trump in this referendum on him that they were able to win in places like Kansas and Texas, and that they may be able to flip a Senate seat in Mississippi, which would really be quite remarkable.

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Arlie, you’ve spent much of the last 20 years speaking to voters, most of whom were enthusiastic about the Tea Party. They probably voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and I imagine they voted for him in 2024, and perhaps in 2020 as well. You did this in the Louisiana Bayou for your first book on this topic, and in Appalachia for your follow-up book.

I always think it’s least interesting to think about the true MAGA diehards. It’s more interesting to think about some of the very decent people you portray and talk to in your books: people in rural communities, in mostly red states, who probably did support Trump and the MAGA movement Trump and the MAGA movement for these years. What do you think is going on with those voters and those communities today? Are we partially seeing some of these voters changing their minds? How does your research make you reflect on how Democrats were able to build this big anti-Trump majority today?

Hochschild: Good question. Just to back up, I got to know people in the second-poorest and the whitest congressional district in the country. Many of these people were coal miners. That’s the dominant industry in eastern Kentucky.

It’s a region that used to be New Deal Democrats back in the day under Roosevelt. Then it became moderate, and for a while it was moderate Republican. Then, over the last three elections in this district, over 83 percent voted for Donald Trump. So I wondered why. What had swung things so far right?

The story is in a way local, but I think it tells a global story. They were hit by the loss of coal. Not every place has had coal and then lost it. But globalization and offshoring and automation, and even AI looking ahead, can create regional losses in a context where some regions are doing fine. Those regions are winners and others are losers. And in those losing regions that are getting economically battered, there’s a story of loss that sets up a predisposition for restoration. It’s a recipe for right-wing takeover.

What happened in eastern Kentucky is that coal jobs went out. People not only lost their jobs, and so did truck drivers and people in related industries, but they also lost their whole way of life and their pride. They would get in a truck and drive six hours trying to find an industrial job, and sometimes that wasn’t available in the area. These are very local people, very proud people, and they took a hit. Opiates came in as coal jobs went out. They didn’t see a bottom, and they didn’t see any answers for them in either the Democratic or the Republican Party.

It was into that vacuum and that sense of loss that Donald Trump came. And it’s almost as if he excavated shame and discouragement and fear, and he processed it and lit it aflame. It’s what I would call, and called in the book, a kind of emotional capture.

He went in there and he said, hey, I see who you are. That was an appeal for recognition. He gave them a very compelling narrative of stolen pride: Who took your pride? It didn’t just go away; someone took it. He moved shame to blame. And thirdly, he had a kind of anti-shaming ritual that really consolidated that narrative. I’m saying all this because that capture was pretty hard to break. It took a lot of mistakes.

Mounk: Do you think it has broken today? Do you think what we’re observing is that it’s broken? Or is it more that other groups of voters who moved to Trump in 2024 have moved away from him today?

Hochschild: That’s a great question. That is the question. No, I think the people I came to know have not said, now I see the Democratic Party and all the possibilities. Yes, I do want health care for my children. And by the way, those Medicaid cuts that Trump just made support the addiction recovery center that my children go to. So no, I don’t think it’s a story of the scales having fallen from their eyes. I think that emotional capture is hard to move.

But I think he’s made so many mistakes, and we are in a way profiting from all the fallout from his mistakes. It’s not that progressives have done wonderful things.

Mounk: One way of putting this: the metaphor you use in Strangers in Their Own Land, and expand upon in the later work on that stolen sense of pride, is that people feel like they’re standing in line for the American dream, and other people are coming in and cutting into the line. This idea that immigrants, African Americans, even the brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, are cutting in because environmental regulations prioritize its interests over ours. And in that narrative, Donald Trump might be a bully, might be unlikable, and you might have some reservations about him, but he’s the bully we need to protect us from these line cutters. Perhaps that fundamental story is still there, but people have lost faith that Trump is a good bully, or an effective bully, or a bully who actually stands up to people. That may mean people are going to go in search of the next bully. But they’ve given up hope on this bully. Is that one way of extending your metaphor?

Hochschild: Yes, that’s very well said. And that is a background fear that I do have. So as a caution: let’s celebrate, but let’s learn from this about how vulnerable democracies are.

Mounk: Larry, you know a lot about American politics, but you know most about democracy around the world. How do you think this compares to other moments in which a would-be authoritarian populist falls out of favor with people?

Diamond: Being shown to be frauds.

Mounk: It seems to me that there’s a bit of a pattern. These figures are able to dominate everything for a while. There’s a period in which every political conversation in a country ends up being about them: about the comparatively harmless Silvio Berlusconi in Italy for 15 or 20 years of disastrous Italian politics, about Narendra Modi in India, about all these different figures.

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And then there are two interesting moments that sometimes happen when they lose their hold. The first is when most people who gave them the benefit of the doubt, who believed in some of the premises and went along with it, realize that these figures have failed completely to live up to those premises. That’s when the majority against them builds. The second is when suddenly they’re no longer the center of every conversation, and everything in the political system is no longer about them. It feels to me like we’ve very clearly reached that first point today, and we may reach the second point quite soon, in the coming weeks and months.

How does this compare to what happened with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or what is happening with Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, and with some of these other moments when figures who seemed quite dominant in the political system suddenly feel like they’re being swept to the margins, at least temporarily? How does the international perspective help us understand what’s happening in the United States today?

Diamond: Well, it certainly has a lot of the feel of Orbán’s decisive defeat in the parliamentary elections in Hungary earlier this year, and of Vučić’s defeat just about a week ago, nine days ago. And as long as we’re on the comparative theme, we might note that Narendra Modi has probably peaked and is starting to decline in India. I think there are some similar reasons in each case.

People may have a certain tolerance for corruption among a charismatic populist elite who has, to put it in Arlie’s language, emotionally captured them. The populist is speaking to their identities, to their sense of dignity and their cultural aspirations, and also to their material aspirations. The populist is giving them a narrative that they’re processing in a way that is not entirely fact-based or rational—this is a very important implication of Arlie’s two books. That’s what the emotional component is.

But at some point, performance does enter in here. When your life is getting harder and harder, when affordability is getting worse and worse, some of the layers of commitment do get stripped away. I’m now speaking very suggestively and hypothetically here, because it’s Arlie who has done the really deep fieldwork. But I have a hypothesis that there are rings of commitment. There’s a hard core that hasn’t been stripped away even today, that is still emotionally captured and very much aligned culturally and symbolically with Trump.

But there are some pretty significant layers that got ripped away tonight from Trump, from MAGA, and from the last 10 or 20 years of the Republican Party. Certainly the young Latino voters you were referring to by implication, Yascha, who had defected to Trump in 2024. Also some other younger voters, and a lot of historic Republican voters who are really hurting as a result of rising gas and diesel prices and rising fertilizer prices. In the cities and suburbs, there’s the lack of affordable housing and the high cost of groceries, hamburger meat, and so on. This hurt Trump and the Republicans very, very badly. We could see it coming from the polling data, and it was even worse.

I just want to make one more point for the moment, Yascha. I think there’s a historic opportunity for the Democrats here, but only if they don’t fall back on their worst instincts. Those instincts push these voters away with the Democrats’ own brand of identity politics, which makes these voters defensive and feel like and makes them feel like their pride is still being stolen by all these elite, effete, college-educated, big-city people.

I would urge every one of your listeners to listen to every word of James Talarico’s acceptance speech tonight after his Senate victory. It was remarkable. I think it’s one of the greatest election victory speeches of recent decades. He talked about love, he talked about inclusion, he talked about “love thy neighbor.” He spoke in religious terms, and he spoke about unifying rather than dividing.

The lessons are abundant from the recent victories in Serbia, Poland, and Hungary, and also from what would be happening in Turkey now, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being prepared to be shown the door in the next election if he hadn’t arrested all of the opposition. What was the name of the opposition campaign in Turkey’s municipal elections in 2019 and 2024? It was a campaign of radical love. And if you listen to James Talarico, it’s exactly the same language. It’s inclusion, not division.

Hochschild: Wow. Yes, I just want to say I love what Larry has just said, and I think it’s worth really pausing on it and taking it in. We’ve got a huge opportunity that, honestly, I wasn’t sure we would have. Democracy is so precious, but it’s also more fragile than we knew. So what’s to learn? Now’s the time, once the celebration and dancing is over, to ask: what have we learned?

We’ve come very close to really losing things, as Trump has disregarded every check and balance and stamped on things. And we’re still in danger of his calling a state of emergency and suspending things. I don’t think we’re home free yet.

So it’s time to not make any mistakes. And Larry, I think you’re right that Talarico is really setting the mood that will work, because it’s a reach-out mood. Without quite realizing it, the Democratic Party has become more and more marginal. It used to have labor unions as the big middleman between the working class and the Democratic Party, and now we’re down to nine percent of workers who are unionized. So that’s gone, and left to itself, the party has almost forgotten about social class.

What’s to learn is that we do have to reach out and strengthen ourselves. We do that by eating some humble pie and taking very seriously the fears and the shame that people have suffered when their sector, their portion of American life, has fallen on their heads. We should take that as our job to help fix.

Mounk: There’s going to be endless intra-party sniping over the next days and weeks as people try to understand and interpret these election results. Clearly, a lot of the very progressive candidates won in a blue tsunami environment that allowed them to win even in swing states. My impression so far is nevertheless that the more moderate Democrats got many more votes. Take one of the most-watched races, in Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed looks like he’s going to win convincingly. At the moment, he’s up by nearly seven points. But Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor in Michigan, with the same electorate on the same day, is running 12 points ahead of the Republican candidate.

So that’s a five-point margin between the more moderate, more mainstream Democrat and the progressive Democrat. Probably every European newspaper and many American newspapers are going to treat El-Sayed’s win as the true story of the election tomorrow. In a tsunami environment, you can drop five points and still win Michigan. And given how important it is to rebuke Donald Trump at this moment, I think that’s a good thing. But in an ordinary election, five percentage points makes the difference between a Democratic president and a Republican president, and potentially between a president aligned with the MAGA movement and one who is not. So I think it’s important to keep that in mind.

What do you think Democrats should be doing now? I’ll tell you that I’m a little bit torn about that. They are taking a big majority in the House and a significant majority in the Senate, though not a filibuster-proof majority. They obviously should be looking into the enormous corruption, rule-breaking, and norm-breaking that Trump and his administration have been inflicting on the United States and its people for the last two years.

I also worry, though, that they may become too consumed by that. For example, they might try a third impeachment, which may well be warranted in terms of what Trump did, but which can only result in a third failure in the Senate, as in the previous two instances. That would be a self-inflicted wound. In fact, it would allow Trump to keep doing what he wants to do, which is to be the absolute center of American politics.

So my gut is telling me that Democrats need to make sure there’s accountability for what Trump’s administration is doing. They obviously need to proactively stop what they can of whatever Trump and his people may be planning for the next two years.

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But they also need to actually offer a positive vision that prepares the country for a true end to the Trump era in 2028. Getting that balance right is going to be very hard, and it’s going to involve a lot of judgment calls that are going to be difficult. So any thoughts about how Democrats can both push for accountability and resist what the Trump administration is doing for the next two years, but without gifting Donald Trump the position of being the absolute center of attention, in hearing after hearing, in ways that might actually extend his relevance and his dominance of American politics beyond his natural sell-by date?

Hochschild: Well, this is a great way to look at what the Democrats now have to do. One is to restore accountability. Yes, that’s huge. That’s basic. But I think it’s interesting what Larry was picking up about Talarico’s acceptance speech. What it is is a restoration of civility, and that in itself I think is hugely important.

Because without us quite looking at it, Trump, like other—what shall we call it? the big word is fascist—those leaders do something to our emotions. They change the feeling rules. They say, for example, as is being said today by people like Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth, that empathy is a bad thing. Empathy’s a silly thing. If you’re feeling sorry for people, that makes you weak. Actually, Musk has said it destroys civilization.

And that’s not just something on the side. There is a kind of chest-beating: anger is good, revenge is good. Even awe is kind of being privatized. There’s an emotional regime, I believe, that has been quietly insinuated into our hearts, and it’s being proposed to us as a way to be a human being.

So I think there needs to be a whole movement to restore civility. And I’m not talking about just Mother’s Day cards and Christmas cards and sort of formalistic, bowing niceness. I’m talking about the real deal, and there we’ve been assaulted. There’s been a shock and awe that Steve Bannon describes. They’re trying to get us confused, with too many things to look at, and we have been a little pushed back on our heels.

We haven’t said, hey, wait a minute, what is it to be an American? What is it we need to reaffirm? So I think we need to actually name the thing that these kinds of highly centralized regimes impose on us. And we might call it civility at the very minimum.

Diamond: Decency, yeah. I strongly endorse that, and I’d like to see more of it on our college campuses too, Arlie. I think you’ll agree with that. We’re working hard on that at Stanford and other campuses, as I’m sure you are at UC Berkeley. I never use the F-word in referring to Trump. I just think it’s polarizing and blinding and so on.

But deep authoritarianism, and certainly all forms of fascism, is a politics of dominance, a politics of strength, a politics of deliberate cruelty. I think that’s part of what got a massive rebuke tonight, along with the politics of just complete and total arrogant corruption.

Talarico spoke a lot about this, but in very simple and elegant terms. He said, “It’s not about left versus right, it’s about top versus bottom.” And he tied this into Musk spending $200 million to try to rescue Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race—of course, with spectacularly little success.

I think Democrats can fruitfully pivot now to a kind of good populism: a populism of standing up truly for ordinary people against the monopolies and oligopolies and billionaires and trillionaires, and against the massive redistribution of wealth and power away from ordinary Americans—working class, middle class—to this technocratic elite.

There are things that can be done on the tax code. There’s much more that can be done on the affordability front beyond the housing bill that they addressed. But real progress is going to require some give from the more determined left-of-center constituencies in the Democratic Party. Because if you want to build more, you’ve got to loosen regulation. This is a point that Frank Fukuyama has been making repeatedly in the pages of Persuasion.

So I think there is an agenda there on the economic front that at least they’re going to be able to send from the House to the Senate. We’ll see if they can pick up a few Republican votes for some of these bills.

I also want to say, if I can echo something I wrote again for your magazine about democratic reform: I think the winning hand here on the accountability front, beyond investigations—of which there will be many by the appropriate congressional committees—is not impeachment. The American people are tired of that pointless drama. It’s reform.

There’s real scope now for reform to ban partisan gerrymandering, ban congressional stock trading, tighten oversight procedures for corruption, and strengthen the autonomy of the inspectors general in the different cabinet departments. And I think the Democrats should push a bill that would substantially constrain the scope of presidential pardons. It is clearly President Trump’s intent now to pardon everyone who ever walked into the Oval Office. He said as much on multiple occasions.

They probably can’t get a lot of these things passed—certainly not a constitutional amendment—without substantial Republican support. But they can draw lines, create an agenda for the future, and put the heat on Republicans on some basic good governance reforms that would not be explicitly partisan.

Mounk: Well, the other thing here is that I just think it should expand the ambition of the Democratic Party for 2028. And I say this again as somebody who cares about our democracy more than as somebody who has a partisan political preference. It’s always seemed to me that the only thing that would put a real end to the MAGA era is a decisive electoral rebuke. Now, we’ve had the first part of that today. It is a very decisive rebuke, but it’s a midterm election.

I think what it’ll take is a really decisive rebuke in a presidential election. And if Democrats are capable of certainly picking up Texas and potentially picking up Mississippi in a midterm, then they should be capable of winning a presidential election, with many, many, many swing states and some states that are not usually swing states rebuking the MAGA agenda. And if we are in the running for that, then that might also put pressure on Republicans and on Republican primary voters to choose a different kind of candidate. Perhaps suddenly a window does open for a moderate Republican—I’m thinking, for example, of Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah—to run in an anti-Trump lane. I don’t think it’s very likely.

Diamond: I think it’s a fantasy.

Mounk: I think that after this election there is going to be a moment when the political constellation shifts. But in order to do that, Democrats need to actually try to speak to the middle of the country, right? There are all kinds of fancy theories about what explains the 2016 vote and the 2020 vote and the 2024 vote. One relatively straightforward one is that most Americans are very angry with the status quo. They don’t trust the elites. The old partisan loyalties, where you just blindly vote for whoever your mom and dad voted for, are mostly gone. But Americans aren’t actually extreme or radical.

What we’ve seen each time is that Joe Biden, I think, had some bad policies that pushed the country too far on questions like the border with Mexico, for example. People got enraged with that: Let’s vote for Trump. Trump came in; he was much more radical, much more extreme. What do they do? They delivered the blue tsunami we’re seeing right now.

I think it’s still possible to build these big majorities. But for the sake of our democracy, the Democrats need to have the ambition to do that. And if they do that, Larry, and if they are able to win a similar majority in 2028 as they did in 2026, then you might not need to abolish the filibuster in order to get a lot of things done. Because Democrats would, on a similar performance two years from today, have 60 Senate seats or more, as well as the House, as well as the presidency. And that might be a moment in which you institute a lot of these deeper electoral and other reforms.

Diamond: Yeah, well, I think a bottom line of what you’re saying, Yascha, and Arlie as well, is that it’s not going to be enough for Democrats to just oppose Trump, investigate Trump, or even propose the kinds of reforms of American democracy that I think are urgently needed, like ending partisan gerrymandering. They’ve got to have a positive economic agenda that features some degree of economic justice and addresses the wreckage Arlie was referring to—of jobs and hope and economic opportunity—that was wrought by globalization, by automation, and by social and technological change.

There are people who have ideas. I’ll tell you somebody who I think is being very underestimated now, who I think is going to be a serious presidential candidate, particularly if AOC doesn’t run: Ro Khanna. Whether or not you agree with all his policies, he’s thinking in these kinds of terms about an economic New Deal to stimulate industry and create jobs.

Hochschild: Yes, yes. I agree with that.

Mounk: I’m personally quite skeptical about Ro Khanna, though I’m always in favor of former podcast guests becoming president of the United States. Perhaps Arlie or Larry, you can consider doing so.

One of the stories of the election that we haven’t mentioned is Jon Ossoff. I think part of the reason for that is that in what should be a swing state, he was running so far ahead in the polls that it wasn’t really considered a swing-state election anymore by tonight.

He is likely to win by, I believe, about 20 points, which is really quite remarkable. He’s currently up 18 points in the prediction market margin. And when you look at the betting markets for the 2028 presidential election they are now led by Jon Ossoff.

You now have Ossoff with a big jump up today to 22 percent, then AOC and Gavin Newsom at 14 percent, and then a whole bunch of people at 5 percent or below: Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, et cetera, et cetera. So it’ll obviously be very interesting to watch how that primary plays out. Any personal predictions or favorites, Arlie or Larry?

Hochschild: Well, of all you mentioned, I think a lot of exciting people and minds have come forward, but I do think Jon Ossoff has a special gift. And he is a populist of a quite remarkable sort. He will talk about one crime after another that Donald Trump has permitted. Having reminded his audience of all the terrible things going on while we’re watching—it’s like a horror movie somehow—he’ll then say to the side, Have you been watching that? Did you notice that? He’s inviting people to develop a critical consciousness of all of the ways in which democracy is being eroded.

Diamond: I’ll say a couple of things. For a while, people were saying that the Democrats don’t have any candidates, that they don’t have any talent, and so on. I found that extremely shallow and irritating. I think it’s now apparent after this election that there’s a lot of talent, young talent, in the Democratic Party. Right now, the Democratic Party is like the Milwaukee Brewers. They’re just rich in young talent that’s gonna win a World Series.

I do agree with the implication of both of you. Right now, not just in the polls but in emerging judgments about raw talent and ideological and programmatic positioning, Ossoff may well be the leading Democratic presidential contender. I think he’s gonna have staying power because of his rhetorical talent and a certain type of charisma that will have long legs.

To win in 2028 and really form a governing majority, the party is gonna have to bridge its two wings, the progressive wing and the centrist wing. Ossoff may be able to do that. I don’t think he’s the only one, and others may find their own ways to do it. But the progressive wing is not gonna go away.

I don’t know who will be the nominee, but I have a hypothesis. The last three or four people standing on the stage are going to include Ossoff and someone who’s carrying the Bernie Sanders flag of progressivism. That means a somewhat more radical approach to economic redistribution and to the classic variable of how much state intervention you want versus market. If AOC doesn’t run, I really don’t see who is on the horizon who will capture that with a more coherent substantive program than I predict Ro Khanna will have.

I think Gavin Newsom is going to fade. I don’t think he’s decided where he is on the spectrum. And I think a lot of the next round of presidential politics is going to put a premium on authenticity. I don’t think that’s Newsom’s strong suit.

Mounk: Very politely put. It is past 3 a.m. on the East Coast, and past midnight even on the West Coast, so thank you so much for staying up so late. I have one last question that I want to ask each of you, and then we’re gonna start wrapping up here.

I’ve held off on writing that Trump is fading for a long time. A lot of overexcitable columnists, some of them my close friends, have written that article every month since October 2016. Clearly, Trump has dominated the American political system for a very long time. At this point, though, I think it is fair to say that Trump does feel very much on the way out. His hold on the American political system is fading.

He is going to continue being president for the next two years. He can do a lot of damage, even with Democrats now controlling the House and the Senate and most governor’s mansions in the country. So it’s going to be a rough two years, but it does feel like his moment is fading for good. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the MAGA movement is fading for good. We’ll have to see whether JD Vance or somebody else becomes the standard bearer in 2028. Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump Jr. might at some point be the standard bearers, which I think is imaginable.

Nevertheless, I want to do a little bit of introspection from the perspective of a political scientist. For good reason, we warned about the dangers to democracy. Larry, when you were co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, you helped to launch my career by publishing a couple of articles in which my colleague Roberto Foa and I were warning about the danger to democracy before 2016, before it was cool. Is it time to revise that judgment to some extent, or at least to moderate it a little bit?

Has it turned out that some of these authoritarian populists have really degraded democratic institutions in their countries, but have not been able to capture them to the extent that some of us came to worry about over the last 10 years? We did not think that Viktor Orbán could be displaced, at least not easily, through free and fair elections in his country. The elections weren’t entirely fair, because he had accumulated unfair advantages through his control over the media and so on. But by a democratic vote of the Hungarian people, he was swept out of power, and he conceded.

We did not think that would be possible with Vučić in Serbia. Some people don’t think it’s possible with Modi in India. I am personally gaining more and more confidence that it might be possible with Modi when he outstays his welcome, in the way that Trump has just done in the United States.

At this point, the administration of elections is in the hands of governors and secretaries of state, and there has been a blue wave, a blue tsunami, against Trump. I think it is absolutely in the hands of the American people to sweep Trump and his clique from power in 2028 if they decisively vote for a candidate who is able to capture the public imagination.

Now, that’s still compatible with a world in which a lot of countries are forms of—I’m not sure competitive authoritarianism is quite the right word—competitive wannabe authoritarians. These are people who are trying to capture the institutions, who don’t care much about democratic norms, who increase corruption, and who degrade the quality of democratic governance. All of those things can continue to be huge problems.

But have we overstated the degree to which this is a battle to the death between democracy and autocracy? Have democratic institutions proven themselves to be more resilient over the last 10 years than we might have expected? Arlie and Larry, you get the last words today.

Hochschild: We have to be cautious. When we look at the rise of right-wing leaders in this country and around the world, we’re looking at two things. It’s tempting to focus on the leader, but that’s just one thing. The other is the followers and their emotional predisposition, and we have to look at that.

In my work, it was clear that people were looking for a Donald Trump because their lives had been turned upside down. They were upset. They were afraid that they were going down and that there was no bottom to that down. That fear, that predisposition to hear the tyrant’s siren song and to be emotionally captured, is very important.

Today we’re faced with an AI revolution. Word is that for some half of the tasks that entry-level jobs call for, AI can do better than a person can. So we’re in for another major disruption. This time it doesn’t affect blue-collar rural workers. It affects the middle class.

I see Donald Trump heroizing and touting the wonders of AI, but creating no plan and offering nothing to meet the needs of an unemployed middle-class person who’s just gotten four years of education, can’t pay back the loan, and is very uncertain about what the next job is. It’s a disaster that could very well happen.

We’re not China, which can just tell the managers of its industries, don’t fire anybody. And we’re not yet Finland, which says, okay, we have a free job retraining program for all our people, because the economy does change and we’ll need to upgrade our skill sets. That’s a public offering. I see those as two models, one bad and one preferable, for what’s going to hit us.

So focus on the predisposition to accept magical answers and be emotionally captured. We need to look at that now and do something about it now.

Mounk: Arlie, thank you very much. You’re probably unaware of this, but you just advertised my new book, which is out in the spring. It is precisely about what happens to our society if those kinds of job market effects from artificial intelligence prove to be real. Larry?

Hochschild: Wonderful. I look forward to reading it.

Diamond: Me too. I would completely embrace what Arlie said. I’d go a bit further, and then I’ll give a more direct answer to your question, Yascha.

Over the next few years, we’re looking at the disappearance of long-haul trucking jobs, probably the disappearance of Uber driving jobs, and the disappearance of a lot of the remaining factory jobs, which are increasingly going to be taken over by robots. What worries me is the slowness in the creation of new types of jobs.

And it’s not only the United States. Many young people in China aren’t finding jobs. Combine this with the algorithms and social media that keep driving polarization and division, and with AI turbocharging narratives of division. It’s certainly a period where there’s going to be a lot of raw material for anger, division, suspicion, and the emotional, not fully rational, side of politics.

Then you look at specific countries. I think we’re turning the tide, at least for now, in the United States. We’ll see if we are on the cusp of a truly realigning period in American electoral history, as we had in 1932 and 1980. Or we may just be in a period that a number of democracies are in now, where the alternation is between more rational and democratic politics, in terms of commitment to liberal democracy, and the politics of illiberal populism morphing into authoritarianism.

It’s hard for me to imagine now someone other than Marine Le Pen being elected president of France next year. You know Europe better than I do, but you certainly have to favor her.

Mounk: She’s certainly odds-on to win, I would say.

Diamond: I’m not saying Alternative for Germany is gonna come to power in Germany. It’s the country of your birth and you follow it closely, but they’re gaining. Europe has a lot of problems. Ironically, because they worry about the United States, I think that if you look out over the next few years, continental Europe is in deeper trouble than the United States.

So I agree with Arlie. We need a lot of caution, and it’s incredibly premature to think that the battle is essentially won and all we have to do is clean up in 2028. I don’t want to panic your listeners, but I want to close with this. There’s something else that worries me that I think we’re not even beginning to take into account.

And that is, weak as he will be in terms of the capacity to get any legislation or any appointments through the Senate—judicial, ambassadorial, anything else—he still has enormous discretion in foreign policy and military policy. That is the discretion of aggression, or the discretion of resignation and passivity in the face of aggression, with regard to Ukraine.

I am very deeply worried about Taiwan right now. If you’re the People’s Republic of China and you’re looking at an aging, politically weak, wounded, and cognitively deteriorating president who has already signaled his transactional attitudes toward foreign policy ... I think we’re going to be in an extremely dangerous period in world affairs in the next two years, for democracy and for international security.

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What’s bigger and more devastating than a tsunami? A Category 5 hurricane? A meteor strike? Whatever it is, it hit Donald Trump and the Republican Party Tuesday. Wednesday dawned on a transformed United States—indeed, a very different world.

Why did this happen? It’s overdetermined, probably. Democrats benefited from every factor you can name, from Trump’s insistence that his party run weak candidates for the Senate in key states to higher fuel prices stemming from the war with Iran he started.

But that doesn’t quite capture the gestalt of an election in which the polls were wrong again—this time because they badly underestimated the Democratic margin, rather than, as in previous years, the latent strength of GOP voters who don’t answer surveys.

This landslide—in which Democrats won back both the House and the Senate by sweeping margins—wasn’t just a rebuke of Trump. It was a repudiation. Whether because 2024 Trump voters turned against him, or just sat this one out, his vaunted “base” all but evaporated. His opponents, by contrast, were energized. Preliminary exit polls showed that 62 percent of voters disapproved of his performance as president, 53 percent “strongly.” Most damning, 62 percent said they think their president puts his own interests ahead of the country’s.

Before the election, two strategies were being debated among Democrats: expand the party by moving to the center, or mobilize the base by doubling down on progressive policies. Turns out neither was proven wrong or right. All it took to win was running against Trump. These midterms had the feel of a country rising up and saying “enough.” People were fed up with high gas and grocery costs, yes. But they were also tired—disgusted, maybe—by Trump’s nasty, rambling, one-man show. The allies insulted and snubbed. The dictators embraced. The people gunned down because untrained ICE agents panicked. The cruel notion of a public execution. Half the White House reduced to rubble and a pharaonic victory arch overshadowing Arlington National Cemetery. The murky deals in crypto and real estate for family and friends. The insults and vulgarity, spouted at rallies and tweeted in all caps at midnight.

F-bombing Democrats take note: Voters seem to have had their fill of indecency masquerading as “authenticity.”

Yesterday’s blue tide swept away political conventional wisdom—right and left.

Since 2016, many writers have, time and again, predicted Donald Trump’s demise. I have always resisted that temptation. It has long been clear to me that Trump had managed to dominate American politics to a remarkable extent, and would not be easy to dislodge.

But all political eras must end eventually, and the Trump Era likely ended last night. The rebuke which the American people have delivered to him is profound. The reasons are many: inflation, corruption, the war of choice with Iran, the wanton cruelty of the administration, and much more. The most important reason is even more simple: Trump made huge promises in 2016, and again in 2024. Nobody believes them anymore.

This does not mean that the furies that Trump is so masterful at channeling will suddenly disappear from American politics. Trump is fading. But Trumpism, the MAGA movement, or perhaps some new form of populist insurgency will likely stay a big part of the political system.

This is the biggest midterm wave in decades. According to current projections, Democrats stand to flip more seats in the Senate than in any election since 2008 and more seats in the House than in any election since 1974. They have flipped Senate seats in Kansas, South Carolina, and Texas, and may well do so in Mississippi. Jon Ossoff, in Georgia, will win his seat by a whopping margin of about 18 points. Democrats also won gubernatorial races everywhere from Alaska to Texas.

The last few presidential elections have all been reasonably close. This makes it tempting to believe that American politics is polarized in the kind of way that Bosnia-Herzegovina is polarized, with rigid voting blocs implacably—and more or less permanently—opposing each other. But in fact there has been a tremendous amount of movement between the blocs. Over the past 20 years, the states that are considered blue, red, or purple have shifted around significantly; last night, to give just one example, James Talarico became the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988. The demographic coalitions of each party have also changed enormously; it was Trump’s unexpected inroad with blacks and Latinos, for example, that helped him pull off his 2024 victory.

We’re delighted to feature this article as part of our ongoing series on “Liberal Virtues and Values.”

The series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, will make the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms. If you haven’t already, please subscribe today to receive future instalments into your inbox!

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For almost six months (!), I’ve been facilitating a reading group—Intellectual Bootcamp—through Persuasion Institute. We meet every week or every other week, read usually an article or a few chapters of a text, and in so doing develop a surprisingly-good mental roadmap of the leading political and theoretical concerns of our time.

It’s good stuff!—and you should consider joining the group! It’s designed to be intellectually rigorous and welcoming at the same time, and a really great hardcore group has developed who regularly come to the meetings. In this time we’ve read Gilles Deleuze, Christopher Lasch, Neil Postman, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Johan Galtung, Judith Butler, Francis Fukuyama, Yascha Mounk, Samuel Huntington, David Graeber, Martin Gurri, Nick Bostrom, Mark Fisher, among others. Future sessions will focus on computers and technology, media ecology, the evolution of the state, the meaning of the West, among other topics. We meet by Zoom, Fridays from noon to 1:30pm EST. Information for our next session is here. The only condition for joining is to be a paid Persuasion subscriber—which you should be anyway!

What I want to talk about here is a little module that we’ve been doing for the past couple of months, tracing out the intellectual origins of “wokeness.” Much of this territory is covered in Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, and our “curriculum” has been largely parallel to that book, but there is something uniquely special about reading these seminal texts in the original. The group self-selects as liberal, and there is an—I would say unanimous—antipathy to some of the consequences of wokeness.

But an interesting thing happens when we make ourselves go back and read Foucault, Said, Butler, Galtung, Crenshaw: they all, in their different ways, make a lot of sense and, taken together, offer a vigorous intellectual critique of liberalism. For those who constitute their political identity as “liberal,” it becomes not at all easy to find the terrain to defend: the position that admits the obviously-valid elements of the progressive critique while beating back the parts that are almost self-evidently pernicious. What I want to do is to map out some of this terrain—to describe the places where liberalism appears most vulnerable and the progressive critique most trenchant, and to think through the most effective arguments liberals can muster in response.

Our genealogy starts with five thinkers. The first is the French intellectual Michel Foucault, and what Mounk calls his “deep skepticism about objective truth.” There is an obvious appeal to Foucault’s writing, in his tracing of the totalizing systems of power and control that emerge in the modern era often under the banner of “humanitarianism,” and in his analysis of the webs of power that purportedly “free” and “independent” actors are constantly caught in, with power relations structuring social experience all the way down.

Second is the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, deeply influenced by Foucault, who was, however, repelled by Foucault’s near-nihilism and moved in a direction that was more engagé. In his classic 1978 work Orientalism, Said analyzed the ways in which the discourse of Orientalism—Oriental Studies departments, as well as centuries’ worth of Western literary and cultural tropes—constituted a language of power and conquest. “Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed to me otherwise,” Said wrote, arguing that cultural projects served for centuries as a form of imperial propaganda with “Colonial rule … justified in advance by orientalism rather than after the fact.”

Third, there’s the Norwegian polymath Johan Galtung, who provided another critical brick in the woke edifice. His argument, as laid out in the 1969 essay “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” is that the usual definition of violence as an agent acting upon a victim is woefully inadequate to depict the real scale of human suffering. Violence, he argued, is an extension of power relations and of inequality, and it is the incessant, ubiquitous unfolding of inequality—whether disparate health outcomes for different socioeconomic groups, or the unwillingness of states to bring vital resources to support the poor—that accounts for violence on the vast scale. “Structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters,” Galtung wrote in a sweeping indictment of the social status quo.

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Fourth, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw advanced the argument of “intersectionality” in 1989, decades before the term caught on in general usage. She started with a pair of crazy-making cases in which black women were clearly discriminated against but were unable to attain legal standing either as blacks or as women. The legal system evidently failed to account for situations in which prejudice occurs across multiple dimensions at once. She concluded that real justice would have to involve an inversion of the current order of the power structure. “It seems that placing those who currently are marginalized in the center is the most effective way to resist efforts to compartmentalize experiences and undermine potential collective action,” she wrote.

Finally, the queer philosopher Judith Butler, writing—interestingly—in Theatre Journal in 1988, argued that gender is a “performative act,” that is “instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as … constitut[ing] the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” Butler’s argument, actually, was not confined to gender and sexuality, but involved a profound challenge to the bedrock liberal notion of personal identity. “I am suggesting that this self is not only irretrievably ‘outside,’ constituted in social discourse, but that the ascription of interiority is itself a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication,” Butler wrote.

So here’s the thing about those five thinkers: they all have a point.

Foucault brilliantly analyzes the ways in which modern power structures rest on a notion of “individualization”—and how the coercive apparatus becomes internalized by all the participants of a regime and acted out even without direct action from a state. But even more than that, Foucault broke through many of the pleasant fictions by which we sustain our social existence and found the world in a state of “agonism” (permanent conflict) in which we cannot even trust ourselves, with our thoughts and behaviors apt to be shaped by those forces that are most invested in our submission.

After reading Said, meanwhile, it becomes difficult to view Western treatments of the “East” in the same way. Within weeks of reading Said, I found The Mummy, 300, Gladiator, Indiana Jones to be hopelessly ruined by their orientalist tropes. And Said’s argument is of course more far-reaching than that—it’s about how cultural entities are, in fact, politically constituted, with a way of serving brute force and actively participating in imperial enterprises.