American progressivism is on the march. New York City will, barring a miracle, have a socialist mayor next year. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been packing arenas in their “Fight the Oligarchy” tour. The chances of the Democrats nominating a Democratic Socialist presidential candidate have never been higher. The left’s moderates, meanwhile, are struggling for attention—or an answer to the question of how to tackle Trump.

And yet, even as American progressivism is having a moment, it has drifted so far from the values that it was founded on as to be unrecognizable. Today’s progressivism is both by and for young, well-off, and well-educated urbanites. But that wasn’t always the case. Allow me to explain.

Progressives once sought to make life better for ordinary people by emphasizing their universal interests across racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions. They wanted to ensure universal fair treatment for everyone. They promoted universal standards of merit, achievement, and truth. And they believed in providing universal access to America’s bounty, from scientific achievement to economic growth to healthcare. The core concept was that if Americans were treated in this fashion, the country would prosper—and that existing social and governmental arrangements should be pushed in that direction.

A progressive, after all, was supposed to be for progress. Today’s progressives are different. They have rejected the universal approach and instead embraced professional-class cultural priorities and policy preferences. In that sense, they have lost the right to call themselves “progressives.” Instead, they now stand in the way of progress as they used to define it—indeed, progress as most ordinary voters would recognize it.

Here are some of the ways that progressives have bid farewell to progress.

Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Now, we are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72 percent of Gen-Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27 percent of boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life to explain everything—psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorized, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, and mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, ourselves.

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things, not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting, but because of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you, not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does—nope, it’s autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul, but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or a curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events.

Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorized. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalized. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental-health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

It’s Tuesday, July 15. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Christopher Rufo on how to stop universities’ serial abuse of American taxpayers. Andrew Cuomo refuses to drop out. What dead birds have to do with the death of Europe. And much more.

But first: Crypto legislation could deliver a new era of financial freedom.

The price of Bitcoin keeps hitting one record high after another—topping $120,000 on Monday—but the price isn’t what makes this a momentous week in the history of crypto. The big news is that Congress is on the verge of passing broad legislation that deals exclusively with crypto. Even more remarkable is that the federal government is looking for ways to support, not outlaw, the technology.

The invention of Bitcoin in 2009 gave birth to a new era of financial freedom in this country. But its libertarian ethos has often been overshadowed by what seems like a never-ending cycle of booms and busts, scandals and arrests, and crypto heroes and villains. President Trump’s political foes love pointing out that his zeal for crypto coincides with his family’s deepening involvement in the industry.

Yet cryptocurrency is an issue on which Trump has governed exactly as he said he would, writes Max Raskin, who has been involved with cryptocurrencies since 2010. The three pieces of legislation that Congress is expected to pass aren’t perfect, but they will allow the market to begin building a structure around the core idea of money belonging to the individual and not the state.

Some people will never stop seeing cryptocurrency as a quirky fad, like Beanie Babies or a glorified Ponzi scheme. But for the 65 million Americans who own crypto, its political and economic legitimacy is arriving at last.

—The Editors

Why Young People Are Voting to Burn It All Down

How did 62 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 come to hold a “favorable view” of socialism? And is Zohran Mamdani the left’s answer to Trump? Free Press columnist Tyler Cowen and Gen Z economics guru Kyla Scanlon break down the viral populism reshaping the future of the American left.

• At a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser on Friday night, Barack Obama urged fellow Democrats to “toughen up.” In remarks to party donors, the former president said defeating Trump would take “less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions.”

• The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can fire nearly 1,400 Department of Education employees, effectively allowing the White House to dismantle the agency. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that only Congress has the authority to abolish the department.

• A fire at a nursing home in Fall River, Massachusetts, killed at least nine people Sunday night. Around 50 firefighters responded to the scene at 10 p.m., and five were injured while working to rescue residents and contain the blaze, according to state officials.

• Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington is calling for the Congressional ethics office to implement mental fitness standards for lawmakers. “What I’ve heard from my neighbors, my community, is that this place is being run by a bunch of staffers,” she told Axios, citing public concern over aging leadership.

• A federal appeals court blocked a new “Click to Cancel” rule that would have required companies to let customers cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up. But the “Click to Cancel” fight isn’t over—Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) introduced legislation Thursday to make the rule law.

• Former president Joe Biden defended his use of the autopen to sign off on pardons and clemency, telling The New York Times that he gave verbal authorization for each decision. “I consciously made all those decisions,” he said.

• President Donald Trump threatened increased tariffs on Russia yesterday if a peace deal with Ukraine does not materialize within 50 days. The trade threat came on the same day that Trump and NATO reached a deal to send new weapons worth about $10 billion to Ukraine this week, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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CORRECTION: A previous version of this Front Page included the line ‘Chris Cuomo refuses to drop out’ in the introduction. It is his brother, Andrew Cuomo, who is continuing to run in New York’s mayoral race. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.

Just two weeks ago, New Yorkers voted en masse for a self-proclaimed socialist—someone who once called for “seizing the means of production.”

This is, of course, Zohran Mamdani, who dominated in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor with a definitive victory over Andrew Cuomo.

He has called for rent freezes, free buses, and even government-run grocery stores.

He won 56 percent of the vote in a campaign fueled by young, highly educated, wealthy people—many of whom believe in reviving socialism here in America, in 2025.

According to a Cato Institute poll from May: 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism. And 34 percent have a positive view of communism.

Polls by Emerson and Marist from May and June had shown Mamdani leading with voters under 45 by as much as a 2:1 ratio against the former governor.

This phenomenon has left many people wondering: Why are so many young people embracing a failed economic system? Is it their university education? Is it the influence of social media? Is it just “cool”? Is it a desperate call for anything to fix wealth inequality? Or is it something else?

Here to help us understand are Tyler Cowen and Kyla Scanlon.

Tyler Cowen is an economist and Free Press columnist who just wrote an important essay for us called “Why Won’t Socialism Die?”

Kyla Scanlon is a writer, economic commentator, and educator—and, importantly for this conversation, a member of Gen Z. She is 28, and her new book is In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work.

This conversation was originally a Free Press livestream—and you’ll hear throughout this conversation that I take lots of questions from people who joined us live.

Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for an edited transcript.

“If the election were tomorrow, he’d run away with it.”

That is how one prominent New York City financier put it to me on Monday, reacting to a new poll showing 33-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani dominating the race for Gracie Mansion. That poll, released by progressive think tank Data for Progress, shows Mamdani, a first-term state legislator, crushing Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor once believed to have White House potential.

Two years ago Michela Padovani, a 32-year-old microbiologist from Verona, traveled to Venice for Italy’s once-a-year taxidermy licensing exam. Venice is the only city that allows the Italian Taxidermy Association (ATI) to administer its test. Twenty years ago, Padovani might have been part of a cohort of 10 or 15 aspiring taxidermists. But she is the only taxidermist to have earned a license that year—or since. 

Padovani, a sunny and soft-spoken blonde, likes birds, puzzles, and collecting. Taxidermy drew the three interests together. “It seemed so precise and creative, so satisfying, as a craft,” she told me this spring. The weekend-long Italian National Taxidermy Championship was winding down and Padovani, who had just won Best in Show in Birds—for a first-place cuckoo, a parakeet, and a long-tailed glossy starling, embalmed dragonfly in its beak—kvelled over her awards. 

Outside her orbit, however, the mood was more glum. “We have an enormous problem,” said Iginio Bressan, president emeritus of the ATI. 

“Twenty years ago we had 400 entries,” said Piero Della Libera, a 66-year-old graphic designer who won third prize in small birds for a blue-gray thrush. “Now we have 81.” 

That’s the proximate problem: For all Padovani’s enthusiasm, Italian taxidermy is dying out. The deeper problem, though, is this: Throughout Europe, cratering birth rates and an accelerating brain drain are converging into a demographic crisis that threatens to hollow out economies, pensions, and labor forces, to fray social contracts, to unsettle national identities. This is Europe’s unraveling, and rural communities on the margins of the continent say they are on the front lines of the crisis. They are already experiencing the erosion of their traditions, the collapse of their ways of life. They wonder what will go next. They wonder if anyone is paying attention. 

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has been engaged in a high-stakes conflict with America’s elite universities and, by proxy, American universities as a whole. The administration’s supporters have applauded the president’s decision to strip billions of dollars in funding from the Ivy League, while critics have warned that such actions are an overreach and will have a negative impact on the hard sciences.

Beneath the dueling headlines, however, there appears to be an uneasy, if often unstated, agreement: Something is deeply wrong with academia, and no one is quite sure what to do about it.

Conservatives have long made the argument that academia has been corrupted. And since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the Hamas terror campaign of 2023, an increasing number of centrists and liberals have joined the chorus, recognizing that many once-great universities had been captured by destructive ideologies and are no longer truth-seeking institutions.

I have been involved in the campaign for higher education reform for a number of years, working with a coalition that exposed former Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism, abolished DEI in dozens of state universities, and transformed New College of Florida, once a haven for left-wing activist ideologies, into a classical liberal arts institution.

These initiatives have been significant, but piecemeal. Now, it is time to systematize the lessons of these campaigns and to enact a program of national reform.

I’m not an old man, but when it comes to crypto, I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been involved with cryptocurrencies since 2010 and have taught a course on digital currencies at NYU for nearly a decade. Over that time, I’ve seen booms and busts, scandals and arrests, and an ever-rotating cast of crypto heroes and villains. Bitcoin is now at an all-time high—$120,000 as of this writing—but price isn’t the real story. The real story is that bitcoin changed the nature of money forever.

None of the wild stories—from the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried to the shutdown of drug market Silk Road—alter the fundamental dynamics that have been in place since the birth of crypto on January 3, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto launched the Bitcoin network. In a society that was trending toward more central control, and less freedom and privacy, the invention of bitcoin gave birth to a new era of financial freedom in this country.

But this year will be different. That’s because the federal government is poised, for the first time, to enact broad legislation that deals exclusively with crypto. And that watershed moment could come as soon as this week, which Republicans have dubbed “Crypto Week” in the House of Representatives.

Lawmakers are set to vote on three bills (one already passed by the Senate) that deal exclusively with crypto. The bills address three subjects—stablecoins, regulatory jurisdiction over crypto assets, and a central bank digital currency ban. These are important subjects for legislation, and lots will be written about the details of each, but the big picture is this: In its first comprehensive approach to private digital currency, the U.S. federal government is looking for ways to support, not outlaw, the technology. This is truly remarkable. Many of us remember when Senator Chuck Schumer was calling for bitcoin to be shut down in 2011 because it was used for drug transactions.

If these bills become law, it would be the fulfillment of a promise: President Trump campaigned on, and is governing as, the heir to the crypto revolution. As many of his political opponents love pointing out, he is doing so as his family gets more involved in the industry. And while true conflicts of interest and impropriety deserve scrutiny, nothing of actual substance has been leveled at the president. Focus on this part of the story risks obscuring the extraordinary change now underway. 

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an inane culture war!

The new Superman film, released over the weekend, turned, predictably enough, into a partisan issue.

Director James Gunn started things off on July 4—of all days—by reminding us in an interview that Superman is “an immigrant,” albeit one who arrived from outer space.

You’ll never guess what happened next: Superman is superwoke, cried the right, in essays, op-eds, and numerous cable segments. X was full of predictions from the right that this was another case of “go woke, go broke.” Then—naturally—the White House suggested that Donald Trump is the real Superman, by posting a mock movie poster of the president in Lycra regalia. Gavin Newsom parried back, saying that Superman was not only an immigrant but “an undocumented one.”

Not that everyone on the left was enthused.

It’s Monday, July 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Christopher Caldwell on the Trump assassination attempt a year later; Coleman Hughes asks his latest guest, can you marry across the religious divide?; Maya Sulkin reports on the teachers union interested in everything except education. And much more.

But first: Tyler Cowen on whether we can trust AI after Grok’s Nazi outburst.

Last week, Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk’s xAI, went full Nazi. It praised Hitler and referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” It rehashed all kinds of antisemitic tropes. It also described graphic sexual violence. Something, obviously, had gone very badly wrong.

On Saturday, xAI apologized for its large language model’s day of Nazi outbursts and claimed to have fixed the problem, which xAI blamed on “an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot” that “is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”

When I saw Grok going off the rails—and read xAI’s explanation—I immediately wondered what our columnist Tyler Cowen thought. Tyler might be the biggest AI user—and biggest AI enthusiast—in the extended Free Press family. So I was curious what his optimistic take would be on the questions I had: If LLMs are fast becoming our main source of information, then isn’t the idea that one of them can turn into a Nazi overnight cause for concern? How can we trust AI if a mistake in the code sends things haywire? Find his answers in his latest column.

—Oliver Wiseman

• President Trump defended his attorney general amid backlash over a Justice Department memo that concluded Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. “Let Pam Bondi do her job,” said Trump in a social media post on Sunday. Trump dismissed renewed interest in the case as a Democrat-fueled distraction—prompting rare backlash from his base. For more on the Epstein furor, read op-eds in our pages by Peter Savodnik—“The Epstein Conspiracy Theorists Will Never Be Satisfied”—and Tina Brown, “MAGA Is Right About Jeffrey Epstein.”

• Support for immigration has reached a 25-year high, with 79 percent of Americans now viewing it as a “good thing,” according to a new Gallup poll. The finding comes amid an administration crackdown on illegal immigration, with Trump promising to deport one million people per year. Approval has risen across party lines, including a notable jump among Republicans from 39 percent to 64 percent. Support for mass deportations has also declined, suggesting growing resistance to Trump’s immigration agenda.

• Iran has confirmed that President Masoud Pezeshkian was injured in an Israeli missile strike on a high-level security meeting in Tehran during the 12-day war in June. The attack, which targeted exits to trap officials, left several wounded and forced the president to escape through an emergency hatch.

• The search for victims from the Central Texas floods is on hold as the region faces more flash flooding just days after 103 people died in Kerr County alone, and left over 160 missing. Rivers like the Guadalupe, Lampasas, and San Saba have surged over 30 feet, prompting mandatory evacuations and road closures.

• An Israeli air strike near a water distribution point in Gaza killed 10 people, including six children, due to a “technical malfunction,” according to the IDF. The military said it was targeting a militant operative, and has now launched an investigation. The incident comes as ceasefire negotiations remain stalled.

• Federal agents on Thursday arrested 319 immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally in raids on two California cannabis farms, sparking protests and leaving one farm worker dead from injuries sustained in the standoff.

• Economists have slightly upgraded their outlook for the U.S. economy, citing paused tariffs and improved growth prospects under Trump, according to a Wall Street Journal survey. On average, the economists put the odds of a recession in the next 12 months at 33 percent, down from 45 percent in April.

• Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, who has long argued for the U.S. to refocus its military priorities on China, has pressed allies including Japan and Australia to clarify what steps they have taken to prepare for a Chinese attempt to take over Taiwan. Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, who is on a trip to China, publicly pushed back on the request.

• World No. 1 Jannik Sinner claimed his first Wimbledon title, defeating two-time champion Carlos Alcaraz in four sets on Sunday. On Saturday, Iga Świątek defeated Amanda Anisimova 6–0, 6–0. It is the Pole’s first Wimbledon title and sixth Grand Slam.