“Our Constitution is very clear. People should be treated as individuals, not as part of a group.”
54 INTO THE
WHEN HIKERS GO MISSING, WHO FINDS THEM? by
mark dee
42 THE RISE AND (SUDDEN) FALL OF DEI
HOW A MOVEMENT CAN FALL, SEEMINGLY OVERNIGHT. by eric schulzke
53 OUT OF MANY, ONE WHY DIVERSITY STILL MATTERS. by theresa dear
THE OLD ORDER IS COLLAPSING. WHAT WILL REPLACE IT? by gary gerstle
SPONSORED BY: PRESENTED BY:
Flake most recently served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey. He previously represented Arizona in the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and currently serves as chairman of World Trade Center Utah and as director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Politics. His commentary on soft power is on page 13.
Dear is a senior human resources executive and a strategist at The Human Capital Strategy Group. She has been on the NAACP national board since 2005 and is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. A recognized expert and pioneer in employee-based innovations, her essay on the value of diversity in the workplace is on page 53.
Murray is a public policy researcher and contributing writer for The Atlantic based in the U.K. She also writes Family Stuff, a newsletter about the shifting patterns of modern relationships. Her story about how family sizes correlate across generations and what that means for the future is on page 18.
Gerstle is an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Cambridge and the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. An author and editor of more than 10 books, an exclusive essay adapted from his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era” is on page 32.
Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist at Commentary magazine and co-host of Commentary’s daily podcast. A fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, her essay on page 62 is drawn from her recent book “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.”
Originally from Spain, Pallarés is a Paris-based illustrator whose work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Istanbul, Évora, Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Her clients include The Washington Post, Glamour, Madame Figaro, Atlas Obscura, Stanford University and Harvard University. Pallarés’ illustration can be seen on page 62.
Here’s something that worries me: Increasingly, friends and family tell me they’ve stopped following the news. Some have unplugged completely. Others have curated their feeds to include only stories that confirm what they already believe. Not that anyone is proud of this. In fact, these disclosures typically come in the form of a confession. It’s just too much. It’s relentless, it’s exhausting, and I don’t know what to do with it all anymore.
As a journalist, I find this troubling. I’m in the news business, after all. But I also relate.
There are days when the flood of headlines — the dysfunction in Washington, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the rapid-fire collapse of once-stable norms — feels like too much to process. We can all sense we’re living through a moment of enormous, historic change, a pivot point between eras. It’s not just political whiplash or economic anxiety. It’s the vertigo of feeling like the world we inherited is giving way to something new that we can’t quite define.
Which is why this month’s cover story felt so clarifying to me. In his sweeping essay on page 32, historian Gary Gerstle offers an explanation for the tectonic shifts of the last decade. He traces the rise — and recent fall — of what he calls the “neoliberal order,” a political and economic philosophy that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This is the worldview that prized free markets, deregulation and global trade. It shaped not just policy but culture — and now, Gerstle argues, it’s unraveling.
That unraveling, he suggests, is why we’re seeing strange new political coalitions form, old assumptions collapse, and previously fringe ideas move into the mainstream. It’s why both Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders — two ideologically opposite figures — could be seen as expressions of the same yearning for a dramatic reordering.
How this all shakes out is anyone’s guess. Argentina may offer some clues, which is why we commissioned Eléonore Hughes to profile President Javier Milei — a libertarian firebrand with a chainsaw and a mission to radically shrink the state. Argentina’s radical overhaul of its government and economy is a year or two ahead of ours, which is why it might offer a glimpse of where the U.S. is headed — and of how societies respond when the old order collapses.
Which brings me back to what I say to friends who don’t want to engage with the news anymore or with ideas that challenge their worldview. The answers are in a timely and thoughtful essay by Maria McNair on page 68. If we are feeling overwhelmed and helpless, McNair argues, maybe we’re looking in the wrong places.
Step back from the daily, relentless churn of our news feeds and a different, more complete picture emerges — one in which global poverty is declining, child mortality is plummeting, and entire nations are getting healthier, freer and more resilient. By seeking out stories of real progress, she argues, we not only gain a truer sense of the world — we rediscover our capacity to shape it. And that shift in perspective can make us feel not despairing, but hopeful.
You don’t have to follow every headline. But you don’t have to give up on the world, either. There is power in understanding the deeper forces at work. And there is hope in remembering that the story isn’t over yet.
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Our annual faith issue in APRIL featured an in-depth analysis of Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Survey that found that after more than a decade, the trend of people distancing themselves from religion had plateaued (“A Great Awakening”). Writer Mariya Manzhos examined the data and interviewed academics, faith leaders and those heading back to church to find that young adults were driving the change and what that could mean for the future of religion in America. Brigham Young University professor David Dollahite, who was quoted in the story, called it “first-rate” journalism that his students will be reading. “It is very informative and comprehensive, supported with survey data. Thank you for the fine journalism,” added reader Stuart Reid. He said the story showed how people drift from faith as religion drifts from its orthodox moorings, while the rising generations seek those who “authentically preach about the supernatural that calls them to sacrifice and to stricter standards.” But many online readers weren’t convinced the trend toward religious affiliation would be long term and they questioned young people’s motives. “A lot are religious because of the community that it brings, but what if you don’t believe what the religion teaches but enjoy the community? Well then, you’re in a very tough situation,” wrote Ben Marsh. And an online reader who calls himself FordFanatic warned that if the results showing youth embracing faith are short-lived, “organized religion as we know it won’t be around in a generation or two. If you don’t have the youth, you don’t have a future.” Johnnie Moore, an influential evangelical leader, contributed an essay on the promise of artificial intelligence for religion and how faith can inform the development of technology (“The Religion of AI ”). But Paul and Collette Pulsipher weren’t as upbeat about AI being a positive for anyone. They commented on Facebook: “ AI needs to die a quick and painful death. It does more harm than good.”
“If you don’t have the youth, you don’t have a future.”
Erik Weihenmayer
BY JEFF FLAKE
As I toiled over my master’s thesis in the basement of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library in the late 1980s, I had no idea I’d one day be sitting across the table from its subject: Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. My thesis had explored how Mugabe managed to retain power through two election cycles.
Decades later, by this time a U.S. senator, I found myself in Harare, being lectured by a tired nonagenarian who, after more than 35 years in power, seemed most animated by his grievances. For what felt like hours, Mugabe recounted a history of slights at the hands of American presidents and British prime ministers. Margaret Thatcher had robbed him at Lancaster House. Barack Obama had snubbed him at the United Nations. Ronald Reagan was an amateur; Tony Blair, clueless.
I listened respectfully, waiting for an opening. When he dismissed George W. Bush, I finally jumped in.
“It was George W. Bush,” I reminded him, “who created PEPFAR — the program that provided life-saving AIDS treatment across Africa, including to Zimbabwe, where infection rates included a quarter of your population. Surely your country has benefited from that generosity.”
He paused, as if pondering his own ingratitude. “I’ll give you that,” he said softly. “I’ll give you that.”
That moment stayed with me. Not just because of the irony of a dictator begrudgingly complimenting an American president, but because it underscored something deeper: the enduring value of soft power. That exchange, unlikely as it was, would not have been possible through force or threat.
That’s why it was deeply troubling to hear about recent moves to dismantle USAID and other programs that represent the softer instruments of American influence abroad. These programs don’t just reflect our values — they advance our national interest.
Beyond PEPFAR’s humanitarian impact, the program has fostered
security partnerships and goodwill that benefit Americans directly. Because of it, we have access to intelligence-sharing agreements, military cooperation and public health collaborations we wouldn’t otherwise have. Soft power works. It’s not just a moral imperative, it’s a strategic imperative.
In this era of alpha dominance, it’s easy to forget the virtues of diplomacy. High-minded rhetoric and saber-rattling may grab headlines, but it’s often quiet diplomacy that resolves crises, builds alliances and maintains peace.
I saw this again firsthand during my time as U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Just months into my tenure, Sweden and Finland sought NATO membership. Turkey balked at Sweden’s admission — citing Sweden’s permissive stance toward the PKK, a designated terrorist organization that has long threatened Turkey’s national security.
With 29 other NATO members eager to bring Sweden into the fold, the instinct was to pressure Turkey — to lecture and strong-arm its leadership into compliance. But diplomacy, not coercion, was the only viable path forward.
Sweden had genuine steps to take, including constitutional and statutory changes to address Turkey’s security concerns. Turkey, for its part, needed to show its citizens that the alliance would be strengthened — not compromised — by Sweden’s inclusion. Meanwhile, the United States had its own role to play, notably by moving forward on a long-stalled sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, which would bolster its NATO interoperability.
What followed was a highly technical, deeply choreographed diplomatic effort that spanned 18 months. It required legislative finesse, alliance coordination and an immense amount of patience. But in the end, Sweden joined NATO. Turkey saw its legitimate concerns addressed. And the United States reaffirmed its role as a reliable partner and leader within the alliance. Most importantly, trust was built — a currency more valuable than any arms deal.
These are the dividends of soft power and diplomacy. They don’t come with parades or photo ops. But they endure. They make us safer. They reinforce the rules-based international order that, however imperfect, has spared us from global conflict for nearly eight decades.
As a former legislator and diplomat, I’ve seen the power of diplomacy up close — how a well-placed word or a quietly brokered compromise can accomplish what no threat ever could. It is far easier to tear down these institutions than to build them. And once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
In the end, diplomacy is not weakness — it is strength under control. And soft power is not softness — it is resilience, influence and moral leadership.
In our zeal to project power, let’s not forget that the best expression of American strength often comes not from the might of our military, but from the measure of our generosity, the soundness of our word and the reach of our ideals.
JEFF FLAKE SERVED AS U.S. AMBASSADOR TO TURKEY FROM JANUARY 2022 TO SEPTEMBER 2024, AND AS A U.S. SENATOR FROM ARIZONA FROM 2013 TO 2019.
IS TOURISM RUINING OUR BEST PLACES?
TOURISM IS BOOMING — and overwhelming locals around the world. Some 1.4 billion people traveled internationally in 2024. That’s 1 in 6 humans! Riding camels in Morocco, learning to tango in Buenos Aires and exploring ancient stone temples in Cambodia, they expanded our collective horizons and poured cash into regional economies. But some aren’t so thrilled when visitors crowd their streets, monopolize landmarks and raise their cost of living, especially in the 10 percent of destinations that draw 80 percent of all tourists. From Kyoto and Venice to Arches National Park, governments are trying different methods to manage visitor traffic and assuage their constituents’ frustration. Do the benefits of mass tourism still outweigh its impacts? —NATALIA GALICZA
MASS TOURISM IS often destructive, fundamentally altering venerated destinations and pushing locals out of their homes. In Barcelona, where protesters sprayed a few of the city’s 15.5 million annual visitors with water guns last year, housing costs have spiked 68 percent in the last decade, fueled in part by the rise of short-term rentals for out-of-towners using popular systems like Airbnb. This situation has echoes across Europe and the globe. But communities shouldn’t be gentrified for the sake of temporary visitors at the expense of their own residents.
Crowding can destroy the unique historic features or natural beauty that attracted tourists in the first place. In the United States, national parks are being “loved to death” with traffic. The lines and permits required to get into favorites like Zion make it feel something more like going to Disneyland. And it only takes a few miscreants to cause long-term damage, like the swarm that went off-trail at Joshua Tree in 2019, trampling the biome and setting the park back centuries. On a broader scale, tourism will account for 5.3 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the next five years.
When cities and parks are overrun, it doesn’t just disturb the locals — it also undermines the visitor experience, making them less desirable. It’s not ideal to see the “Mona Lisa” through opera glasses from behind a sweaty mob tromping through the Louvre in June. High prices, noise, litter and damage to points of interest detract from the character of any destination. “Social media has concentrated tourism in hotspots and exacerbated the problem,” Justin Francis, CEO of a sustainable tourism operator, told BBC last year, “and tourist numbers globally are increasing while destinations have a finite capacity.”
Sadly, efforts to limit tourism without completely deterring visitors have largely flopped. Tourist taxes have become popular on virtually every continent, in countries like Ecuador, Croatia and Indonesia. Even stateside in Honolulu, Hawaii, hotel guests pay at least $50 a night on average. Still, Honolulu is so overwhelmed the city has had to shut down cultural landmarks to tap the brakes. So far, no method has been found to slow the tide.
RESPONSIBLE TOURISM IS a driver of the global economy; more importantly, travel can make us better humans. In his 1869 book “The Innocents Abroad,” Mark Twain writes: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Modern science suggests that exposure to new people and environments sparks synaptic connections in the brain that encourage creativity, reduce stress and increase trust in humankind. So it’s no surprise that in 2023, Pew Research Center reported that Americans who travel internationally “feel closer to others around the world.”
The economic benefits are easier to measure. Mass tourism accounts for about a 10th of the planet’s gross domestic product. The travel industry brought in $1.6 trillion last year — roughly equivalent to Spain’s annual GDP — and supported an estimated 357 million jobs, about 1 in 10 worldwide. For resort destinations like Macau in China or the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, which derive at least a third of their gross domestic product from tourism, the industry is essential.
If we think of tourism as a global marketplace, competition for the attention of travelers often fuels healthy investments in communities. Consider the CopenPay project in Copenhagen, Denmark, which incentivizes guests to make sustainable choices like using public transit and volunteering for park cleanups in exchange for rewards that range from free meals to sports equipment rentals. Further, when people are invested in a place, chances are they will treat it with greater care and compassion. Everyone benefits.
In reality, the problems typically associated with mass tourism are not so much inherent to the industry as a reflection of mismanagement. Governments can adopt creative approaches to stagger visitors without deterring tourism, like the timed-entry reservations required at several national parks during peak season. Officials can similarly promote less frequented areas as alternatives. “For every crowded metropolis,” Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet travel guidebooks, told UNESCO last year, “there are probably a dozen places that would dearly love to be making a baby step up from undertourism.”
SUMMERTIME INVITES US to get outdoors. The long, warm days beckon us by their very nature to leave our air-conditioned comfort and enjoy the sunshine. In this modern age, when screens exert their own gravity and fear of the unsafe invades our everyday lives, Americans still get outside more often than ever before — but spend less time there overall. Something is changing in our relationship with the world beyond our doors. Why is that? And what are we missing out on? Here’s the Breakdown. —ETHAN
BAUER
AS HARDCORE
A record 80 percent of people practiced sports or fitness in 2023. Pickleball has exploded, growing fivefold from 2018 to 2024. Skateboarding isn’t far behind, with more than 3,900 skateparks and wheels-on-concrete in all 50 states. But the number of outdoor outings per person fell to 62.5 in 2023, down from 70.5 the year before. And the rate of “core participants” — devotees who practiced a certain sport at least 50 times a year — dropped about two-thirds from 2013 to 2023, landing at just over 10 percent.
8-10 minutes
80% OF MIDSUMMER SUNLIGHT CAN OPTIMIZE OUR VITAMIN D3 OF PEOPLE PRACTICED SPORTS OR FITNESS IN 2023
62.5 AVERAGE NUMBER OF OUTDOOR OUTINGS PER PERSON IN 2022 IN 2023
70.5
331,863,358 VISITORS
More of us visited national parks than ever in 2024, led by 12 million at the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee and five million at Zion National Park in Utah. More commonly, 82 percent of Americans spent time at a local park, playground, dog park or other open space; 53 percent hiked, biked or walked a trail; a third played basketball, golf, tennis and other sports with friends; and 31 percent hit a swimming pool.
Americans spent over $1 trillion on outdoor recreation in 2022, another record. That bought tents and sleeping bags, bug spray, fishing rods and lures, outboard motors, scooters and bike helmets, soccer cleats and archery classes. Children from wealthy families are more likely to spend time outdoors than lower-income kids, and twice as likely to play sports. Some 20,000 summer camps generate $70 billion a year.
SPENT TIME AT A LOCAL PARK, PLAYGROUND, DOG PARK OR
HIKED, BIKED OR WALKED A TRAIL
PLAYED BASKETBALL, GOLF, TENNIS AND OTHER SPORTS WITH FRIENDS
WENT TO A SWIMMING POOL
Researchers recommend enough midday summer sunlight for the body to produce a healthy dose of vitamin D3 to fuel our hearts, muscles, bones, immune systems and mental health. The “sunshine vitamin” is produced by a chemical reaction when sunlight falls on human skin, though it’s also found in salmon, beef, egg yolk and supplements. Getting outside — especially in nature — also helps us to sleep, breathe and exercise better. It’s even good for our mood and overall mental health.
Kids age 8 to 12 spent three times as many weekly hours looking at screens than going outdoors, according to one study from 2017. Researchers have found links to improved well-being and better attention spans among people who deleted the internet from their phones for two weeks. Experts recommend a “summer screen time plan” to help children to disconnect. Rather than limiting electronics, some recommend a minimum amount of time off screens.
“CHILDREN MORE THAN EVER NEED OPPORTUNITIES TO BE IN THEIR BODIES IN THE WORLD — JUMPING ROPE, BICYCLING, STREAM HOPPING, AND FORT BUILDING. IT’S THIS ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN LIMBS OF THE BODY AND BONES OF THE EARTH WHERE TRUE BALANCE AND CENTEREDNESS EMERGE.”
DAVID SOBEL, ANTIOCH UNIVERSITY NEW ENGLAND, AUTHOR OF
“CHILDHOOD AND NATURE: DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR EDUCATORS”
More than 71 million fans attended Major League Baseball games in 2024, the most in seven years; 31 million more watched minor league teams, like the Charleston Dirty Birds, Modesto Nuts and Salt Lake Bees. Twice as many music festivals take place in the summertime, from Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza to Kilby Block Party. Roughly 4 in 10 Americans visit a farmers market like the one at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park at least six times a year.
4 in 10
AMERICANS VISIT A FARMERS MARKET AT LEAST SIX TIMES A YEAR
200,000 ER VISITS
That’s how many kids end up at the hospital each year for treatment of broken bones, concussions and other playground injuries. Parents should also monitor their exposure to sunlight, especially during peak hours. About 33,000 people visit the emergency room yearly for severe sunburns. Five “blistering burns” in childhood raise the chances of eventually developing melanoma by about 80 percent.
LARGE FAMILIES AREN’T AS COMMON AS THEY USED TO BE, BUT I STILL WANT ONE
BY STEPHANIE H. MURRAY
Igrew up in what, by modern standards, is a pretty big family. I have four siblings, including two sisters — one older and one younger. At the moment, my older sister has four children. My younger sister and I are each in the process of welcoming our thirds. I honestly don’t know how many we’ll end up with between us because we’re all still in our early-to-mid30s, with a fair bit of time for more kids to enter the picture.
Given that we’re all millennials with graduate degrees, the childbearing trajectory my sisters and I have followed is already a bit unusual. These days, an American woman with a master’s degree has an average of 1.4 kids, and won’t have her first child until she is 30. At that age, my sisters and I already had two each. In my 60-some-odd-person graduate school cohort, there was only one other student with young kids. I found out I was pregnant with my eldest the day before my first semester of classes began, and I remember feeling almost embarrassed to tell
my classmates about it, like I’d messed up somehow. When I finally did, everyone was kind, but many were utterly flummoxed. But in another sense, the earlier-and-more approach to parenthood my sisters and I
THE EARLIER-ANDMORE APPROACH TO PARENTHOOD MY SISTERS AND I HAVE TAKEN IS ENTIRELY IN STEP WITH A PATTERN DEMOGRAPHERS HAVE OBSERVED IN MANY COUNTRIES: THE “INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF FERTILITY.”
have taken is entirely in step with a pattern demographers have observed in many countries: the “intergenerational transmission of fertility.” That’s just a big way of
saying that people tend to mirror the older generations in their family tree when starting a family. Kids without a sibling are more likely than others to stay childless in adulthood. Those who grow up with a bunch of siblings are more likely to go on to have a lot of kids themselves. The more children that your aunts, uncles, grandparents and in-laws have, the more you’re likely to have. Bigger families beget bigger families.
When I first learned about this phenomenon, it struck me as fairly intuitive, but also somewhat puzzling. There is a decent amount of evidence that kids from bigger families, and particularly those who fall later in the lineup, end up worse off in a variety of ways as adults. They tend not to go as far or do as well in school, for one thing. Having a lot of siblings often means sharing bedrooms, hand-me-downs and generally getting a smaller slice of your parents’ resources, be that money or time. Surely those of us who grew up in big families (especially if we’re, like me, not among
THE MORE CHILDREN THAT YOUR AUNTS, UNCLES, GRANDPARENTS AND IN-LAWS HAVE, THE MORE YOU’RE LIKELY TO HAVE. BIGGER FAMILIES BEGET BIGGER FAMILIES.
the oldest) know better than anyone else of the sacrifices the lifestyle involves. What about the allure of having a big family of your own — with all the bills and bulk grocery shopping and crammed calendars — is bigger than the drawbacks? A childhood in a big family, for all its chaos and sacrifice, offers an answer for future generations. And it may provide a smoother on-ramp to future parenthood than exists elsewhere in modern American life.
STUDYING HOW — and why — family sizes correlate across generations is a question that statisticians have been focused on “for as long as their tools have existed,” says Tom Vogl, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. It’s been over a century of study, beginning with English statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson estimating the continuity in family size for his own analysis using the correlation coefficient he developed and that’s still widely used today.
Despite 120-something years of statistical examination, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how family size is passed from one generation to the next. Generally speaking, the most prominent theories fall into three broad — and not entirely distinct — categories, Laura Bernardi, an associate professor of demography at the University of Lausanne, says. The first is genetic. “You have the same genes of your parents,” Bernardi explains. Those genes may influence several aspects of a woman’s life that, in turn, impact the number of kids she has.
But arguably the best-evidenced explanation for the intergenerational transmission of fertility is what Bernardi refers to as status inheritance. “We are born in families that have a given educational level, a given social status, a given residential outlook,” she says. As such, we share quite a few sociodemographic characteristics with our parents that are “proven to be very much related to fertility levels, fertility timing and preferences.”
Factors like these explain a good chunk of the link between siblings and fertility in
the U.S., but not all of it, Vogl says. Tinkering with data from the General Social Survey, he couldn’t get the association to disappear by accounting for such attributes, “so there’s a lot left that I don’t know how to explain.”
The children of college-educated Americans tend to go to college themselves, for example, and women with a college education tend to have fewer kids than their less-educated counterparts. Likewise, religion tends to be passed from parent to child, and religious folks tend to have more kids than nonreligious ones. (Unlike the educational component, which, as I alluded to above, doesn’t appear terribly relevant in my particular family, the religious influence checks out. We’re Catholic.)
The last, and perhaps murkiest, of the possible causes of the big family to big family link is what Bernardi calls “socialization.” This would include all the ways that growing up in a particular family shapes one’s attitudes toward family formation. As our first reference, our families offer a model for what a family ought to look like. Likewise, parents may hold certain values that they impress upon their kids. “Some people are more child-oriented or family-friendly,” Martin Kolk, an associate professor of demography at Stockholm University, says. “In turn, their children are more child-oriented or family-oriented.” Or those of us growing up surrounded by children may simply come to “like having children around,” Eva Beaujouan, an associate professor of demography at the University of Vienna, says.
I GREW UP with a strong sense that raising kids was a good thing to do. Even beyond the “be fruitful and multiply” outlook that is common to the sort of traditional Catholic community I was raised in, I always got the sense that my parents and extended family members truly believed that parenthood was a worthy use of one’s talents. But when I reflect on what led me to launch myself into parenthood so much earlier than my peers, I find myself wondering if
having so many siblings merely helped to demystify family life in a way that made it seem less daunting.
This is not something that existing research can verify or refute, but there are tidbits of evidence that seem to give it credence. A study based in Poland found that so-called parentification — defined rather broadly as having “early caregiving responsibilities” — is positively associated with the future decision to have a child, perhaps playing an important role in “shaping childbearing motivations and desires,” the authors concluded. Parentification can, of course, be damaging for a child if taken to the extreme. But it seems that, where appropriate, the small-scale introduction to caregiving that life with siblings offers can function as a sort of apprenticeship for parenting down the road.
In another recent study, researchers in Finland found that those who grow up with more siblings tend to want more kids, but that the association is particularly strong for childless folks, which suggests that one’s childhood family size has the strongest sway for people navigating the transition to parenthood, Kateryna Golovina, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki, says. To her, it seems plausible that growing up in a big family would provide experience with children that many young people these days lack, and in that way make raising kids seem less intimidating. In an environment in which the expectations of parenthood are so high, and the time that people spend as adults without kids stretches ever longer, the thought of having a child can feel like “one big unknown.”
Bernardi, the professor of demography in Lausanne, Switzerland, says that while studying the social forces that influence childbearing decisions for her dissertation, she picked up on one mechanism that was “difficult to communicate,” but discernible in all of her interviews. In conversation with childless women about their fertility plans, many noted that something about watching a sister or friend become a parent provoked an almost emotional drive to have a child
themselves. This could offer another potential explanation for why people with many siblings have more kids: They have more opportunities for such exposure. Research published in 2010 by the Population Association of America suggests you are more likely to become a parent if your sibling has a child. Perhaps one reason I went ahead and had a child in graduate school, despite being surrounded by baffled childless peers, is that my older sister was having kids, too.
And then, of course, there’s the simple fact that almost by necessity, parenting in a large family tends to be more relaxed. I’m convinced that having an extra couple of kids automatically sets your parenting style back a generation. There is simply no way for parents to maintain the same level of vigilance you might with one child when
AMERICA WOULD BE A MORE FAMILYFRIENDLY PLACE IF ITS CULTURE MORE CLOSELY RESEMBLED THAT OF A LARGE FAMILY.
there are five. I imagine this helps to explain why those in larger families don’t do quite as well in school as their peers from smaller families — I’m certainly open to the idea that I might have been a better student with a little more focused attention from my parents. But, given that my siblings and I all mostly turned out just fine, our less structured childhood didn’t saddle me with resentment so much as it left me with the impression that parenthood simply isn’t the tightrope walk that many make it out to be.
Of course, the influence of one’s family background on childbearing is complex. There’s evidence, for example, that childhood experiences can shape people’s views on families in unpredictable ways. In one paper, associate professor of demography Beaujouan looked at the impact of parental death in childhood on fertility in adulthood
and found a polarizing effect: Some went on to be childless, while others swung in the other direction and had many kids. Other research suggests that whether someone goes on to replicate their childhood experience depends, to an extent, on how fondly they think of their parents. This finding aligns with Golovina’s study, which found that in addition to the sibling effect, those who held a negative view of their childhood environment tended to want fewer kids.
And despite its persistence, the intergenerational transmission of fertility has not been enough to counteract the massive decline in fertility that has occurred across the world over the past couple of centuries. Whereas the average American woman had five or six kids in the 1850s, she’ll have fewer than two today. Whatever upward pressure growing up with a lot of siblings has on a person’s approach to family formation has been swamped by stronger cultural and economic shifts pushing American family sizes down.
If that’s the case, the tendency for people from big families to have more kids will not be enough to reverse our country’s ongoing baby bust. But I suspect that America may still have something to learn from big families. America would be a more family-friendly place if its culture more closely resembled that of a large family. If the effort of raising children was more broadly valued, if parenthood was more relaxed, if kids weren’t tucked away in gated playgrounds and schools, but were an ever-present aspect of daily life. Maybe then, even those who didn’t grow up in big families might not hesitate so much to raise a family, small or big, themselves.
For all the real challenges of modern parenthood, I am nevertheless grateful for the ways that growing up with many siblings seems to have primed me to pursue it. The simple fact is that, when I think about what sort of life this third baby of mine will have, I don’t find myself worrying much about whether he will get enough love or attention or how he will fare in school. I think he’ll get along fine, just like I did.
BY ELÉONORE HUGHES
Argentine President Javier Milei is having a moment. The wildhaired economist was greeted with cheers and rock music at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Interview requests from the world’s biggest media organizations are pouring in. Pictures where he adopts his customary pose — chin down, two thumbs up — are a mainstay in the news cycle, along with his emblematic chainsaw and his echoing desires to dissect traditional government structures.
Milei is a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who believes the centralized government should be as small as possible. While he goes further than most, he shares the long-held belief of many of the country’s conservatives that the state is an entity permeated with outdated socialist ideals that stifle individual freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit. The chainsaw is Milei’s symbolic tool to reduce it to the bare minimum.
“We’re exporting the ‘chainsaw’ model of deregulation to the whole world. … We’re making a freer world,” he said during a speech at the Chamber of Commerce in November.
With a well-established export industry, a
relatively high GDP per capita compared to many of its neighboring countries, and simply due to its sheer size, Argentina has long stood out as a powerhouse on the continent But after the social crisis of 2019 and 2020, defined by protests and civil unrest, followed by job losses and business closures caused by the pandemic, the economic disruptions
MILEI IS DISRUPTING A BROKEN STATUS QUO. BUT WHETHER THAT DISRUPTION IS FIXING THE SYSTEM OR MAKING THINGS WORSE DEPENDS ON WHO YOU TALK TO.
that the country had been weathering since inflation first became a significant and destabilizing issue in the 1940s and ’50s came to a head. With a promise to cut down the regulatory bodies surrounding the free market,
Milei won over Argentine voters to become the nation’s president in 2023.
Argentina, then, might be a harbinger for where the United States is headed, and the country’s present may provide important lessons for American policymakers. Although the economic realities and the histories of the two countries are poles apart, the ideologies — and actions — that animate both countries’ leaders are uncannily similar, with a desire to deregulate and redefine the systems of power within each democracy.
President Donald Trump praised Milei in November, calling the Argentine leader his “favorite president.” After Trump’s second-term win, Milei visited Mar-a-Lago, where he referred to the election results as “the greatest political comeback in all of history.” Trump has since lauded Milei as “a MAGA person,” highlighting their shared commitment to economic freedom and limited government.
“MILEI, BEFORE EVERYTHING else … is the loneliest man in the world,” says Juan Luis González, a journalist and author of an
THE ARGENTINE PEOPLE OPTED TO UNDERTAKE A PAINFUL TREATMENT WHEN ELECTING JAVIER MILEI, BUT IT HAS BEEN AN EXTRAORDINARY SUCCESS THAT ABSOLUTELY NO ONE COULD HAVE IMAGINED.
investigative, unauthorized biography of Milei titled “The Madman: The Unknown Life of Javier Milei and His Breakthrough in Argentine Politics.”
In the book, González recounts Milei’s traumatic childhood, from the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father to his lack of friends and boundless love for his dogs, his “four-legged children” whom he thanked after finishing a surprising first in Argentina’s 2023 presidential primaries (Milei has never married and has no children). Four of them are cloned from the original, since deceased, English mastiff named Conan. The press has also widely reported that Milei believes that God speaks to him through Conan’s spirit, thanks to a spiritual medium who specializes in animal telepathy.
Debate about Milei’s emotional stability abounds across the country, dating back to when his rants on television catapulted him into the public consciousness. The shouting matches with opponents and fiery rhetoric made for spectacular, and viral, video clips. During the election campaign, Milei’s interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson received 300 million views in 24 hours. Elon Musk was among those sharing it on social media. Carlson expressed admiration for Milei’s libertarian views and his staunch opposition to socialism, as well as his critiques of abortion and climate change regulations.
Only two years before becoming president, Milei was elected as a national deputy for Argentina’s lower house of Congress — his first step into the world of politics. Demonstrating the savviness of a performer, Milei declared his salary was “money stolen from the people by the state” and organized monthly raffles livestreamed to give it away.
Milei’s four (still living) English mastiffs are named after economists who thought little of the state: Murray, after Murray Rothbard; Milton, for Milton Friedman; Robert, for Robert Lucas Jr.; and Lucas, also for Robert Lucas Jr. Rothbard believed that the market is more important than democracy, since, in his purview, democracy
is just another form of state control that ultimately limits individual freedom.
Since he was sworn in on December 10, 2023, Milei has kept his promise made on the campaign trail to hack away at the state. Argentina’s government now comprises nine ministries, down from 18 during the last administration. The ministries of culture, education, women and labor were all merged into a new ministry of human capital.
But one was created: the Ministry for Deregulation, located in downtown Buenos Aires in the old headquarters of British oil giant Shell, a few squares away from the presidential offices in the Casa Rosada. More than 42,000 federal jobs have been cut by Milei’s government as of April, 250 secretariats and subsecretariats have closed, and over 600 regulations have been amended or repealed including reducing severance pay and abolishing rent control laws.
In less than two years, Milei has also used executive powers to implement his sweeping reforms to deregulate industry, eliminate public works projects and curb the powers of trade unions. He dissolved the Federal Intelligence Agency, citing its historical misuse for internal espionage, influence peddling and political persecution, then promptly turned it into a secretariat directly under his orders by decree, increasing his power and later boosting the new administrative budget. Intelligence is now said to be monitored by Milei’s influential presidential adviser Santiago Caputo, who does not have an official government role.
That Milei is disrupting a broken status quo is largely agreed upon. But whether that disruption is fixing the system or making things worse depends on who you talk to.
SITTING IN AN upscale restaurant in Buenos Aires, Ramiro Juliá, the chief executive of a global real estate investment company, Americas Capital, explains why Milei is sparking optimism among the business class. Many affluent Argentines insist that Milei is administering a harsh, but necessary, remedy to a broken economy.
Juliá calls himself an example of a disillusioned businessman who “is now betting again on Argentina.” After years of living and investing abroad in the United States and the United Kingdom, in late March he decided his company was going to start investing again in Argentina, including nearly $6 million in a development project in the large, trendy Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo. Tackling inflation, which distorts prices and creates instability, has been Milei’s main success, he says.
He believes Milei could do more with his chainsaw. “It’s necessary to do more, much more,” he says. He believes that the state should be in charge of security, and some health care, “but not much else.” He considers today’s education system to be “completely obsolete,” for example. Mario Grinman, president of the Argentine Chamber of Commerce and Services, is similarly enthusiastic about Milei’s policies. By electing him, “the Argentine people opted in November 2023 to undertake a painful treatment, which is still painful,” says Grinman. But it has been an “extraordinary success (and) achieved immediate results that no one, absolutely no one, could have imagined.” In 2024, Argentina brought in its first budget surplus in over a decade.
The adage goes that, sometimes, things have to get worse before they can get better. But whether getting better is a result of sticking with one type of change or pivoting to another is tricky math. Patricio Hernández, CEO of political consulting firm Methodo, says that Milei has benefited from a honeymoon period among voters who were simply desperate for change. “Milei is a dagger to punish the past that did not bring solutions,” he says.
Allegations of corruption under the last administration heightened public anger at a time when economic turmoil was engulfing the country. Cristina Kirchner, the powerful vice president between 2019 and 2023 and former two-term president who followed her husband into office, was sentenced to six years in prison and banned from holding any future political office for fraud
involving public works in 2022, a judgment upheld by a federal appeals court last year. She continues to deny wrongdoing.
Kirchnerism, as the policies of the couple are known, descends from Peronism — a movement that originated when Juan Domingo Perón came to power in 1946, preceding a cycle of overspending, boom, bust, devaluation and default.
But some remember Perón and his policies fondly. A third of candidates on Perón’s electoral lists were trade unionists at the time, says Mercedes Cabezas, deputy secretary-general of the Association of Workers of the State, in her office with an Argentine flag behind her. “Peronism is the only experience that Argentina has had of
“THE PROBLEM WITH MILEI IS THAT HE SAYS SOMETHING BUT DOES ANOTHER.”
co-government with the organizations of the popular movement.”
Peronism’s defeat at the last election may be related to the deep societal changes that have shaken Argentina in the last decades. “The world of a century ago, of the worker who went to the factory and had paid holidays and social security — that doesn’t exist anymore,” says González. Milei, who exalts personal initiative and freedom, has a discourse that is “much more in tune with these times.”
THE MUNICIPALITY OF Tigre is half an hour by car from Buenos Aires. A gateway to the rivers and wetlands of the vast Paraná Delta, it’s a popular tourist destination known for its scenic boat tours and island houses built on stilts. But not far from the Victorian-style houses, many live beneath the poverty line, struggling to make ends meet. Gisela Bruno, a 32-year-old with 10 mouths to feed, is one of them. During
Milei’s administration, her situation has taken a turn for the worse. “The money is no longer enough to feed the children,” Bruno says, adding that sometimes they go without supper.
As the gap between the dollar and the Argentine peso has decreased (a trajectory that began before Milei took office), prices for apartments, food and energy have soared. President Milei has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket and eroding people’s purchasing power. Soup kitchens, such as Pequeños Valientes — Little Brave Ones in English — say they have seen an increase in demand.
For Bruno and her family, Pequeños Valientes is a lifeline.
Maria José Games, who runs Pequeños Valientes, says poverty has increased across the neighborhood. Milei froze pensions and social benefits without adjusting for inflation, which hit the old and the poor. Before, mothers were able to live off what they earned, working and supplementing with the food from the soup kitchen. Now, they can’t afford toiletries, shampoo, or to wash their clothes, says Games. “One stops buying things that are also essential.” Like during the Covid-19 pandemic, she now has a list of families waiting to enroll in the kitchen.
Upon coming to power in December 2023, Milei implemented the most radical austerity program in Argentina’s recent history. Annual inflation plummeted to 66.9 percent in March, compared to over 250 percent a year earlier, according to the government’s statistics agency, known as INDEC. Argentina’s poverty rate also dropped in 2024, from nearly 42 percent to just over 38 percent, a marked improvement from the preceding administration in the second half of 2023.
But critics — and the lives of Bruno and Games — suggest those figures fail to capture the reality of ordinary people.
ACROSS ARGENTINA’S SPRAWLING interior, over 100 million acres of fertile plains brim with crops. The sounds of tractors and
ARGENTINA MIGHT BE A HARBINGER FOR WHERE THE UNITED STATES IS HEADED, AND MAY PROVIDE IMPORTANT LESSONS FOR AMERICAN
combine harvesters at work rumble from the fields during the soybean harvest, which typically begins in April and extends into June. Once the busy season ends, packed grain silos dot the vast grasslands before being collected and sent across the country and abroad for processing.
Many of the farmers who keep this industry alive and decried heavy state interventionism under previous administrations initially supported Milei, but some have begun to grumble about his impact on their livelihoods.
Higher energy prices have hit manufacturing industries and agricultural sectors that relied on fuel subsidies to keep production prices low. Small-scale farmers who counted on state support have struggled to stay competitive, with some facing ruin. “If you speak with the mining sector, they are happy. The fishing sector, happy. But if you speak with actors in the micro-economy, they are really struggling: agriculture, fruiticulture,” says Francisco Paoltroni, a senator for the Formosa province. He was an ally of Milei and a member of his Freedom is Advancing party, but was expelled after opposing the nomination of Ariel Lijo to the Supreme Court. Lijo has been accused of conspiracy, money laundering and illicit enrichment. To generate employment, Argentina must have “an independent judiciary, of quality, with people who truly have a spotless record,” Paoltroni said before
being removed from a caucus in the upper chamber.
“The problem with Milei is that he says something but does another,” says Paoltroni. Milei has surfed on a wave of anti-establishment sentiment by presenting himself as an outsider to the political elite, which he calls “la casta.” “Que se vayan todos,” or “may they all go,” was one of his campaign slogans in 2023. Yet many of those serving in Milei’s government have participated in previous administrations. A February 2024 study by nonprofit Celag found that 70 percent of people with the highest level of responsibility in Milei’s government have held positions in multiple administrations, including his economy and security ministers.
When asked about this apparent contradiction during a press conference at the Casa Rosada in March for this story, Milei’s spokesperson Manuel Adorni said that it takes time for a government with no political history “to arrive at the ideal structure.” But Argentines’ patience may be wearing thin. A March opinion poll by the University of San Andres showed that 52 percent of 1,020 respondents are unsatisfied with Milei’s government, up from 43 percent in a poll conducted in November. Analysts point to the impact of fraud allegations being investigated by court officials after Milei briefly promoted a cryptocurrency, whose value collapsed within hours of its launch earlier this year. A string of protests has made headlines
in recent months as well, with retirees requesting higher pensions to get by in the face of rising costs.
Still, in the face of it all, one can conclude that Milei’s approval rating has remained relatively high. Raquel Albornoz, a 36-year-old woman who now relies on the soup kitchen in Tigre, voted for him in 2023, after a lifetime of voting for his opponents. “I voted to see change. It was always the same thing,” says Albornoz, who works as a cleaning lady by day and in a bar at night in Buenos Aires. Despite tougher times, she says she retains hope that things will get better.
That Milei and his firebrand politics have shaken Argentina to the core is clear. Problems were rife in the country, and the economist offers an easy-to-understand response to broken systems that voters could get behind. Since coming to office, he has made good on his promise to take a chainsaw to the state. But for his critics, the state is an entity that incarnates a common vision for a nation, and they say that its withering reach and growing power center increase hardship for the most vulnerable. A clash of ideologies split those in favor and those against. For his supporters, questions also arise on whether the ends justify the means.
“It’s very difficult to do futurology in Argentina,” says González, the journalist. “But the tendency appears to be that he will get more authoritarian, not less.”
BY HEATHER HANSMAN
The setting sun is painting the mountains orange and purple and we can hear coyotes in the palo verde and creosote bush. I am following wrangler Terry McDonald out over the trails at a lope, looking out through the ears of a gray mare who keeps picking up the pace. McDonald pulls his horse to a walk and looks out over the range. “This is one of my favorite rides, I never get sick of this,” he says, “And first-timers are always blown away.” I ask McDonald what those first-timers say when he brings them out here. “They say, ‘You remind me of ‘Yellowstone,’” he says, laughing. We are on the White Stallion guest ranch in the Sonoran Desert, closer to Mexico than Montana, but geography appears to defy the current cultural obsession with cowboys.
It’s not just the increasing number of people who come riding with McDonald who are fixated on cowboys. That fascination is clear in “Yellowstone” and its myriad, ongoing spinoffs, but it’s also showing up in other places. It’s one of the world’s most recognizable supermodels riding cutting horses during New York Fashion Week,
where Prada barn jackets that cost nearly $5,000 are on the runway. It’s Beyoncé’s collaboration with Levi’s jeans. Even Chappell Roan has a country song (arguably two, if you count “Pink Pony Club”). The specter of the cattleman permeates music, fashion and art, but it also shows up in tourism, pol-
THE IMAGES OF THE GOOD GUY, THE RUGGED INDIVIDUAL, THE OUTLAW, THE MAN CONNECTED TO NATURE AND ITS VALUES, HAVE EBBED AND FLOWED IN THE CULTURAL COLLECTIVE.
itics — where cowboy can be a code word for anti-government action, an identity taken up by wannabe, “small guy” politicians, or a brand of foreign diplomacy — and in the economy. Land prices have spiked in rural places where ranches are getting snapped up and so have the cost of cowboy goods. “This hat used to be $100 and I went
into Boot Barn recently and it was twice as much,” a wrangler named Hondo told me, touching the faded felt on his head.
I’m not immune to the fascination. Lately, Spotify says my most frequently played genre is coastal cowgirl and the preteen horse girl inside me has been rearing her head again. I feel it all around me. I live in a rural place, and the rodeo happens a quarter mile from my house, so every summer Wednesday I can watch a rendering of Western Americana circle the arena. I love the galloping barrel racers with their hair blown back and the coordinated muscle of the team roping, but I wince at grandstanding and the nostalgic jingoism that feels like a utopian remembrance of simpler times. It feels complicated, but it sticks around. Like most Americans, I’m not a cowboy. According to the USDA, just over 1 percent of Americans work on farms and ranches, and the number who do the kind of work that could be classified as cowboying is even slimmer. Despite that gap, the image of a specific kind of Western life has long been woven into American identity. I wanted to know why it was flaring particularly hard
now, so I chased it to a dude ranch — the original example of city dudes cosplaying as wranglers — to try and untangle America’s cowboy obsession.
SOME OF MY best childhood memories are being on horseback. I rode competitively through high school. But when I showed up at the White Stallion, where graceful cactus gardens peek between adobe buildings and rocky peaks hang in the distance, it was clear that I wasn’t the only one who was idealizing time on horses in wide open spaces.
We act out our fantasies on vacation, and here at the ranch that feels very true. We go on trail rides, dodging saguaros on rocky trails, but we also enact an approximation of real ranch work. We cut cows and team rope, playing cowboy. At the end of the day I am wiggle-legged, muscles I haven’t used in a while screaming, keyed up from galloping down the rail of the arena, ponytail blown back, feeling like one of those rodeo queens. We eat big meals together in a mess hall. I have dinner with people from California, New York and Ireland, some who come here every year. When I ask them why, they say they love the landscape, the horses, the way they feel like themselves outside, removed from the rush of the modern world.
That feeling has a long, traceable history. The ways cowboys are perceived in broader culture have always been a complicated twist between storytelling and truth, especially as a diminishing number of people actually do the work on the ground. For instance, rodeos were conceived in the early 1800s by Mexican vaqueros as a way to blow off steam with some friendly competition and show off their skills before people like Buffalo Bill Cody made them spectacles in the 1880s. Dude ranching started around the same time, as cattle ranching in the U.S. grew and spread. Ranching has never been an easy business, and ranchers like the Eatons, who are considered the first dude ranchers, started hosting guests from the East who wanted to live the life of a cowboy, sleeping under the stars and chasing cows, as a way to supplement their income.
“If they were going to be hosting they had to find a way to pay for it, so they started charging,” Bryce Albright, the executive director of the Dude Ranchers’ Association, told me. “And that business model created in the 1800s had been resilient enough to withstand time.”
It’s been resilient in part because, somehow, the abiding image of the cowboy can perennially morph to meet the moment. “Though the experience hasn’t changed tremendously, how we talk about it changes culturally,” Russell True, the owner of the White Stallion, who has been in the dude ranching business since he was five, says.
True, who was working in the corral saddling horses when I showed up, said that when his parents bought the ranch in 1965 they were talking about John Wayne and Westerns. Those popular stories mythologized an American West where the hardworking good guys prevailed.
Cowboys are rugged, close to the land, hardworking and independent-minded — remember, Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote. But cowboys are often also stand-ins for rebels who don’t play by the rules, and who hold their personal freedom above a greater good. They’re often portrayed as rugged white men, an image that doesn’t actually match the reality that a substantial percentage of cowboys have always been people of color — some historians estimate that up to 25 percent are Black. Even the tooled leatherwork and turquoise we associate with Western fashion is a nod to the Hispanic and Indigenous history behind the culture.
The images of the good guy, the rugged individual, the outlaw, the man connected to nature and its values, have ebbed and flowed. Versions rose up in the late ’70s and ’80s with movies like “Urban Cowboy,” which brought country music and honky-tonking into the Hollywood mainstream, just as presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (in a cowboy hat, of course) was aligning himself with the sagebrush rebels, a group of militant anti-government Western landowners.
By the ’90s, cowboys came to stand in for the anti-yuppie real people working with their hands. It was exemplified by the movie “City Slickers,” which depicted middle-aged men lost to midlife. They find their way again through manual labor and wisdom that’s unhurriedly dispensed through the drawls of a cowboy named Curly. True says the movie sent dude ranch bookings through the roof. “You couldn’t buy the impact of ‘City Slickers,’” he says.
AS AMERICANS, WE’VE always gone chasing open places west of wherever we started when the rest of our lives feel too constrained. That’s been true since colonists first came to the country and kept moving toward the Pacific looking for their own land, and it’s held true even after the Industrial Revolution had driven the majority of Americans to live in cities and work indoors. That freedom-seeking cowboy on the horizon has always been this complicated image that rises when people feel disenfranchised or hemmed in. It’s Americana at its most distilled, for better or worse. Right now many feel cut off from abundance and personal growth. We’re inside more and less ingrained in our communities than we used to be. Those wide open spaces that symbolize freedom and American independence are threatened by climate change and development. Rejecting all of that is part of the dream of the dude ranch. When I feel stuck inside, hunched over my computer for the nth day in a row, I threaten to run away on horseback. Being a cowboy seems like the perfect antidote to a mixed-up modern world, even though I know that the image in my head is oversimplified and overlooking most of the reality of a cowboy’s life.
I get swept up by the appeal of living from pastureland, but then I remember that these cowboy ideas can be problematic and even dangerous if we don’t hold them up in the light of their complicated history. The cowboy can show up in dark ways. You can see it in the “Yellowstone” themes of personal freedom, vigilante justice and
protectionism, which are starting to show up outside of the TV screen. It’s the unrealistic idea that we can survive alone on the plains, which comes from a broken kind of nostalgia. One of the original pioneering values is helping your neighbors. Not even cowboys can go at it completely alone.
The collective image of ranch life threatens its reality. Desire for Western real estate has choked out working ranches and dude ranches. Land has been taken out of agricultural production and made into subdivisions with HOAs, where home values are skyrocketing so high that people who actually work the land can’t afford to live where they work. The parcel across the road from the White Stallion, which was once a ranch, is now a development with at least 2,400 home sites.
One wrangler I talked to said she just wanted a job in ranching, plain and simple. She’d worked a cow-calf operation,
THE ROOTS OF THIS RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM COME FROM A BROKEN KIND OF NOSTALGIA.
which she really loved, but dude ranching is more economically sustainable for someone like her who doesn’t own land. She couldn’t quite make her cowboying dream come true, so she’s working with what feels realistic.
It’s hard to sustain on the ground, but she’s still chasing it for many of the same reasons why I’m on the ranch — because it feels like there is still beauty and integrity there. And because parts of the wisdom of simpler times still ring true: You reap what you sow. Land is our most valuable resource. You can’t fool a horse. True says he thinks the connection to those values is a big part of why people come to the White Stallion, and why they keep coming. “It’s the horses, but it’s also this whole understandable movement toward nature being healthy, a little less crowded,” he says. “It strips the stress out.”
It’s the part that pulls me back to the idea, even if I don’t like the darker parts. It’s the boot stomp and the big sky, the magic of rooting for the rodeo queens. It’s a rejoinder when things get too crowded and technological. I think so many of us are problematically far from the land, far from where our food comes from, and from being in our physical bodies. Riding through the desert — which I know is a constructed, vacation experience, but which I still feel in my bones — gets me close to things I crave because I don’t experience them enough. Part of the cowboy fantasy is the emotional side: adventure, simplicity, tangible work.
A big part of the cowboy ideal is to be independent-minded and tough, to make your own future. So how do we do that well now? Can it be inclusive and reflective of both the complicated history and desire for a good future? Can our image of a cowboy expand to reflect what being a cowboy means to people who have historically been left out of the image?
It’s happening already, which is part of the tension of the current moment. This current expression of cowboy culture is an evolution, one that includes the revival of Black rodeo and the overdue wide acceptance of diverse artists in Nashville. It’s the traveling art exhibit “Cowboy,” curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which challenges the more well-known idea of cowboy culture. It’s acknowledging people who have been there all along, but who might not have been found on the casting list for “True Grit” or “City Slickers.” That’s where cowboy culture could go this time, even if it feels a little uncomfortable. If we let this movement meet the moment in all its complexity.
I see it even among the wranglers on the ranch who look so cool and at ease on their horses and who include young Black women, and a Navajo guy who grew up on a ranch near the Grand Canyon who teases me for how competitive I get in team penning. Even in this fantasy land, where we literally ride off into the sunset, they are expanding the idea of what a cowboy can be.
FOR 40 YEARS , free markets and global capitalism reigned supreme. Now, THE OLD ORDER IS COLLAPSIN G — and what will replace it is UP FOR GRABS
L
BY GARY GERSTLE ILLUSTRATION BY BEN WISEMAN
EVEN BEFORE THE pandemic struck, developments that 10 years earlier would have seemed inconceivable now dominated politics and popular consciousness: the election — and reelection — of Donald Trump and the launch of a presidency like no other; the rise of Bernie Sanders and the resurrection of a socialist left; the sudden and deep questioning of open borders and free trade; the surge of populism and ethnonationalism and the castigation of once-celebrated globalizing elites; the decline of Barack Obama’s stature and the transformational promise that his presidency once embodied for so many; and the widening conviction that the American political system was no longer working, and that American democracy was in crisis.
In this dizzying array of political developments, I discern the fall — or at least the fracturing — of a political order that took shape in the 1970s and 1980s and achieved dominance in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. I call this political formation a neoliberal order. Ronald Reagan was
its ideological architect; Bill Clinton was its key facilitator.
The phrase “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond election cycles. In the last 100 years, America has had two political orders: the New Deal that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s.
At the heart of each of these two political orders stood a distinctive program of political economy. The New Deal was founded on the conviction that capitalism left to its own devices spelled economic disaster. It had to be managed by a strong central state able to govern the economic system in the public interest. The neoliberal order, by contrast, was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom. The architects of
the neoliberal order set out in the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its 40-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled.
Establishing a political order demands far more than winning an election or two. It requires deep-pocketed donors (and political action committees) to invest in promising candidates over the long term; the establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs; a rising political party able to consistently win over multiple electoral constituencies; a capacity to shape political opinion both at the highest levels (the Supreme Court) and across legacy and new media; and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with visions of the good life.
Political orders, in other words, are complex projects that require advances across a broad front. New ones do not arise very often; usually they appear when an older order founders amid an economic crisis that then precipitates a governing crisis. “Stagflation” precipitated the fall of the New
Deal order in the 1970s; the global financial crash and ensuing recession of 2008-09 triggered the fracturing of the neoliberal order in the 2010s.
In these moments of decline, political ideas and programs formerly regarded as radical, heterodox or unworkable, or dismissed as the product of the overheated imaginations of fringe groups on the right and left, are able to move from the margins into the mainstream. This happened in the 1970s, when the breakup of the New Deal order allowed long-scorned neoliberal ideas for reorganizing the economy to take root; it happened again in the 2010s when the coming apart of the neoliberal order opened up space for Trump-style populism and Sanders-style socialism to flourish.
IN THE UNITED States, conservatism has long been the preferred term to frame the political developments that describe what I refer to as neoliberalism. Why, then, label the political order that dominated America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries a neoliberal one rather than a conservative one? That choice deserves some explanation.
Conservatism, in the classical sense, signifies respect for tradition, deference to existing institutions and the hierarchies that structure them, and suspicion of change. One can find manifestations of these ideas in American politics across the second half of the 20th century, most importantly in a widespread determination among white Southerners to maintain racial privilege in the era of civil rights and among Americans throughout the country who, in the name of tradition, were pushing back against liberation movements calling for equal rights for women and gay people, and for sexual freedom.
Other beliefs commonly associated with conservatism in America, however, do not fit comfortably under this political label. A celebration of free market capitalism, entrepreneurialism and economic risk-taking was central to Republican Party politics of the late 20th century. Yet this politics was not about maintaining tradition or the
institutions that buttressed it; rather, it was about disrupting traditions and upending institutions that stood in the way.
Neoliberalism calls explicitly for unleashing capitalism’s power. Central to the politics of the Clinton years were major legislative packages that fundamentally restructured America’s information/communication and financial systems and whose influence on the 21st-century political economy has been decisive.
And yet those restructurings have attracted less attention than they deserve, their significance hidden by the smoke generat-
BThe neoliberal order was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation and freedom. The architects of the neoliberal order set out to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its 40-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled.
ed by the decade’s fiery culture wars. Those culture wars cannot be ignored any more than the racial backlash against the Civil Rights Movement can be slighted. But it is time to bring the project of economic transformation more into focus, to give it the kind of careful examination it deserves, and to adjust our views of late 20th-century America accordingly.
Neoliberalism prizes free trade, celebrates deregulation as an economic good and valorizes cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the product of open borders
and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples. It hails globalization as a win-win position that both enriches the West (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. These creedal principles deeply shaped American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order.
Neoliberalism, then, sought to infuse political economy with the principles of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism (born in the 18th century) discerned in markets extraordinary dynamism and possibilities for generating trade, wealth and a rising standard of living. It sought to liberate markets from monarchy, mercantilism, bureaucracy, artificial borders and tariffs. It sought, in other words, to release the economy from the heavy hand of the state in its various guises. It wanted to allow people to move around in pursuit of self-interest and fortune. Classical liberalism wanted to let individual talent rise (or fall) to its natural level. It carried within it emancipatory, even utopian, hopes of people freed and a world transformed.
Every student of neoliberalism must pay careful attention to its harsh elements, including mechanisms of coercion used to impose market discipline on a society; support, sometimes ruthless, for pursuing capitalist accumulation; and an indifference to questions of economic equality and redistribution.
But an elite-driven model for understanding neoliberalism cannot suffice to account for the popularity that its views achieved in the United States. Reagan convinced many Americans that joining his political crusade would unshackle the economy from regulation and make them free. He framed that freedom as every American’s birthright; the pursuit of that freedom, he argued, was the reason the American Revolution had been fought, the reason the American nation had come into existence. Reagan resuscitated the emancipatory language of classical liberalism for a late 20th-century audience, an act of recovery that helped to make him one of America’s most popular political figures.
THE INTERNATIONAL ORIGINS and reach of neoliberalism have been well documented by a variety of scholars. Generally missing from those studies, however, is a reckoning with the Soviet Union and of communism more generally. Few international events in the 20th century matched the Russian Revolution of 1917 in importance. In the 50 years after their rise to power in Russia, communists walled off large parts of the world — the vast Soviet Union itself, then half of Europe, and then China — from capitalist economics.
For the first third of the Cold War era, communism was a serious threat in western Europe; for the first two thirds of the Cold War, it posed a similar threat across innumerable nations emerging in Africa and Asia, and across Latin America. Fascism and Nazism can be understood as radical right responses to communism’s rise. Meanwhile, in the United States, from the 1920s forward, communism was regarded as a mortal threat to the American way of life. The Great Depression and the Second World War moderated America’s anticommunism, temporarily. No other single political force had a comparable influence on the world or American politics across the 20th century.
The power of — and the fear unleashed by — the communist threat is now largely forgotten. But the consequences of the Soviet Union’s fall between 1989 and 1991 and the simultaneous defeat of its legitimating ideology were immense, making possible neoliberalism’s American and global triumph.
One consequence of communism’s fall is obvious: It opened a large part of the world — Russia and Eastern Europe — to capitalist penetration. It also dramatically widened the willingness of China (still nominally a communist state) to experiment with capitalist economics. Capitalism thus became global in the 1990s in a way it had not been since prior to the First World War.
Another consequence of communism’s fall may be less obvious but is of equal importance: It removed what had been an imperative in America (and in Europe and
elsewhere) for compromise between capitalist elites and the working classes. From the 1930s through the 1960s, communism was understood through the lens of totalitarianism. A nation once lost to communism would never be regained for the capitalist world (or so the influential theory of totalitarianism taught). Thus the specter of communist advance required a policy of military containment unprecedented in American history. The fear of communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order, and similar agreements in many social democracies in Europe after World War II.
LIn these moments of decline, political ideas and programs formerly regarded as radical, heterodox, or unworkable move from the margins into the mainstream.
The precise timing of the fall of the Soviet Union and of communism more generally — 1989-1991 — explains why the 1990s was a more decisive decade in neoliberalism’s triumph than the 1980s had been, and why Clinton’s role in securing neoliberalism’s triumph was in some ways more important than that of Reagan himself. After 1991, the pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class vanished. The room for political maneuver by class-based progressive forces narrowed dramatically. This was the moment when neoliberalism transitioned from a political movement to a political order.
EVERY POLITICAL ORDER contains ideological contradictions and conflicts among constituencies that it must manage; the neoliberal order was no exception in that regard. One such contradiction has already been noted: that which existed between those who saw neoliberalism as a strategy for enhancing rule by elites and those who saw in it a pathway toward personal emancipation.
Another lay in the uneasy coexistence within the neoliberal order of two strikingly different moral perspectives on how to achieve the good life. One, which I label neo-Victorian, celebrated self-reliance, strong families and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality and consumption. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family — heterosexual and led by male patriarchs. Such families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in their members and especially in the young, and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. This view found a mass base in Jerry Falwell’s legions of evangelical Christians, mobilized politically as part of an influential religious organization known as the Moral Majority.
The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order, which I label cosmopolitan, saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance and prescribed social roles. In the United States, this moral perspective drew energy from the liberation movements originating in the New Left of the 1960s and flourished in the era of the neoliberal order. Cosmopolitanism rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living.
The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.
The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists and immigrants, and for stigmatizing lower-income Black people for their “culture of poverty.” The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph — the 1990s — was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars.” In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years. Many political scientists regard “polarization” as the key phenomenon in American politics and devote themselves to explaining how it arose and how it has shaped — or rather misshaped — American society.
I do not deny the reality of this polarization, which, ultimately, would contribute to the fracturing of the neoliberal order. But this reality should not be allowed to obscure the coexistence of cultural polarization with a broad agreement on principles of political economy. This paradoxical coexistence of cultural division and political economic agreement manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the New America. He was thought to embody the spirit of
the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the New Left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values.
Yet, despite their differences and exhibiting hatred for each other, these two Washington power brokers worked together on legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. Their behind-the-scenes collaboration made possible the triumph of the neoliberal order. Pulling back the curtain on the 1990s re-
xIf the government could shape markets via tariffs and immigration restriction, might there be other ways in which the state could exercise authority over the economy? If social media companies could be regulated or broken up, what about other corporations that had accumulated too much power?
him well for leading a sprawling and complex federal state. Moreover, Trump had done little planning for his administration, a critical step for a president-elect with many government appointments to make and numerous policy matters to master.
But Trump remained a master at commanding the political stage and thus the attention of the nation. Virtually no Americans, irrespective of whether they supported or opposed Trump, could take their eyes off him, or rather off the screens serving up his latest provocations via their social media feeds. Day after day, Trump drew both the American media and the American public into his version of “the greatest show on earth” — an unending spectacle of enemies defenestrated, honor defended, accomplishments hailed and supportive foreign leaders (preferably with an authoritarian bent) lauded. Week after week, and then year after year, Trump’s antics gripped, divided and then exhausted America.
It was often hard to discern a consistent political program amid the heat and smoke that the Trump firestorm generated. But there were, in fact, two such programs issuing from the Trump administration: One pointed in the direction of maintaining the neoliberal order, the other in the direction of dismantling it. The second was the more important of the two and will likely have the more consequential long-term impact.
veals a powerful and coherent economic accord that sustained the neoliberal order across decades of culture wars.
FEW WERE AS surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election as Donald Trump himself. He did not really expect to win. He had little familiarity with governance, either in the public or private sector. The Trump Organization, a closely held corporation run by relatively few people, did not prepare
The Koch brothers, neoliberals to the core, had despised Trump during the GOP primaries. But Trump’s selection of Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, as his running mate, opened up the possibility of a rapprochement between the two camps. The Kochs had been grooming Pence for a position of national leadership. He brought their deregulatory agenda to the White House, along with the hope that he would be able to launch a campaign to strip multiple federal agencies of oversight authority and thus to limit the federal government’s ability to regulate the private economy.
Trump had never really believed that markets were perfectible as instruments of exchange, but he signed on to the idea
of weakening the federal government anyway. Such an evisceration, he imagined, might expose and then undercut the “deep state” allegedly nestled in the CIA, FBI and other national security agencies and intent (he believed) on destroying his presidency. Trump also worked closely with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to appoint hundreds of judges to the federal bench whom the Federalist Society had identified as reliably deregulatory on economic policy and conservative in their approach to family values. Finally, Trump pushed a major revision of the tax code, one that sharply reduced corporate taxes and modestly reduced personal taxes for those in the highest brackets.
If deregulation, judicial appointments and tax cuts pointed toward the maintenance of a neoliberal order, however, Trump’s assault on free trade and immigration aimed at its destruction. In Trump’s eyes, free trade among nations was harming America; so was the free movement of people across national borders. Trump wanted to build walls against both and to allow into America only those goods and individuals that it wanted, and under conditions of its choosing.
Trump seized every opportunity to remove America from the international position it had long held as the leader of a globalizing and free trade world. He criticized Europe both for taking advantage of the United States in trade and for being unwilling to pay a fair share of the costs of maintaining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He became the first president to publicly question the value of NATO, and the close relations between Europe and North America that this multinational defense organization was meant to sustain. He supported Brexit, less out of enthusiasm for a fully independent Britain than out of a desire to hurt the European Union, the sort of globalist and cosmopolitan federation that Trump despised. He mused to the media about withdrawing American troops from South Korea, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Closer to home, Trump threatened trade
wars with Canada and Mexico in order to compel those two countries to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement in ways that made it more favorable to U.S. interests (a threat he has made real in his second term).
Trump discovered that he could authorize tariffs unilaterally, without the cooperation of Congress, if he claimed that they enhanced national security. Part of Trump’s pitch was that free trade had benefited only the “globalists.” In an ad released in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had proclaimed that “a global power structure” had “robbed our working class,
BMore and more, the 2010s were coming to resemble the 1930s and the 1970s, earlier moments when the decline of a dominant political order had allowed ideas long consigned to the periphery of American politics to move into the mainstream.
imports, stopping the free movement of people across borders and challenging media companies had the effect of widening the space in which those engaged in politics could think more freely — and ambitiously — about the proper role of government in economic life. If the government could shape markets via tariffs and immigration restriction, might there be other ways in which the state could exercise authority over the economy? If social media companies could be regulated or broken up, what about other corporations that had accumulated too much power?
More and more, the 2010s were coming to resemble the 1930s and the 1970s, earlier moments when the decline of a dominant political order had allowed ideas long consigned to the periphery of American politics to move into the mainstream. If the ability to control the ideological mainstream was a sign of a political order’s triumph, the loss of that ability signaled a political order’s demise. Trump’s work, along with that of Sanders and Warren, in undermining neoliberal hegemony created additional opportunities for once peripheral political ideas and initiatives to flourish.
stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”
Trump promised that his presidency would upend that power structure and substitute for it one that benefited ordinary Americans. Trump wanted the breakup of the neoliberal order to benefit the authoritarian right. But the breakup was also benefiting a social democratic left that liberal Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others had been infusing with new life. Trump’s constant talk of putting tariffs on
In the 2018 elections, the left turned its newly-acquired institutional capacity and ideological ferment into a measure of political power. Four progressive Democrats won congressional seats: Alexandria OcasioCortez in New York, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan. Their success, in turn, vaulted Sanders (again) and Warren into front-runner status for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Warren built a national reputation in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008-09 by exposing the predatory lending practices of banks to exploit ordinary borrowers. Later, and especially in her 2020 campaign, Warren also began targeting the nation’s social media and e-commerce companies — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft — for having accumulated too much wealth and power. Her staff worked to revive America’s
anti-monopoly protest tradition, which a hundred years earlier had energized a progressive political movement that had checked private economic power both by breaking up large corporations and subjecting the ones that remained intact to regulation. Sanders’ plans were more ambitious than hers, as he sought to make his social democratic vision a reality in American life.
The unlikely facilitator of this left revival was Joe Biden, soon to become the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee and then president. In 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, few thought much of what Biden had accomplished across his long political career. But from March 2020 onwards, he found a way to invest his campaign with promise and appeal. He grasped as much as Sanders and Warren (and more than other contenders) that America was at an inflection point, that the Democratic politics inherited from Clinton and Obama no longer sufficed, and that the moment demanded thinking big and acting boldly. Biden welcomed Sanders and Warren supporters into his Democratic coalition and allowed them to influence an ambitious agenda: investing heavily in physical infrastructure, designing a vast new “social infrastructure” system to improve conditions for both America’s young and old, and incentivizing the private sector (via industrial subsidies) to reshore manufacturing and accelerate the country’s green transition. Biden’s desire to use public policy to steer markets toward serving the public interest broke profoundly from the economic orthodoxies that dominated during the heyday of the neoliberal order.
Biden’s victory in November 2020 earned him majorities in Congress, but ones that were too small to achieve more than a portion of his agenda. Even his genuinely impressive accomplishments — for example, approving more than 50,000 infrastructural projects in the first two years of his administration — received little public attention or support. Instead, the difficulties of restarting an economy that Covid had compelled the government to shut
down dominated public consciousness, leading many to sour on those in charge. Much of the disenchantment with Biden was rooted in pandemic realities over which his administration had, in truth, little control: the loss of loved ones to Covid, long stretches of enforced personal isolation, and the disruption of supply chains that contributed to the worst inflationary spike in 50 years.
Though by multiple measures, the U.S. economy rebounded well in 2023 and 2024,
LWill
“Trump Unbound” succeed in building a new political order along the lines of its Rooseveltian and Reaganite predecessors? It is not yet clear.
to the point where it became the envy of many foreign leaders and observers, majorities of Americans were convinced otherwise. As infirmities of age stripped Biden of the ability to be an effective communicator for his own achievements, many began to look with rose-colored glasses at the “halcyon” days of the pre-Covid portion of the first Trump presidency. Forgiving Trump for his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat (and conveniently ignoring his role in fomenting the January 6 assault on the Capitol), these Americans carried Trump to victory in 2024.
THUS FAR, THE economic policies of Trump 2.0 have largely resembled those of Trump 1.0. He is imposing high tariffs on most imports to the U.S., scuttling the neoliberal world of free trade in the process. He wants to dismantle the regime of international law and multilateral organizations (IMF, World Bank, WTO) that undergirded both the New Deal and neoliberal orders. The EU has once again drawn his ire. He continues to talk openly about pulling the U.S. out of NATO, part of his attempt to deglobalize not just the international system of free trade but the Earth-spanning military shield that the U.S. has erected to protect such trade. Trump is as intent as ever on closing America’s southern border and on bringing illegal immigration to a halt while narrowing the streams of legal migration to the U.S. As before, he wants MAGA to transform America into an impregnable fortress, turning away all but the “choicest” immigrants.
Trump, however, is now far more aggressive and disciplined about pursuing his policy goals. He has a team, led by Stephen Miller and Russell Vought (architect of “Project 2025”), that spent its time out of power strategizing how to make the most of presidential authority should their man regain the White House. Trump’s shock-and-awe first 100 days, and the blizzard of executive orders that lie at its core, owe a great deal to Miller’s and Vought’s blitzkrieg battle plans, their offensive aided by Elon Musk’s willingness to come on board and deploy a team of DOGE commandos to blow up large portions of the “deep state.” Musk’s alliance with Trump is unlikely to last, but the rest of Trump’s team is devoted to him, with chief of staff Susie Wiles providing some administrative competence and calm behind the scenes.
Trump has also purged his administration (and much of his party) of Republican establishment figures. The Mark Kellys, Gary Cohns and Jim Mattises of Trump 1.0 are nowhere to be found in the current
White House and Cabinet. Meanwhile, Trump seems no longer to fear a 20 to 25 percent stock market crash, which makes him more willing than he had been in his first term to upend the world trading and financial systems, believing that the rewards accruing to the U.S. long term will be worth what he considers to be short-term risk.
Will “Trump Unbound” succeed in building a new political order along the lines of its Rooseveltian and Reaganite predecessors? It is not yet clear. The chaos, unpredictability and lack of governing skill of Trump’s first term have reappeared in the second. The electoral coalition that put Trump back into office is larger and more diverse than Trump 1.0, generating internal conflict on key policy issues.
Take tariffs, for example. Part of Trump’s pro-tariff lobby is genuinely populist, in the sense that it believes that reshoring manufacturing will generate better jobs and greater opportunity for working-class Americans. Oren Cass of the think tank American Compass and Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs, speak for this populist, or what they would call an “economic nationalist,” constituency. So does Steve Bannon. Their supporters are strong in various government agencies, such as in the departments of State and Commerce. But in Congress, a core of Republicans, the last of the neoliberals, care most (and in some cases exclusively) about tax cuts and deregulation. Tariffs appeal to this latter group not because they may revive working-class fortunes but because they will generate external revenue large enough to facilitate a major income tax cut for the wealthy. Is Trump capable of managing a political coalition of tax cutters and economic nationalists, of upper-class and working-class constituents? Or will the divergent interests of these distinct groups cause the MAGA movement to splinter?
Finally, Trump seems to have little interest in replicating a crucial feature of the Roosevelt and Reagan “political order”
playbook: namely, winning a smashing political victory at the polls. The margins of the electoral victories won respectively by Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984 were so large that the opposition — Republicans in the case of Roosevelt, Democrats in the case of Reagan — fell into disarray and acquiesced for years to the core political economic principles of the winning party. To achieve this kind of victory for himself (or his successor) in 2028, Trump might have opted to use his first year back in office to
xIs Trump capable of managing a political coalition of tax cutters and economic nationalists, of upperclass and working-class constituents? Or will the divergent interests of these distinct groups cause the MAGA movement to splinter?
appeal even more than he did in 2024 to Latinos, African Americans and independents. But securing an expanded electoral coalition is not part of his governing plan. Instead, he is simply behaving as though he has already won a huge victory. The unrelenting pace with which he is issuing dramatic, and often draconian, executive orders is designed to make real the broad mandate that he believes he has earned.
Yet, this broad mandate is a fantasy. In his three runs for the presidency, Trump
has yet to gain a majority of the popular vote. He did win the popular vote in 2024 (49.8 to 48.3 percent for Kamala Harris), but the magnitude of that victory cannot compare to the more than 58 percent of the popular vote and the 98 percent of the Electoral College vote won by both FDR and Reagan in 1936 and 1984, respectively. In 2024, a switch of a mere 270,000 ballots in three Midwestern states from the Republican to the Democratic column would have swung the Electoral College from Trump to Harris and put her in the White House.
Trump’s apparent indifference to expanding his electoral base to secure long-term MAGA dominance may reflect his belief that he can consolidate his movement’s power through other means. Here the critical influence may not be Roosevelt or Reagan, but Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Orbán has kept himself in power for 15 consecutive years by rigging Hungarian politics in his party’s favor. He has suppressed free speech, instilled fear in his political opponents who go against his wishes and vote for the “wrong” candidate, compromised the courts and stripped independence away from universities and other civil society institutions.
Some of Trump’s advisers wish to “Orbanize” America. They would like to curate the electorate to the point where small margin victories for an incumbent Republican Party is assured. Congress and the courts would be weakened to the point where they could no longer serve as checks on presidential power. In this scenario, America would still have semblances of democracy (elections would continue) but not its substance. This may be the future that Trump is imagining.
If he succeeds in this endeavor, Trump will have installed a new political order in America, but one unlike any that preceded it.
GARY GERSTLE IS PROFESSOR EMERITUS AND DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH IN AMERICAN HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. THIS ESSAY IS ADAPTED FROM HIS BOOK “THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER: AMERICA AND THE WORLD IN THE FREE MARKET ERA” (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS). COPYRIGHT © 2022 BY GARY GERSTLE.
DEI PROMISED TO REMAKE ACADEMIA AND THE AMERICAN WORKFORCE. AND THEN IT COLLAPSED, SEEMINGLY OVERNIGHT.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
BY Eric Schulzke ILLUSTRATION
HEN FREEMAN HRABOWSKI hears “diversity, equity and inclusion,” he sees Kizzmekia Corbett, an immunologist who played a key role in developing the Covid-19 vaccines. Corbett is an alum of a scholarship program Hrabowski built to mentor underrepresented minorities into STEM careers. “For me, DEI has always been about wanting all of us to be included in the American dream,” Hrabowski says, “not just to get a good job, but to participate as productive citizens who care about the health of our country.”
When Nan Zhong hears “diversity, equity and inclusion,” he sees his son, Stanley, whose 99th percentile SAT and stellar high school grades got him rejected by 16 of 18 universities. His story made national news when Google reached out to him and hired him out of high school as a software engineer. Nan Zhong feels that DEI-related quotas are excluding Asians from educational opportunities, thus making a mockery of the word “inclusion.”
Depending on your perspective, the acronym DEI may sound personal and inviting, bureaucratic and statistical, or ideological and accusatory. It may be primarily about race and ethnicity — or it may be about much more: gender, gender orientation, gender identity and sometimes even disabilities. It can give confidence or breed resentment.
When President Donald Trump began 2025 with a burst of anti- DEI executive orders, he stepped into an already hot conflict. In 2023, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 21 anti-DEI bills had been introduced across 13 states. By 2025, 18 states had enacted such laws. And that list does not include the University of Michigan, which in March of this year shut down its sprawling DEI program overnight, without any change in state law. This is not
a conflict that falls into the familiar fault lines. DEI skeptics now include many who had previously been prominent voices in the Democratic Party.
The pendulum will likely swing again, but the question will remain: In a diverse society where opportunity is unevenly distributed, is using race or other core identities as deciding variables in employment and university admissions a necessary corrective?
Or does the practice, and the rhetoric behind it, corrode the body politic and harm individuals?
In a 2016 speech at Duke University, bestselling author and New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that universities can pursue truth or social justice but not both. “We need our universities to clearly declare which way they are going,” he said, “but you have to be explicit about it, advertise that, and then students can choose which kind of university to go to.”
FREEMAN HRABOWSKI SEES Haidt’s argument as a false choice. Recently retired after 30 years as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Hrabowski sees enduring inequalities along racial lines as fissures in the body politic that we leave uncorrected at our peril. “Fairness and inclusion,” he told me, “are two things that must be at the center of any discussion involving the future of America — the future of human society, I would say.”
UMBC is a suburban campus where 30 percent of students are first-generation college students and 20 percent are Black. Hrabowski’s support for DEI stems from a career spent lifting disadvantaged students. But that passion can also be traced to his personal memories as a young boy playing a key role in a decisive point in American history.
When Hrabowski defends DEI and
programs like affirmative action, there is a tone of warning in his voice. As history has shown us, divisions can derail democracies when higher aspirations seem unattainable to some classes of citizens. In fact, he is echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, who warned in 1840 that democracies have a desperate
at younger ages have significantly better outcomes, demonstrating that racial disparities can be narrowed through changes in environment.”
The disparate outcomes of Black boys and girls in this study are startling. The implications are complex, but Hrabows -
“THE STAKEHOLDERS IN WHAT I’VE CALLED THE DIVERSITY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ARE NOT SIMPLY GOING TO GO QUIETLY INTO THE GOOD NIGHT AND LEARN TO CODE.”
thirst for equal outcomes — a thirst they temper only if opportunity for upward mobility is seen as real. If not, Tocqueville feared, the French revolutionary pattern beckoned. And if being stuck is bad enough, what do we do with downward mobility? In 2018, a team led by Raj Chetty, an economist now based at Harvard, found surprising downward mobility among Black people and Native Americans — in contrast to other races and ethnicities. Black people who grew up in the top income bracket were as likely to fall to the bottom quintile as to remain at the top. This generational slide was entirely driven by Black men. Once controlled for childhood status, wealth differences between Black women and white women entirely disappeared.
Whatever environmental factors are at play, they distinctively impact boys. The hopeful news was that the gap “is significantly smaller for boys who grow up in certain neighborhoods — those with low poverty rates, low levels of racial bias among white people, and high rates of father presence among low-income Black people. Black boys who move to such areas
ki pointed to cultural influences that give Black boys a poor template for real success. “How often do those boys see great examples in social media or on TV of young Black males excelling in school?” he asked. Instead, models of success typically center on sports and entertainment. Hrabowski argues that some young people do need focused support and role models to help them grasp opportunities others take for granted. In his mind, that includes race-conscious policies like DEI as a counterweight to that built-in societal burden.
What he doesn’t want, Hrabowski told me, is talk about quotas. “As soon as you use the word quota,” he said, “people just stop talking. What I would rather say is, are we broadening participation in our society in a way that young people can see people looking like themselves in any segment of society?” This means mentoring and role modeling. While Hrabowski is emphatic that racism persists, he doesn’t make it the focus of his work. He focuses instead on finding individuals, helping them learn and connecting them to others who can pull them upward.
Not all DEI supporters share Hrabowski’s tempered focus. “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism,” said Ibram Kendi in 2018, commenting on Chetty’s research in The New York Times. In his 2019 bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi wrote: “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ white person. Every white person benefits from racism, and every white person is socialized into a racist system.”
Kendi’s signature phrases are “racism” and “anti-racism,” concepts that, along with “white privilege,” became part of the lexicon in elite circles, and quickly spread throughout the university system and corporate America.
It is easy to forget that, as recently as 2013, Kendi’s views were rejected by a majority of American Black people, with the trend line pointed the other way. In 1993, Gallup tracking surveys found that 44 percent of Black people viewed discrimination as mainly responsible for disparities in jobs, income and housing, while 48 percent saw the cause as “mostly something else.” By 2013, only 37 percent of Black people cited discrimination, with 60 percent pointing elsewhere. The trend was clear.
The same was true of race relations. Beginning in 2001, Gallup asked Black and white adults about relations between the two races. For 13 years, majorities of both
officer killed an unarmed Black man: the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The details of these events quickly became secondary to their symbolic impact. Suddenly and decisively, the American zeitgeist shifted, as diversity, equity and inclusion rhetoric and policies sank deep roots in both hearts and minds and in institutions.
Google Trends shows anti-racism, microaggression and implicit bias emerging as popular search terms in 2016. That same year, a Yale lecturer resigned after protests broke out over Halloween costumes. In 2017, white people at Evergreen State College in Washington state were asked to stay off campus for a day, in solidarity with people of color. One biology professor resisted. This led to protests, calls for his firing and threats of violence, which temporarily shut down the campus.
In 2018, Smith College in Massachusetts erupted in protests after a janitor and a security guard questioned a Black student who had been in a dormitory that was closed for the summer. “All I did was be Black,” the student wrote in a Facebook post. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.” The janitor was put on paid leave while
“FAIRNESS AND INCLUSION ARE TWO THINGS THAT MUST BE AT THE CENTER OF ANY DISCUSSION INVOLVING THE FUTURE OF AMERICA.”
groups rated relations “good” or “somewhat good.” White optimism hovered at around 70 percent, and Black attitudes about race relations improved when Barack Obama became president, rising from 55 percent in 2007 to 66 percent in 2013.
But then the bottom fell out. By 2015, Black optimism about race relations had fallen to 45 percent and in 2021 to 33 percent. That shift straddled two events in which a police
the college hired a law firm to investigate. That investigation found no evidence of racial bias, but Smith College nevertheless launched an anti-bias training program for all staff and announced it would comply with a demand by the student to build dorms set aside for Black students and other students of color.
That was also the year that Roland Fryer, a Black economist at Harvard, published
data showing that, although police are more likely to tangle with Black people in minor ways, they are less likely to use lethal force against Black people compared to other races. Fryer was surprised by his own results, but he was shocked at the reaction. Later, in 2024, Fryer summed up the reaction to his research: “People lost their minds. I had colleagues take me to the side and say, ‘Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career.’ I lived under police protection for about 30 or 40 days. I had a seven-day-old daughter at the time. I remember going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy.”
Anti-racist DEI training was by now de rigueur in corporate America. Disney in 2021 began requiring employees to attend training to introduce them to terms like “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “white fragility” and “white saviors.” That same year, San Diego Unified School District brought in a Black guest speaker who had written in Education Week that public schools were “spirit murdering black and brown students.” And Coca-Cola, also in 2021, assigned optional corporate training materials urging employees to “try to be less white.”
As this fervor grew, some prominent mainstream critics came to see DEI as more than a movement. John McWhorter, a Black linguistics professor at Columbia University, wrote in his 2021 bestseller “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” that DEI had become more like a religion, and a fanatical one at that, with original sin and heretics who must be purged.
It also offered an apocalyptic end game. In 2021, The New York Times reported that Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a Black psychiatrist in private practice, spoke at the Yale Medical School, describing gruesome fantasies of shooting white people. “There are no good apples out there,” she said. “White people make my blood boil.” The title of her address was “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.”
And there was catechism. In the summer of 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum
of African American History and Culture, which receives half its funding from the federal government, published a tutorial on racism that included an infographic indicting “whiteness” in our culture. “Since whiteness works almost invisibly,” the document stated, “we may not always be aware of how it manifests in our daily lives.” Even many people of color, it said, have “internalized some aspects of white culture” — a list that includes “self-reliance,” “the nuclear family,” “time schedules,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” “delayed gratification” and “action orientation.”
THE ANTI-DEI PUSH gained critical mass in 2023. That January, Ilya Shapiro, Matt Beienburg and Chris Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute published model anti-DEI legislation, with four lines of attack: abolish DEI bureaucracies, end mandatory diversity training, end diversity statements and end racial preferences in admissions and employment. DEI defenders saw this model, and others like it, as an orchestrated campaign with nefarious intent. “Gathering strength from a backlash against Black Lives Matter,” wrote Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times, “and fueled by criticism that doctrines such as critical race theory had made colleges engines of progressive indoctrination, the eradication of D.E.I. programs has become both a cause and a message suffusing the American right.”
in place on DEI programs in higher education. The anti-DEI arena was so active that many higher education publications began maintaining “anti-DEI trackers” of state legislation.
A key turning point came after October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage. DEI offered a ready template for what followed: Israelis and Jews were white colonialists, the Palestinians Indigenous victims. On October 8, 34 student organizations at Harvard issued a joint statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Anti-Israel campus protests swept campuses, illegally occupying grounds, vandalizing buildings and intimidating Jewish faculty and students. Soon Republicans were, as Vox put it, “weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI.”
On December 5, 2023, when New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., grilled the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT , none of the three seemed very anxious to ensure the safety of Jewish students. That hearing helped surface newly vocal critics like Harvard alumnus and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman — the kind of donor even ultra-endowed institutions avoid alienating. Ackman blamed DEI for the post-October 7 campus chaos, concluding that it was “not about diversity in its purest form” but rather “a political
“WE NEED OUR UNIVERSITIES TO CLEARLY DECLARE WHICH WAY THEY ARE GOING, BUT YOU HAVE TO BE EXPLICIT ABOUT IT, ADVERTISE THAT, AND THEN STUDENTS CAN CHOOSE WHICH KIND OF UNIVERSITY TO GO TO.”
In May 2024, the Iowa Legislature used a budget bill to pass the toughest anti-DEI legislation up to that point, which included banning the required use of pronouns. By the summer of 2025, 18 states had bans
advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI ’s own methodology.”
Shortly after, Jonathan Haidt also dropped his previous qualifications in his
long-standing DEI critique. “I now think that ‘identitarianism’ is completely incompatible with the mission of the university,” he said in February 2024. “There’s no future for DEI as long as it’s based on identity. … Get rid of the entire thing, get rid of all the departments.”
Haidt was referring to the DEI bureaucracies that existed at many colleges and universities: the offices and officers tasked with organizing training, keeping track of DEI goals, and operating the programs designed to help vulnerable students feel at home.
Few universities had invested as deeply in DEI as the University of Michigan. Michigan’s DEI progress report in 2024 ran to 88 pages of goals and measurements. Then there were appendixes and spreadsheets, detailed data and plans from every campus department, with milestones marking degrees of progress. The report touted “an extensive reporting and evaluation process, performed meticulously each year. Self-reported data for each plan is carefully assessed to address each unit’s personalized approaches tailored specifically to their needs.”
Behind that data lay a costly bureaucracy. The campus-wide DEI bureaucracy oversaw scores of smaller ones in a network that could be visualized like synapses surrounding a central brain. Each of these entities was tasked with developing DEI goals on faculty hiring and promotion, as well as student enrollment and other measurables. Staffing and salary figures drawn from public records showed UM’s DEI salary payroll pegged at $18 million in 2022-23, suddenly jumping to $30 million for 2023-24.
But the zeitgeist was clearly shifting. In October, The New York Times ran a highly critical piece, arguing that Michigan had “built one of the most ambitious diversity programs in the country — only to see increased discord and division on campus.”
In December 2024, Michigan ended its use of diversity statements, even as some Michigan regents toyed with shifting all DEI funding to scholarships benefiting needy
students. The full DEI-shutdown hammer fell in the spring of 2025. I watched in real time as UM’s DEI websites winked out, link after link diverting to general departmental or campus web pages.
Over at the Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro kept his guard up. “The stakeholders in what I’ve called the diversity industrial complex are not simply going to go quietly into the good night and learn to code,” Shapiro said. “There are so many nodes or choke points. Every department, every academic department, every program has their diversity officers. They’re embedded. It’s not going to be gotten rid of very easily or quickly.”
dissented: “Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Harlan’s dissent became a talisman for the Civil Rights Movement, and Thurgood Marshall, the legal hero in later anti-segregation battles, held Harlan’s words in marked reverence.
Over time, the Supreme Court applied “strict scrutiny” to any policy that divvied up benefits with reference to race while carving exceptions for using race to remedy enduring wrongs. In 1987, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in a speech that racism remains “so pernicious, and so difficult to remove, that we must take ad-
“AS SOON AS YOU USE THE WORD QUOTA, PEOPLE JUST STOP TALKING. WHAT I WOULD RATHER SAY IS, ARE WE BROADENING PARTICIPATION IN OUR SOCIETY IN A WAY THAT YOUNG PEOPLE CAN SEE PEOPLE LOOKING LIKE THEMSELVES IN ANY SEGMENT OF SOCIETY?”
THIS WAS NOT the first time Michigan made headlines on race politics. In 2006, 58 percent of Michigan voters passed a measure that echoed California’s 1996 Proposition 209, both of which effectively banned, or attempted to ban, affirmative action. In more precise terms, they both barred the use of race, sex, ethnicity or national origin in admissions selections criteria or hiring or other personnel decisions in public education, government contracting and public employment. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Michigan law in 2014, after a lengthy court battle in which both sides invoked the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in their favor.
In any DEI dispute, the muddled history of the equal protection clause plays a significant factor. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld racial segregation, birthing the misbegotten concept of “separate but equal.”
Justice John Marshall Harlan famously
vantage of all the remedial measures at our disposal.” For nearly 50 years, the court concurred with Marshall’s pragmatic argument for affirmative action and against premature insistence on race neutrality.
Writing for a 5-4 majority in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested a 25-year expiration for affirmative action. Twenty years later, the court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that racial categories in college admissions violated the equal protection clause and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, seemingly ending the use of race-conscious policies in college admissions.
SFA v. Harvard was brought on behalf of a group of anonymous Asian students who were denied admission at Harvard despite their stellar academic records. The plaintiffs argued that Harvard was engaging in conscious race balancing, deliberately capping Asian numbers. The problem is that enrollment at elite schools is zero sum. If
racial balancing is an objective — and if academic records are not randomly distributed — then some kids are going to get pushed out because of their race or ethnicity in order to allow space for other kids because of theirs, the plaintiffs argued.
Going beyond test scores and grades, the plaintiffs called out Harvard’s pattern of disparaging Asian applicants on a “personal ratings” score used by admissions officials that included factors like likability and courage. Asian applicants often scored low on these ratings, according to the suit. To be Asian, critics noted, seemed to oddly correlate with being unlikable. In December 2023, The New York Times put human faces on the lawsuit, telling stories of Asian teenagers who had obscured their identities, found ways to hide geeky hobbies, like the violin, and left race boxes unchecked to try to slide below the radar at elite universities.
Nan Zhong’s son, Stanley, who grew up in Palo Alto, was applying to colleges during the very months that the Supreme Court heard arguments and began writing its decision on the Harvard case. Zhong says he had been pretty naive to that point, but as he began digging, he realized that Stanley’s experience in applying for colleges was fairly routine for Asian kids. “I think it’s just a repeat of what they did to the Jews in the early part of the 20th century,” he said. “They decided to suppress a particular group and find ways to manifest that in a facially neutral fashion, even though there’s clear racial motivation.”
“The Chinese Exclusion Acts in the 1880s,” he added, “was the only law in U.S. history that banned entry of a particular ethnic group.” Chinese exclusion, he notes, was not repealed until 1943, and even then strict quotas kept Chinese visas to about 105 per year until 1965.
To illustrate his hunch that his son was being discriminated against covertly, Nan Zhong pointed me to unguarded statements by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “What colleges and universities
will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution,” Chemerinsky told The New Yorker. “So they can’t have any explicit use of race. They have to make sure that their admissions statistics don’t reveal any use of race. But they can use proxies for race.”
You can hire based on diversity, “just don’t say it. You can think it. You can vote it. But don’t ever articulate that that is what you are doing,” Chemerinsky later told UC Berkeley faculty. “If I’m ever deposed, I’m going to deny I said this to you.”
Despite recent court rulings, enrollment numbers for Asian American students are still being systematically suppressed, according to the Asian American Coalition for Education, noting that after the Supreme Court decision, Yale lowered its Asian enrollment from 30 percent in 2023 to 24 percent in 2024, while Duke dropped Asian admittances from 29 percent to 23 percent. As Chemerinsky observed, less data means more latitude. This fall, over 80 percent of American colleges and universities are not requiring test scores. Removing test scores shifts weight to high school grades, extracurriculars and personal essays, and, according to Zhong, can suppress Asian enrollment.
Defenders of the shift, meanwhile, said eliminating test scores from admissions decisions will likely increase diversity of incoming classes. “Test-optional policies continue to dominate at national universities, state flagships, and selective liberal arts colleges because they typically result in more applicants, academically stronger applicants and more diversity,” FairTest, an organization that opposes standardized testing, said in a statement.
NAN ZHONG IS sure the University of California is also quietly using race quotas in student admissions, and he thinks he can prove it. He says that UC campuses held Asian numbers precisely flat, for example, even as the Asian population in California grew from 13.8 percent in 2010 to 15.5
percent in 2020. That, he argues, would not occur by chance. In fact, Zhong believes that little is left to chance with UC demographics. He notes that the UC is striving to raise Hispanic student populations to 25 percent, with five of nine campuses currently qualifying. These are called “Hispanic Serving Institutions” by the U.S. Department of Education, a status that, in theory, comes with access to preferential federal grants. The UC is also monitoring Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions, or AANAPISIs, also a federal designation. AANAPISI campuses must have a more modest 10 percent AANAPI students, a target that eight of the nine UC campuses currently meet. That is no surprise, since
“provide a more nuanced treatment to the existing demographic data including adding new categorization schemes.” The new categories “are themselves also likely to be fraught, but we hope are a closer representation of individuals’ lived experiences around race and ethnicity.”
In today’s America, race often seems like a moving target. In 2014, Vox reported that “over a million Hispanics turned white between the 2000 and 2010 Census.” And in 2022, Brookings asked, “Are Asian Americans people of color or the next in line to become white?” Richard Alba, a former professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, argued in 2021 that multiracial identity is now a central feature
“THERE’S NO FUTURE FOR DEI AS LONG AS IT’S BASED ON IDENTITY. GET RID OF THE ENTIRE THING, GET RID OF ALL THE DEPARTMENTS.”
Asians already make up roughly 32 percent of UC admissions.
Labored acronyms come with the territory when grouping races. In 2024, the Federal Office of Management and Budget proposed multiple changes to its race categories. Race and ethnicity are now combined into one question, and you can now select more than one race, so totals will exceed 100 percent. If you check two boxes, you get counted twice, and they don’t ask for details or percentages. There are also new options to choose from. People from the Middle East and North Africa, whom the federal government had previously labeled “white,” can now choose Middle East and North African, or MENA, a map that reaches from Iran to Morocco.
The University of Michigan’s 2022 DEI report sounded almost exasperated in explaining its new categories. Race and ethnicity are “social constructs,” “historically fraught” and “quite complicated,” the report stated. Michigan’s new DEI categories
of American life, with nearly 3 in 10 Asians, 1 in 4 Latinos, and 1 in 5 Black newlyweds now married to partners of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.
Two prominent young Black critics of DEI are cases in point. In “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” Coleman Hughes writes that after his mother’s death he was shocked that many friends and family had seen her as Black. Her father was Puerto Rican, her mother Black. “My mother emerged a perfect blend of the two: a light-brown hue that suggested neither blackness nor whiteness — at least not to my mind.” He had always thought of her as mainly Puerto Rican, when he thought of it at all.
Another challenge comes from Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose mother is white and father is Black. In “Unlearning Race: Self Portrait in Black and White,” Williams recalls that as a teenager he identified intensely with Blackness. But living in France as a young man, his racial
certainties came unmoored. He would enter a random kebob shop, be spoken to in Arabic, and encounter incredulity and even indignation at his silence. “One night, the young Algerian behind the counter simply demanded of me, ‘Parle arabe! Parle arabe!’ and all I could do was stare at him blankly.”
“STOP TALKING ABOUT it,” snapped Morgan Freeman in a 2005 “60 Minutes” segment when asked how we can overcome racism without talking about race. An iconic film actor born in 1937 and raised in bitterly segregated Mississippi, Freeman surprised host Mike Wallace with his derision of Black History Month. “Black history is American history,” Freeman said curtly. Freeman returned to the theme in 2024 interviews: “This whole idea makes my teeth itch. It’s not right.”
Hrabowski has little patience for Black people who erase race from civic dialogue. “People like Morgan Freeman who are so confident that they’re right about race,” Hrabowski said. “There is nothing I could say to them because their lived experience is so different from mine.” Hrabowski also calls out writers like Hughes and Williams. “It’s very easy for some kids from multiracial backgrounds to want to forget the race part. They just have had a very different experience. Their experiences have been so different from those of children from disadvantage.”
Hrabowski speaks from his own experience. He was a 12-year-old math geek in the spring of 1963 when he sat on a church pew in Birmingham, Alabama, munching M&M’s and doing his algebra while half listening to a man he later learned was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Two days later, Hrabowski joined thousands of other young Black kids, skipping school, braving police dogs and water cannons, and marching on city hall. There he was confronted by Bull Connor, the city’s infamous commissioner of public safety, who spat in the boy’s face and tossed him in a police wagon.
The young Hrabowski then spent five nights in Birmingham Jail, just two weeks after King’s famous stay in the same place. Hrabowski became the leader of a group of boys, all of them frightened at the squalid conditions and intimidated by the inmates who, he says, “were not there for the marching.” During the long, scary nights, he would read from the Bible with his charges. “The Lord is my shepherd,” they read aloud. “I shall not want.”
Hrabowski never lost his passion for math, nor did he ever stop looking out for those boys. Throughout his academic career, he focused on pulling vulnerable kids in, keeping them in, and finding them mentors on their way out.
As ever, Hrabowski’s eye is on at-risk Black kids from American families and neighborhoods.
As vice provost at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the late 1990s, Hrabowski built a scholarship program that mentored aspiring Black male scientists and stuck with them until they reached their goals. Hrabowski would later serve 30 years as UMBC’s president, where he dedicated particular attention to the Meyerhoff program, which initially focused on mentorship of young men. The program soon opened to women and non-minorities after its launch, but it remains focused on helping minority stu-
times more likely to enter a STEM Ph.D. than their African American counterparts who were accepted but went elsewhere instead. Thus, graduate by graduate, the program quietly continues to build the edifice of role models needed to prime the pump — rising aspirations and dogged mentoring leading to greater equity and fairness.
One notable Meyerhoff alum is Dr. Damon Tweedy, who grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked cutting meat in a grocery store. During one of his Meyerhoff summer job placements, he met a Black cardiologist. “That was one of the first times I’d met a young male African American physician,” Tweedy would later say. “The idea of becoming a doctor was really foreign to me. … I had no frame of reference at all.” Tweedy graduated from UMBC with a 4.0 grade point average, earned an M.D. from Duke University Medical School, and is now a professor of psychiatry at Duke. Meyerhoff could be seen as a “pay it forward” model of building diversity on campus and in the workplace. Tweedy meets a Black cardiologist, goes to medical school, becomes a professor, and now a new generation of Meyerhoff students can meet him in their summer program.
Speaking of Black cardiologists, Tweedy’s Meyerhoff classmate, Andrew Atiemo, went on from UMBC to Harvard Medical School and is now a practicing cardiologist. Atiemo
YOU CAN HIRE BASED ON DIVERSITY, JUST DON’T SAY IT. YOU CAN THINK IT. YOU CAN VOTE IT. BUT DON’T EVER ARTICULATE THAT THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
dents earn STEM doctorates. Meyerhoff graduates have earned 448 doctorates from top graduate programs, with over 70 alumni in faculty positions. One study found that Meyerhoff students were 4.3
was born in Ghana. Ghanaian Americans are not a struggling group, with education and income levels well over the national average. It might be argued that Atiemo’s roots mean he did not need Meyerhoff, but
that would miss the point. Hrabowski’s vision is less about distributing outcomes than about seeding hope. Young people need role models. When you are dealing with kids who don’t know anyone who went to college, who are not encouraged to read at home, whose aspirations are formed by popular culture, it takes hard work and lots of little successes to build an alternate world. One more Black cardiologist, even one born in Ghana, could be a lodestar for a Black kid who needed that boost of hope and confidence.
HRABOWSKI’S RACE-CONSCIOUS mentoring is closely akin to that of Robert Young, a prominent Black attorney in Michigan. A DEI skeptic and a Republican, Young became chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court in 2011. He is passionate about mentoring qualified young Black professionals. In the early 1990s, he was the general counsel at Michigan’s American Automobile Association, which he
professionals and his opposition to what he sees as the rhetorical excess and statistical pressure of formal DEI policies. He mentored Black attorneys not because of a mandate, but because he saw a problem and felt he could help fix it.
Hrabowski, meanwhile, remains unapologetic about the need to focus on young Black males, statistically as well as individually. There is no way, he argues, to counter the negative influences that surround those young men without consciously pulling them in, through DEI-type programs, helping them stay in, and passing them on to other mentors they can relate to.
American voters seem to agree with both Young and Hrabowski, and they struggle with the contradictions. In 2020, CNN found that 74 percent of Americans saw racism as “a big problem.” Pew found in 2019 that 75 percent deemed affirmative action important to “promote racial and ethnic diversity in the workplace.” But that same Pew poll found 75 percent opposed to using
“IT’S VERY EASY FOR SOME KIDS FROM MULTIRACIAL BACKGROUNDS TO WANT TO FORGET THE RACE PART. THEY JUST HAVE HAD A VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE.”
says outsourced thousands of legal cases. None of the law firms selected for those cases, he noted, had Black partners. Pressed for answers, his colleagues said they didn’t know any Black attorneys. “That’s true,” Young told me. “The only people they knew were the people they went to church with and played golf with and socialized with, none of whom were Black. So I solved that problem because I knew a lot of talented Black attorneys.”
Young sees no contradiction between his passion for mentoring young Black
race as a factor in hiring, even if diversity suffered. And a 2018 University of Chicago poll found 71 percent opposed preferential hiring by race. In November 2020, 56 percent of voters in California rejected a push to overturn a state law that bans race, sex or ethnicity in hiring, state contracting or state college admissions.
To both persuade a conflicted public and effect real change, some DEI supporters now call for rethinking tactics. Harvard professors Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin are both leaders in carrying DEI into the
workplace. In 2023, they wrote an op-ed calling for rethinking training approaches that “prove to trainees that they are morally flawed,” causing trainees to “leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups,” noting that such programs “can turn off even supporters of equal-opportunity programs.”
“We have to get to the point where we can have these conversations,” Hrabowski said, noting that in the current climate many DEI supporters are hunkering down, afraid to draw attention to themselves or their efforts. This is, of course, a fear that many DEI critics know all too well from the other side of the conflict.
For his part, Nan Zhong would like greater respect for those who resist being categorized. “It’s dehumanizing,” Nan Zhong told me. “Our Constitution is very clear. People should be treated as individuals, not as part of a group. Even if only one individual is getting discriminated against, it is still discrimination.” Zhong’s concern is echoed by Irshad Manji, a Muslim woman born in Uganda of Egyptian and Indian parentage, whose family fled Uganda, she says, after being targeted because their skin was brown, not black. She is the author, most recently, of “Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times.” “If leaders want to rise to this moment sincerely and sustainably,” Manji writes, “they would be wise to remember: People are humanized by being seen as individuals within communities, not as labels on legs.”
“This is a time to take stock,” Hrabowski says. He cites an ongoing lack of minority faculty in many departments and graduate programs and ongoing challenges in the minority student pipeline, including K-12 preparation and retention in college. “How will we as a society become our best if we are not bringing forth the best talent from every group? What responsibility do we have to make sure that we are maximizing the brain power in this country, but not just the brain power, but our ability to be compassionate and supportive of each other?”
BY THERESA DEAR
E’VE HEARD A lot about DEI recently — most of it bad. The acronym has been politicized to represent everything wrong with government, education and business. We see supporters use it as a check-the-box virtue signal, while opponents point to it as a universal scapegoat. But many attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion show a misunderstanding of long-held American values. Diversity is a value and principle of an organization committed to appreciating and respecting differences. Equity is providing the same access and opportunities for all. Inclusion is developing an environment where people feel welcomed, appreciated for their uniqueness, and valued for their skills and talents.
Somewhere these values became conflated and confused with affirmative action. Unlike affirmative action, DEI is not compliance driven, where quotas need to be met. Affirmative action was government mandated. DEI is voluntary. Affirmative action benefited certain groups. DEI benefits all. Affirmative action was contained to one department. DEI is a shared endeavor across an organization. Affirmative action opened doors in organizations. DEI opens minds and attitudes. What undergirds the validity and relevance of DEI is census data. One of the main reasons every leader, business owner, parent, teacher and clergy member should care about DEI is because census data matters. For more than three decades, economists, statisticians and politicians have been watching and analyzing
that data. Every 10 years when the census is taken, it reinforces the findings from the previous census. The data has predicted that there would be more people of color in the United States by 2045 than white people. This data can also inform new dynamics, structures and descriptors in the demographic composition of the country. For example, if brown people will make up the majority of people in the country, then this could translate into white people being the minority. For some, this could be a daunting notion to consider.
Just because DEI programs are removed from academic, corporate and governmental entities does not deny its existence and inevitability. DEI helps us become stronger, better and greater.
DEI has been incorrectly identified as Black or African American. But DEI does not target one group for advancement. It includes women, veterans, Asians, Native Americans, disabled people, parents, senior citizens, millennials, zoomers, LGBTQIA+, every religion, socioeconomic status, etc. At DEI’s core is the principle that everyone matters and everyone is included. Everyone matters means that their ethnicity, traditions, experiences and cultural norms matter. Their history, struggles, triumphs and sacrifices are important. The consideration of people’s backgrounds and experiences takes into account the contributions of America’s culture. America is a strong, rich and powerful nation not because of one group, but because of the participation of many groups.
In business, differences have value. There is currency associated with differences. DEI is a competitive advantage, where differences are strengths that are leveraged to benefit the consumer, employee and community.
According to a June 2024 U.S. Census report, the Hispanic population is growing the fastest. Between 2022 and 2023, it represented just under 71 percent of the country’s growth. The Hispanic spending power is $2 trillion per year. The African American spending power is $1.8 trillion per year. To successfully market to these groups, companies will need a DEI strategy to speak their language, hire people who look like them and appeal to their cultural traditions. Based on America’s growing diversity, future businesses could slump or fail without a DEI strategy.
For health care providers, hospitals and clinics treating African Americans, it’s important to understand why hypertension, diabetes and hyperpigmentation are prevalent in the community and social constructs. Likewise for appreciating the patriarchal structure in the Hispanic family.
One of the most effective components of DEI is training. It teaches us cultural competence, including the traditions and cultural norms of different groups and how to embrace and respect them. As examples, the training content helps us appreciate why Islamic women wear hijabs, why Jewish men wear a yarmulke and why Muslims pray at Salah times. It also helps us identify our unconscious bias and blind spots.
DEI matters because it’s important for companies to reflect the customer and community they serve. DEI matters because individuals want to see themselves reflected within the company’s culture, leadership, collateral, advertising, etc. DEI matters because it increases brand loyalty to diverse groups. DEI matters because it prepares us for the future — different languages, traditions, cultures and norms — and how to respect them for the betterment of humanity.
WHEN HIKERS GO MISSING, WHO FINDS THEM?
BY MARK DEE ILLUSTRATION BY DARYA SHNYKINA
ERN BAIRD LEFT Ketchum, Idaho, past noon on October 19, 2020. She pointed her black Subaru north, up state Highway 75, the two-lane artery that follows the Big Wood River through the flat, fault-bound basin that splits the Boulder and Smoky mountains. Twenty-odd minutes later, she turned left onto the fine gravel road that leads to the Prairie Creek trailhead. At 1:17 p.m., Baird, who was 62, clicked open a brown box at the end of the parking lot and signed the registry inside. She was headed “to the lake and back.” Then, Baird stepped up the trail, into the mountains, and disappeared.
Last August, nearly four years later, 22 volunteers with the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation took the same drive north from town. They parked at the same trailhead and signed the same log. They trod, as best they could reason, the same paths Baird took that October afternoon. At the most basic level, they were looking for clues — pieces of gear, scraps of clothes, anything that might lead to Baird’s bones. But beyond that, for Baird’s friends and her family, they were looking for answers.
bodies found, seven cases open — makes them one of the most active and, so far, successful groups working in that arena across the American West.
Under Tarr, Fowler-O’Sullivan united a growing company of volunteers to scour wilderness, both on foot and online, with obsessive dedication. Its methods mix brute force and shoe-leather detective work with a drone-driven digital approach. The common thread: thousands of hours seeking, and thinking about, missing people volunteers have never known. From that has grown something like the foundation’s emotional mission, supporting those who loved the lost and assuaging the stymied grief of those grappling with the unknown and the unknowable, a state psychologists call “ambiguous loss.”
No one gets paid, but Tarr is full time. She’s involved in every aspect. When snow shrouds high alpine clues, Tarr migrates south to the deserts of Southern California and Arizona. When the desert gets too hot, she heads north with the thaw to the Cascades.
“There are always missing hikers,” Cathy Tarr
said. “There
are missing hikers we don’t even know about.”
Named in honor of Kris Fowler and David O’Sullivan, a pair of hikers who went missing on the Pacific Crest Trail, the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation steps in when search and rescue gives way to search and recover — a space that Executive Director Cathy Tarr found scattershot and ineffective when she first ventured to help find Fowler in 2017. Nearly eight years after its namesakes vanished from the trail, the organization continues to search for the remains of lost hikers once authorities stop. Their record — five
Search and rescue is a growth industry. In Utah, for example, reported missions for missing hikers alone increased significantly in the 20-year span from 2001 to 2021, the most recent full year logged by the state. Grand County, which encompasses Moab and its surrounding recreation hotspots, plans to spend $554,992 on SAR operations this fiscal year; in 2020, it spent $178,074. But search and recovery — Fowler-O’Sullivan’s purview — remains an afterthought. If it had the means, the foundation could be working on 10 times as many cases as it is at any point, according to Tarr.
“There are always missing hikers,” she
said. “There are missing hikers we don’t even know about. I can’t think of a time when we won’t be working on a case.”
As the group’s profile grows, so does the work. In 2023, Fowler-O’Sullivan search volunteer and former Forest Service ranger Andrea Lankford’s “Trail of the Lost: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail,” a narrative chronicling the search for Fowler and two other missing PCT hikers, became a New York Times bestseller. Since then, Tarr has gotten more calls from wider areas — missing people, desperate families, more sojourns to the sadder side of life.
“Cathy is seven days a week,” Sally Fowler, Kris’ stepmother, told me last fall. The women met not long after Kris Fowler went missing; by now, they’ve known each other almost a decade. “I reminded her the other day, ‘Cathy, every time I talk to you, you’re either about to go look for the remains of a human being, or you just got back from looking for the remains of a human being.’ I try to talk her into taking a few deep breaths in between things. It’s a lot — it’s like a hospice worker.
“To me, that total strangers go out there and search for someone they didn’t know — just because it’s the right thing to do — it’s amazing.”
K RIS FOWLER STARTED the PCT on Mother’s Day. He came to the trail between chapters in his life. At 34, his seven-year marriage had ended — painfully, but, by his family’s account, amicably — a year prior. He left his job at a Florida logistics firm and returned home to Beavercreek, Ohio, where he regained his footing. The next step was toward Wyoming for a seasonal construction gig and a chance to see a new part of the country. When summer ended, he had enough money and time to commit to a long-standing dream. Fowler got a permit for the PCT and started preparing in Colorado with a hiking buddy. They reported to Campo, California, an unincorporated town sidling the Mexican border, and Kris agreed to check in with his parents every two weeks
for however long it took, starting with his first day: May 8, 2016. That morning, Sally Fowler’s phone pinged two time zones away and a picture came through of Kris heading north on the trail. “Happy Mother’s Day from the PCT,” the message to his stepmother read. “I love you.”
The son of a Navy sailor, Fowler was a natural athlete. When he put his head down, he could cover 25 miles a day. But he had a wanderer’s temperament, his stepmother said; he cared more about “smelling the roses” than making good time and preferred to hike in sandals to feel the trail beneath his feet. Fowler liked to take photos, too, and soon after setting off, his partner outpaced him. They decided to split up — nothing unusual on long hauls — and to keep in touch throughout the trip. Every two weeks, as promised, Fowler called home.
In October, Kris reached Washington and the calls stopped. Sally Fowler messaged a hiker Kris had befriended on the trail. Kris had texted her on October 12, the hiker said. He was having phone trouble
“That total strangers go out there and search for someone they didn’t know — just because it’s the right thing to do — it’s amazing.”
and was looking for a new charger. Sally Fowler let it slide.
Another week passed without word. By October 23, she was convinced her son was missing. The last person to see Kris Fowler dropped him near a trailhead at White Pass on October 12 — mile marker 2,294, 356 miles from trail’s end. It took more than a week of negotiations for Sally Fowler to convince authorities, she says, but on October 31, the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office agreed: Kris Fowler had disappeared on the PCT
The two-week search spanned five counties. Sally Fowler flew out to join. She supported her son’s outdoorsman streak but isn’t a hiker herself. She stayed as long as she could. The people she met were gracious. Washington Search and Rescue workers ran one of the largest, longest searches the area had ever seen, Fowler said. And the place was beautiful: high, hanging meadows and emerald groves, every inch alive. It was the sort of landscape Kris had set out to see.
Soon, though, she had to return home. From the plane she looked out at the forests that fringe Mount Rainier and cried. She knew in her mind that down there, obscured by autumn snow and trees, was her son. But until he’s found, part of her will never be convinced.
“I say that my head knows he’s gone,” she says. “My heart hopes he’s braiding hair in a commune somewhere, but my head knows he’s on that mountain.”
The weeks and months following Kris’ disappearance hollowed her out. She was exhausted and emotional, working full days from her home in Ohio and spending nights online, running down any lead that might track down Kris in the mountains of western Washington. She didn’t know what else to do.
“They’re wonderful, amazing human beings,” she said of the crews and volunteers that ran the operation, “but at some point reality says it’s time to call off the search. Some people give up once it goes from rescue to recovery, but (others will) go back out to chase down a clue. In the meantime,
going to be a good outcome,” she said. “You still have hope. And you can’t imagine your loved one being left out there, with no one who cares enough to find them. Until you deal with this, you just think it’s like TV, with hundreds of people linking arms and walking side-by-side through a field until they find them. And that is not what happens. It’s not even close to the truth. That’s a snapshot — one moment of one day.”
Her life went on anyway. Eight months after Kris disappeared, his father — Sally’s ex-husband — died of cancer. Mike Fowler’s obituary stated that he was survived by a son. Sally Fowler went to Mike’s funeral, but never had a memorial for Kris. She doesn’t plan to.
At night, Sally leaned on social media for tips.
In 2017, she got home from work and opened Facebook. Her group, “Bring Kris Fowler/Sherpa Home,” approached 10,000 members. Fowler sorted through her messages and connected with a woman who said she wanted to help. Her name was Cathy Tarr.
of the Appalachian Trail, she was a regular “trail angel” — an endearing term for a volunteer who offers a bit of accommodation (or civilization) to those long in the woods. She traded her kindness for their inspiration. Tarr herself began hiking farther and farther distances. Exploration turned to training, and she fixed her sights on hiking one of the American through-hiker’s “Triple Crown”: the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. Two years after starting to hike seriously, her permit came through. In April 2017, she’d report to Campo and head north on the PCT. The trip would span 2,650 miles and take around six months.
you’re left on your own to start digging and looking for the breadcrumbs.”
Fowler started getting calls from people with half-trained dogs or strong hunches. Psychics came out of the woodwork with ideas of their own; a check would pull things into focus. Fowler is high-energy and no-nonsense, but she was running out of ideas. Low on strength, she was beginning to listen.
“If Elvis rode in on a unicorn and found my son, I’d be OK with that,” she said. Fowler was surprised and disappointed there was no structure in place to help. She encountered practical problems, too: Without a body, she couldn’t get a death certificate. Without a death certificate, she couldn’t forward his mail or cancel his cellphone plan. Kris had a car — she couldn’t sell it. The tags expired, and she couldn’t register it. It sat in his dad’s driveway, illegal to drive, a reminder of a missing son.
“Your loved one is missing, and especially in the first year you haven’t wrapped your mind around the fact that it’s probably not
CATHY TARR DOESN’T fit most archetypes of serious hikers. With her shoulderlength, red-brown bob and trained, managerial cadence, Tarr comes off like an aunt who found the right rungs on the corporate ladder and climbed, comfortably, toward retirement age. Yet she’s spent nearly every day of the last seven years unpaid, searching for people she’s never met.
People who fixate on these sorts of cases are often touched by loss one way or another. Some are battered by it, warped into thwarted grief. Others are just brushed. Tarr’s scrape was with Kris Fowler, missing somewhere near Mount Rainier in the fall of 2017.
As a new empty-nester, hiking was meant to be Tarr’s next act. A pharmacy technician by training, she left Walgreens after overseeing six stores in northern Virginia. Tarr soon fell in love with New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and among them wandered into the domain of long-distance hikers. For those on the last northern stretches
She went back to New England that winter to practice on ice, using crampons and microspikes — skills she’d need through the suspended winter of June in the Sierras, and again, months later, in the erratic fall of the Cascades. She was riding with a friend through Maine when another driver pulled out in front of them. The collision ignited Tarr’s airbag, which blew into her chest with a crack. The driver was OK, but Tarr couldn’t breathe. The impact fractured her sternum. She wouldn’t be hiking the trail that spring.
Tarr wandered west anyway. In Arizona, she started seeing fliers with pictures of a tall young man in sandals. He had long, wiry limbs and smiling eyes set between a bandana and a beard like straw thatch. His trail name was “Sherpa.”
Kris Fowler (Sherpa)
Last seen October 12, 2016 near Packwood, Washington.
Tarr set out to join the search. She started looking and stayed along the PCT until the snow blanketed northern Washington. Clues concealed, she went south. After the first set of fliers came a second: David O’Sullivan, a young Irishman assigned a start date so close to Tarr’s that, had her plans gone as scripted, they might have passed each other on the trail.
“When you’re on one of these trails, you become a family,” Tarr told me. “You kinda look out for each other. When a hiker goes missing, it means a lot to hikers. And it means a lot to try to have them found — as a hiker and as a mother.”
When other searches stalled, Tarr stayed on. She grew close with O’Sullivan’s parents, and when circumstances forced them to return to Cork, Tarr stood in their stead. As a family advocate, she liaised with media, chased leads and generally kept O’Sullivan’s name in the air around Idyllwild, California.
She kept working with Con and Carmel O’Sullivan, as well as Sally Fowler. She met with volunteers and organized searches and, as word spread, those scarred by loss set out to find her. These families couldn’t take on much more, so Tarr carried it for them. Slowly, over the course of the next few years, the work coalesced into an idea: the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation, a formal nonprofit empowered to search for the lost.
There’s a mystery at the heart of every disappearance. You’ll never know exactly why someone ended up where they did. But there are clues, and with them trends. If Tarr sees a preventable pattern in Fowler-O’Sullivan’s cases, it’s day hikers encountering trouble on trail. When she goes on searches, she prepares for the worst. Her advice: Check the weather and be certain of the trail. Know when the sun sets and how long you’ll be out there, and
FOR DAVID O’SULLIVAN. THOUGH FOCUSED IN THE WEST, TARR HAS WORKED WITH SEARCHERS FROM AS FAR AWAY AS AUSTRALIA.
don’t feel bad about turning around. Pack accordingly: Tarr always brings enough food and water to wait out a protracted rescue, as well as layers and a light sleeping bag. Most accidents happen when people panic. Sun setting, temperature dropping, day hikers may look for shortcuts, dip off trail, and get lost. (Through-hikers simply pitch a tent and spend the night.) It’s usually safer to stay put and call for help. That’s why Tarr always carries a satellite communicator — she uses a Garmin InReach, and the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation has given away 57 of them to avid hikers since its inception.
“We try to keep hikers safe — to give them information on how to stay safe,” Tarr said. “Whether they take that information, it’s up to them. But in today’s age, you shouldn’t be going missing. You should have something to send out a signal so that you’re saved.”
A SEARCH IS like a stone thrown in a lake. It makes ripples for a while, but soon the water closes back. It looks as it always has, flat and still, only now the stone is drowned.
Breck Baird had a celebration of life for his mother. Afterward, he told Tarr that it didn’t feel real. He didn’t have any answers going in, and he didn’t leave with any.
Here, “closure” is something of a dirty word. Pauline Boss, the psychologist who coined the term “ambiguous loss,” calls it an outright myth. You can close a case — a material thing — but you can’t bring closure to a family. The term ties a neat bow on something that’s “messy — really, really messy,” says Maureen Trask, who runs Fowler-O’Sullivan’s support group for families of the missing. To Trask, closure suggests a finality that’s never truly there. One day, you’ll want to call for a recipe. Share a joke. See a car, unregistered, in the driveway. And a dam holding back that thing the world called “closed” will break inside your chest.
“Our grief is frozen,” said Trask, whose son, Daniel, disappeared on a hike in northern Ontario in 2011. His remains were found three and a half years later.
DAVID O’SULLIVAN
LAST SEEN
APRIL 7, 2017
LAST KNOWN POSITION
IDYLLWILD INN IN
IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA
“When someone is dying of cancer, you know where the person is, and you know that there’s going to be an ending: At some point, they’re probably going to die. With us, it’s like: They may be alive, and they may be dead. It’s a both/and situation.”
Think of it as Schrodinger’s hiker: a loved one, alive and dead at the same time.
“You know the person’s gone but you can’t wrap your head around it,” Tarr told me. “You have no answers. You don’t have a body. You don’t have remains. None of that. And you just want something back. Many families told me, ‘Even if I just had his backpack back. Something — something to let me know where he was.’ Some families hold on to the idea that they’re not dead at all. Maybe he just left the trail, and he’s fine. And I tell them to hold onto that, until they hear differently.”
People across the country rallied for Baird’s search last summer. They worked in stages. First, a team from Utah-based Western States Aerial foreran the area
There’s a mystery at the heart of every disappearance. You’ll never know exactly why someone ended up where they did. But there are clues, and with them trends.
using drones programmed to fly a tight grid as close as they could to the treetops. They aimed to augment luck through methodology, photographing each foot of visible earth. Their drones moved like a lawnmower trimming a football field, cutting one way, sliding over exactly the width of its blade, then turning around to make an equivalent pass back the other way. The art is more in deducing the right spot to look than flying the mission, according to volunteer pilot Kent Delbon, a former national park ranger and Secret Service agent who runs drones for Fowler-O’Sullivan. It’s old-school behavioral study brought to bear on an emerging modern tool. Those photos, thousands of them, went into a folder, joining some 40,000 others FowlerO’Sullivan has on ice, waiting for a team of human spotters — some as far afield as Australia — to scrutinize what they held.
Someday soon, artificial intelligence may help, but for now, no program matches the human eye for spotting out-of-place items in wild places. And few eyes are as well trained as those of Morgan Clements, an early ensign to Tarr’s “image team” who has been examining these photos for nearly 10 years. Clements might identify 20 to 30 “candidate items” in every 1,000 pictures he examines. “Candidate items” are like proto-clues — unnatural objects, pieces of gear, a surprising number of mylar balloons — and those spotted by Clements have led to three bodies in the wilderness. After the drone flight, Clements and dozens like him scrutinized, inspected and debated what the photos held online, and came to a consensus on a slate of coordinates worth following up on in Idaho, a place they’ve never been.
Volunteers came to Ketchum from both coasts, spanning South Carolina to California. Bill Silliman drove up from Park City. An avid outdoorsman and photographer in his 80s, Silliman knew Baird through the Park City Mountain Sports club, an outdoor recreation group with close to 700 members. He said he had to help. He slept in his Jeep at the trailhead and hiked the mountainsides for three straight days. He was
struck by how “wild” the terrain felt — rock slides, deadfall, steep and stony climbs, all just a few miles off the highway.
“It would be so easy to get off the trail and get lost out there,” he said. “And it’s the type of place you wouldn’t want to be lost.”
In all, 22 volunteers put on blaze orange vests and holstered radios. From the trailhead, Tarr used GPS to track them in real time. They fanned out, 10 or 20 feet apart, and raked through the undergrowth. They found animal bones, dirty underwear, rocks that looked, passingly, like skulls. Nothing belonged to Baird.
Clements remains optimistic, though four years is a long time.
“It might take multiple imaging efforts. The first set of images may not find them. A different team on a different day with different lighting and a different philosophy might show us different things. But it is true: They have to be there to be found. And we’re always guessing where they are.”
To Tarr, an empty search isn’t a failure. She’s now “95-99% certain” Baird isn’t in the area they canvassed.
“Every time we go out and don’t find her, we’ve still progressed,” she said. “You can find someone after a long time — years. It’s not as if bones, or shoes, or whatever disappear up into the air. It’s still there. We just have to find it.”
In late October, I pointed my car north on state Highway 75. It was a warm fall, and the aspens that wreathed the valley floor held themselves like torches against the blue-green spires of subalpine fir. I put my back to the Boulder Mountains, punching like gnarled knuckles through the valley floor, and took the road toward Prairie Creek. Cars sprinkled the lot. Beyond that, laughter rode the breeze down the trail. A father and his kids walked their retriever through the woods, whooping as the dog pingponged between them. Soon, the wind swept their joy into the brush, and I stepped up onto the trail. I didn’t know what I thought I’d find. But I thought of Tarr and thought of this: As long as there is something to look for, there will be someone willing to look.
BY CHRISTINE ROSEN
IN RECENT YEARS, research into the ways technologies such as smartphones and social media impact children’s mental health and well-being has generated a long-overdue public debate about how to manage the potential harms of our sophisticated new tools. Thanks to the work of social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, parents and educators are now better informed about potential risks of a phone-based childhood.
Yet other challenges remain: How our own use of these technologies has transformed our expectations and behavior, and led to the creation of a world that often seems devoid of basic decency and thoughtfulness; where we navigate public
space comfortably enclosed in our own digital bubbles, feeling little sense of obligation to others; and where we become ever more comfortable outsourcing human skills to machines.
These transformations of everyday experience are seemingly less alarming but no less impactful. On average, we spend seven hours a day staring at screens; for younger people, those numbers are much higher. For many of us, our phones are the last thing we touch before falling asleep and the first thing we reach for in the morning. These small decisions, repeated day after day, create habits of mind and new ways of understanding and being in the world. They encourage us to expect convenience, efficiency, seamless interactions and everything on demand. We crave novelty, immediacy, endless options and near-total control of our environment.
Several decades ago, naturalist Robert Michael Pyle lamented the “extinction of experience.” Pyle and others worried that younger generations suffered from “nature deficit disorder” — being raised without the hands-on experience of mucking around outdoors, they argued, these children would grow up disaffected from nature and unlikely to embrace the role of environmental stewards as adults.
Several decades after Pyle coined the phrase, this challenge — to live in the real world, with all its messy physical realities — is one we all face. Our experiences of pleasure, hands-on skills, self reliance, relationships and connection to nature are all threatened by mediating technology. Daily intimacy with the physical world recedes, little by little, while our attachment to digital worlds grows. More and more, we relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it.
DESPITE WHAT SILICON VALLEY MARKETING MESSAGES INSIST, HISTORY IS NOT ALWAYS A STEADY MARCH TOWARD PROGRESS, AND NOT EVERY NEW THING IS AN IMPROVEMENT ON THE OLD.
The platforms and screens on which we spend our days effectively have become our new character-forming institutions. They have invaded the private world of existing institutions such as the family and become indispensable in the public world of work and leisure. They promise us, as an Apple slogan once put it, a world that is “automatic, effortless, and seamless.” In many ways, our technologies have made good on that promise, but in the process, we are changed.
THERE ARE SEVERAL areas where crucial human experiences have deteriorated or are disappearing.
Consider face-to-face interaction. Data from the American Time Use Survey show significant declines in the amount of time Americans spend face-to-face with friends; in the past 20 years, time spent with others has declined more than 20 percent, and more than 35 percent for people younger than 25. We spend an increasing amount of time in self-isolation, and some experts warn that the 21st century might be one marked by a “loneliness epidemic.”
But it is not quite right to call this a loneliness epidemic. In fact, we are experiencing an epidemic of self-isolation, as more people choose to spend time alone, immersed in digital worlds but bereft of in-person human interaction. When we leave our homes, we encounter self-service checkout kiosks, computerized concierges, and other replacements of quotidian human interaction by machines. Many of these make our lives more efficient, of course, but they also change the tenor of our daily interactions, leaving us habituated to machine interactions and perhaps less patient with human ones. We are even replacing humans with screens in places like hospitals, where “telepresence robots” wheel around with a disembodied doctor’s head on a screen. Human beings are wired to read each other’s facial expressions and physical gestures — what anthropologist Edward T. Hall once called “the silent language.” As we spend more time on mediated interactions, we
lose opportunities to hone those important human skills. When our face-to-face experiences become more hurried, less frequent and less satisfying, we delve deeper into mediated experiences to compensate, in a cycle that endlessly repeats itself. Our technological skills improve; our primal skills of embodied interaction deteriorate.
This new reality has proven fertile ground for technologies that offer to ease our loneliness and offer a simulacrum of friendship: artificial intelligence-enabled chatbots and other popular artificial forms of friendship such as Replika and Character.ai. A 2024 survey by Institute for Family Studies and YouGov found that 1 in 4 young adults “believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.”
We are also losing hands-on knowledge of the world gained by doing things in unmediated ways. Today it is easier, physically, to send a message to the other side of the world on your smartphone than it is to tie your own shoe. Yet earlier tools that used to serve as extensions of our bodies have given way to digital devices that require far less physical effort from us.
Consider writing by hand, and cursive writing: Mastering both builds fine motor skills while also stimulating and creating synergies between different hemispheres of the brain involved in thinking, language and working memory. Many experiments on the benefits of writing by hand versus on a computer, for example, have found that students who take notes by hand during a lecture retain more than those who take notes on a computer.
As those who study embodied cognition remind us, keyboards and touch screens do not hone the same skills as writing by hand. As well, by neglecting these old ways of teaching writing by hand, we are raising generations of Americans who also cannot read cursive, which means they cannot read our nation’s founding documents, or the letters of their ancestors who wrote only in script.
The art of waiting has also diminished. As steady increases in the rates of road rage
and air rage incidents suggest, we are less patient and less tolerant of delay. Today we expect a great deal more distraction and control over the experience of waiting, and we can turn to our smartphones to check email, text a friend or play a game any time we experience a wait. Nearly every moment of interstitial time can be filled with entertainment or communication.
And yet, our willingness or unwillingness to wait reveals our feelings about patience (and impatience), our acceptance of things such as idleness and boredom, and our need for a sense of control. How we wait reveals our attitudes about silence and reticence, reflection and daydreaming. The individual experience of waiting might be unique, ours to cope with as we choose, but our attitude about waiting has a public effect — on our families, friends, neighbors, communities and even on our broader political culture. Our mediated lives have led us to believe that waiting is a problem to be solved, rather than a normal human experience. As a result, when we are forced to wait, we become annoyed and angry, as we lack practice.
THE EXTENT TO which technologies of mediation — cellphones, tablet and laptop computers, and the software and apps we use with them — saturate our lives and interpose in our daily decision-making marks a new moment in human experience. We don’t use these technologies merely to find the nearest coffee shop, museum or potential romantic partner; we use them to make judgments about what is and isn’t worth experiencing at all.
The greatest transformation of our daily lives, compared to past eras, is our willingness to allow so much of it to become data. This has radically altered our connection to place. Our near constant use of mediating technologies, especially phones, means we now follow the rules of virtual space, with its demands for immediacy and its rewards for behaviors that keep us focused on the virtual world. Our dedication to the virtual world has come at
the expense of the physical world. In his 1985 book “No Sense of Place,” communications scholar Joshua Meyrowitz noted, “Electronic media destroy the specialness of place and time. … When we are everywhere, we are also no place.”
Civil society has long been rooted in particular places — places that foster sociability among strangers. They create opportunities for us to run into people we know and to meet new people in a familiar context. Often, they serve as proving grounds for protest and political action. It is not a coincidence that large-scale civic engagement often begins in the physical town square, or in public meeting places where people of different backgrounds come to-
A VISION OF THE FUTURE WHERE LARGE PORTIONS OF THE POPULATION ARE RELEGATED TO VIRTUAL EXISTENCES IS DYSTOPIAN BECAUSE IT IS ONE IN WHICH HUMAN CHOICE IS SEVERELY CURTAILED.
gether. In physical places, we are forced to confront, compromise and get along with those around us in ways that we can avoid when we are online.
When we are not grounded in concrete places, face-to-face with others, we form different habits of mind; we react at times with less empathy; we risk cultivating fewer emotional attachments. Instead, we have embraced the values of our technologies to measure our own and others’ worth through quantification — likes, reposts, follower counts. In doing so, we have made our relationships more transactional and turned others into abstractions, not out of malice, but out of habit.
Narcissus fell in love with a reflected image of himself. Today, a two-hour conversation with an AI model is all it takes to make an accurate replica of someone’s personality, researchers have found. Instagram has already begun experimenting with a feature that shows users AI-generated images featuring themselves. “Imagine yourself reflecting on life in an endless maze of mirrors where you’re the main focus,” the caption of one image stated. In this culture, what happens to the sympathetic imagination that encourages us to understand other people, when all we see is a reflection of ourselves?
THE QUALITY OF our experiences matters, and by limiting the time we spend face-to-face with others, technology alters our understanding of the things we have in common, including things as mundane as having to wait in line together, or having to engage in the social pleasantries that make public space a healthy rather than hostile place.
Life is finite — even if acknowledging our human limits is not a popular pastime in a culture eager to understand technology as a story of endless gains for mankind. Accounting for what we have lost is also the beginning of the process of reclaiming it. Despite what Silicon Valley marketing messages insist, history is not always a steady march toward progress, and not every new thing is an improvement on the old.
What can we do to reverse some of these harmful changes?
We must, above all, defend the human. This is not hyperbole. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s vision of the future is indicative of how Silicon Valley understands humanity. When he was asked about the possibility of a future where people’s inability to distinguish between reality and unreality might harm humanity, he called this concern “Reality Privilege.” “A small percent of people live in a real world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many
WE USE OUR TECHNOLOGIES TO MEASURE OUR OWN AND OTHERS’ WORTH THROUGH QUANTIFICATION. IN DOING SO, WE HAVE MADE OUR RELATIONSHIPS MORE TRANSACTIONAL AND TURNED OTHERS INTO ABSTRACTIONS, NOT OUT OF MALICE, BUT OUT OF HABIT.
fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date,” he said. “Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote unquote real world.”
He noted the likelihood of naysayers: “The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian,” but “reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap.” Instead, he argued, the reality-deprived should be happy to spend their time in “online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
Defending reality is not a privilege; it’s crucial to ensuring a flourishing human future. A vision of the future where large portions of the population are relegated to virtual existences is dystopian because it is one in which human choice is severely curtailed.
This requires us to ask some tough questions about our own technology use, particularly as new promises are made about the sophistication and power of AI
First: What human skills should we refuse to outsource to technology? What are
the virtues and habits of mind we must practice by doing certain tasks ourselves, such as those that cultivate patience, empathy, healthy communication and respect?
Second: How do we value the human person in an age of virtual reality, AI and disembodied experience? What can we do regularly to live lives that are less disembodied and dematerialized? How do we cultivate richer in-person human relationships rather than always choosing the convenient and technologically mediated path? We can begin by choosing not to fill every moment of interstitial time in our daily lives with “look down” screen experiences; rather, cultivate more “look up” unmediated experiences.
Third: What can we do at the community level to reinvigorate public spaces that have been colonized by technology? W.H. Auden wrote, in “The Dyer’s Hand,” that “A real community, as distinct from social life, is only possible between persons whose idea of themselves and others is real, not fantastic.” Today we lack a sense of shared reality, and the real world cannot always compete with the fantastical things we see every day online.
Forming a healthier and more meaningful world for ourselves and our children means reclaiming the things we know are grounding: a healthy sense of time and place; the modeling of patience and delayed
gratification; hands-on, real-world experiences; the encouragement of virtues and practices that lead to the development of a healthy sense of self.
Today we carry around in our pockets a tool that functions as a vast externalized memory, but it has made us forgetful about some deep truths — namely, the values we must continue to cultivate because they are important for human formation and human flourishing. They are the ballast against a fragmented culture that elevates the present moment at the expense of the past and encourages habits of mind that too often leave us feeling alienated rather than connected.
Seeking knowledge, not merely information, and practicing, every day, those quotidian habits of mind and cultivation of virtues that connect us to our past while helping us imagine a future, is not as seamless or efficient as downloading a new app or liking an image on Instagram. But it is in those daily moments of embodied interaction, grounded in time and place, often inefficient and frustrating but also rich and meaningful because of their quirks and inefficiencies, that we are truly formed as human beings.
BY MARIA M C NAIR
IN 2010, 16-year-old Hannah Ritchie arrived at the University of Edinburgh to start a degree in environmental geoscience. Environmental issues were her passion, and she was excited to learn how to solve some of these great global challenges.
“Four years later,” she writes in her first book, “I left with no solutions. Instead, I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems. Each day at Edinburgh was a constant reminder of how humanity was ravaging the planet.”
Contributing to this sense of deadweight was mainstream media. “During my time at university, I made a conscious effort to keep up with the news,” Ritchie notes.
“Everywhere were images of natural disasters, droughts and hungry faces. More people seemed to be dying than ever before, more were living in poverty and more children were starving than at any time in history. I believed I was living through humanity’s most tragic period.”
The unrelenting exposure to the world’s negative trends looked like it was going to change the trajectory of Ritchie’s life. “Despite working relentlessly to get my degree, I was ready to turn my back on my obsession and find a new career path. I started applying for jobs far away from environmental science,” she writes. “Those years made me feel helpless.”
This chapter of Hannah Ritchie’s story may be familiar to many news readers.
“More people are turning away from news, describing it as depressing, relentless and boring, a global study suggests,” writes Noor Nanji for the BBC.
“Almost 4 in 10 (39 percent) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, compared with 29 percent in 2017,” Nanji highlights from a report by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute that noted record high levels of news avoidance.
A key reason for actively avoiding the news has to do with that emotion of helplessness that Ritchie experienced. The report’s lead author, Nic Newman, tells the BBC that people often choose to avoid the news because they feel “they have no agency over massive things that are happening in the world.”
People are similarly driven away by the focus on “endless unsolvable problems.”
“Haunted by a sense that the news is relentlessly toxic, once-loyal readers and viewers have been gradually ebbing away,” Paul Farhi reports in The Washington Post. “Digital media has made news ubiquitous. … And
much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.”
Farhi quotes one reader who’s backed off her dedicated news reading: “I can’t handle the stress put on me when I go to the front page,” she said. “It feels like it affects me directly. I don’t know if the world is worse now than it was before. But it never used to feel like a personal threat.”
Ritchie once felt powerless to make a difference. But she didn’t stop consuming news; instead, she expanded the kinds of stories she reads. Today, she is one of a growing number of voices in journalism dedicated to highlighting what’s improving in our world and how we can lean into progress. When we know what’s going well — and why — we can help it keep going.
MICHELLE COTTLE BECAME a champion of spotlighting progress in the news for similar reasons. In 2018, Cottle joined The New York Times as a national political writer for its opinion section. In the two years following the January 6 insurrection, she had a particular focus on “ways to protect democracy.”
“This is not a question of ideology,” she says. “I have deep respect for members of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.” The concern was over “efforts to undermine the foundations of democracy, like the peaceful transfer of power, respecting the will of voters.”
The question was, what role would the news play in helping shore up those foundations of democracy?
“On one level, that’s a very important story that people get very stressed out about. But when you get down to the mechanics of what you have to worry about, like the officeholders way down the political food chain, like county clerks, secretaries of state, the attorneys general … election board commissioners, those are really boring races for people,” Cottle says. Even though these stories about obscure elected offices are crucial to explaining how U.S. elections function, it’s hard to get readers to take an interest in them.
The potential danger of this lack of interest surfaced in the 2022 midterm election season.
As Cottle explains, there had been a push from certain quarters after January 6 for those who believed the electoral process was corrupt to take over local election machinery: “Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser, pushed this strategy out nationwide, trying to stack the election infrastructure with people who were convinced that there was massive democratic fraud and they needed to stop it at all costs. You saw stories of election watchers out eyeballing people and being vaguely intimidating. So we learned that this was an ongoing, multi-pronged plan.”
THAT LACK OF AWARENESS OF CRUCIAL FACTS CAN HAVE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES. ONE IS THE UPTICK OF ANXIETY THAT NEGATIVE
MISPERCEPTIONS CAN CAUSE. ANOTHER IS THE WAY THAT ANXIETY CAN PREVENT ENGAGEMENT.
In response to this election-stacking plan, the Times and other news organizations strove to alert voters to the candidates running for less prominent local offices. “In addition to all the pieces about the Senate races and the House races,” Cottle says, “we were constantly hammering the whole, ‘These secretaries of state candidates need to be watched; they are a danger.’”
If voters had just avoided the news, they might never have known about the candidates’ positions. They might not have reflected their real values with their vote, or might never have turned out to vote at all.
As it turned out, voters apparently did pay attention to the news. Candidates who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were overwhelmingly defeated in battleground states. For Cottle, the midterm results had a very positive message about people’s ability to change outcomes — and she wants this message shared.
“What I learned is that you really do need to put the spotlight on these things. One of the things that you worry about when you cover politics is that people just get exhausted and frustrated and they lose any sense that they have the ability to affect things. And so when they do, it’s very important to jump up and down and say, ‘See, you need to go out and vote. This matters.’”
The direct impact of local politics on individual lives is one reason many media scholars recommend reading and supporting local news. If you’re concerned about making an impact in the world, your own community is a good place to start. Following local news will help you discover where your efforts can make a positive difference.
WHATEVER YOU CAN do locally, you might still feel overwhelmed by the crises you see happening around the world. If so, it’s essential to remember that “the news” isn’t actually the best way to understand the world.
Discouraged by a fiercely negative picture of global events, Ritchie was tempted to abandon environmental science as a career path. But her mind was changed when she came upon a new way of looking at global issues — something quite different from the tragic headlines and images she saw in every day’s news. It started with a presentation by a man named Hans Rosling.
Rosling, who died in 2017, was a physician, professor of global health and statistician who developed new ways of visualizing and understanding statistics. In particular, he used big sets of data to reveal hidden truths about global trends. These truths were often startling to his viewers because of the positive picture they portrayed, exposing audiences to a different perspective
than the one they had seen while scrolling the web, watching cable TV or thumbing through the paper.
Rosling’s presentation changed Ritchie’s outlook on the state of the world. She had assumed everything was getting worse. What Rosling showed in this presentation was how many things were actually getting better — how countries around the world, for example, were getting healthier and healthier. There was a vast gap between Ritchie’s perception of the world and reality — a gap that comes from the way we take in information about the world.
The kinds of daily news stories we consume are not designed to tell us the whole truth about world trends. “The news is designed to tell us, well, something new — an individual story, a rare event, the latest disaster. Because we see them in the news so often, unlikely events seem like probable ones. But they’re often not,” Ritchie explains. “That’s why they make the news and why they capture our attention.”
It is the disasters, in particular, that are highlighted to draw us in. In an attention economy, news outlets bank on crises as the best bet for attracting our clicks. They’ve learned that their audiences are drawn to
catastrophes and potential threats to their well-being.
“These individual (news stories) are important,” Ritchie writes. “But it’s a terrible way to understand the bigger picture. Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year. … The only way to really see these changes is to step back and look at the long-run data.”
And what Ritchie saw, as she studied that data, was a global picture far more positive than the one she’d seen in those despondent years at university. As she states in her book, “If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: Humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.” Her book is, fittingly, titled “Not the End of the World: How to be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.”
There are still many ways we can change the world for the better. A crucial way to make these changes is to find broader and better stories about the world. Broader, in that they capture more data. Better, in that they focus on what’s going well.
RITCHIE IS A featured author with “The Progress Network.” Supported by over 100 scholars in diverse fields, this organization is dedicated to sharing stories about the progress that humankind is making in many areas — stories backed up by the kind of big data for which Rosling advocated.
The goal is to “balance out this strongly negative viewpoint (in) the mainstream media” and “help show people there is progress actually happening,” says Emma Varvaloucas, the network’s executive director. This is a vital task because many people are not aware of this progress.
Take climate change. Anxiety levels would likely not be so high, says Varvaloucas, if more people knew “that the truly apocalyptic levels of warming that were possible even 10 years ago are widely seen as implausible now. So the really scary scenarios that (a United Nations panel) outlined for 7, 8, 9 degrees of warming, we’re done with them. We avoided them already.”
We’re still faced with a very serious situation trying to avert the possibility of 3 degrees of warming and hopefully keep warming under 2 degrees, she says, but progress is happening toward this goal.
THE NEWS IS DESIGNED TO TELL US SOMETHING NEW. BUT THOSE UNLIKELY EVENTS ARE NOT THE MOST PROBABLE ONES.
“What we’re doing already has worked,” says Varvaloucas. “I really wish that a lot of climate coverage in the U.S. would mention that emissions … are down almost 20 percent already from 2005 levels. … People think that the world is about to blow up in 10 years … and that (scenario) is just not the case anymore.”
That lack of awareness of crucial facts can have serious consequences. One is the uptick of anxiety that negative misperceptions can cause. Another is the way that anxiety can prevent engagement.
For the past 10 years, the narrative around climate change has simply been one of urgency and alarm. There was good reason for this strategy in the past, but Varvaloucas contends that it has become counterproductive as the distress it creates has possibly prevented people from engaging with the issue as much as they could and engaging with it in a healthy way.
Varvaloucas was one of those people. “I was really turned off by the whole climate change discussion for a long time because I just felt there weren’t any entry points. It was just like, ‘Hey, we have this problem. No one’s solving it. The end.’ And I was like, ‘OK, well, what do you want me to do about that?’”
This is where stories about progress can help. They provide the information and the motivation necessary to drive engagement with crucial problems — to let people know that it’s worth it to get involved.
“If you are aware that progress has happened, it leads to a completely different set of decisions,” says Varvaloucas. When people have access to the data on where progress is happening and what’s driving it, they can invest in strategies that have actually worked to improve people’s lives.
For example, Ritchie wrote on her Substack newsletter, “Every month I donate a share of my income to global health charities. The money goes toward the most cost-effective ways to save lives and improve health: malarial bed nets; nutritional supplements for low-income kids. … I only donate because I know that it’s effective and I know it works.”
Contrary to what some critics say, stories that focus on progress don’t tend to cause
complacency, Ritchie says; they inspire action. “When we can see real results coming through, we tend to lean in, not out.”
PUBLIC HEALTH IS just one area where the Progress Network documents significant advancements over the past decades: reductions in new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS; positive developments in vaccines for diseases like malaria and RSV (not to mention Covid-19); huge drops in child mortality; and declines in severe poverty.
To learn about the positive changes that are happening and how to help sustain them, you can start with the Progress Network’s website and weekly newsletter, and the Solutions Story Tracker at SolutionsJournalism.org.
To improve your understanding of global trends, including trends for the better, you can check out Gapminder. Co-founded by Rosling, the site uses clear, reliable data to expand understanding and correct misconceptions about global issues. Our World in Data is also dedicated to using data to make progress on the world’s biggest problems — and to share news about the progress that has been made.
Today, Ritchie is deputy editor and science outreach lead at Our World in Data.
After almost giving up on a career in the environmental field, she has now spent nearly a decade researching, writing about and sharing the news on environmental issues. A key part of her work is letting the world know about the problems we still face and the magnitude of those problems. But, she notes, she couldn’t have embarked on this vital work at all without an escape from doomsday thinking.
“Our impending doom leaves us feeling paralyzed,” she writes in her book. “I recognize this from my own dark period when I nearly walked away from the field entirely. I can assure you that after reframing how I saw the world, I have had a much, much bigger impact on changing things.”
MCNAIR IS A WRITER AND PODCAST PRODUCER BASED IN ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI. THIS ESSAY IS AN ADAPTATION OF AN EPISODE OF “ARTICLE 13,” A FAITH MATTERS PODCAST SHE RESEARCHED AND CO-PRODUCED.
THE DESERET NEWS HAS DOCUMENTED AN EVOLVING WEST FOR 175 YEARS
BY ETHAN BAUER
The very first issue of the Deseret News told the story of the paper itself. Published on June 15, 1850 — 175 years ago this month — the lead item established the paper’s motto as “Truth and Liberty” while promising to “promote the best interest, welfare, pleasure and amusement of our fellow citizens.” It promised to bring readers the world, with foreign news and the ornamental works of “our poets and poetesses.” The edition covered the dealings of the U.S. Senate, where North Carolina’s Willie P. Mangum had threatened to dissolve the Union, and a “terrible fire in San Francisco.” And it included a plea, encouraging readers to save physical copies of the Deseret News so that “their children’s children may read the doings of their fathers, which otherwise might have been forgotten; ages to come.”
It may seem odd to our modern digital sensibilities, asking readers to keep physical newspapers around as a record of a
people and their place in the world. But such were the demands of the era. The Deseret News, owned then and now by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was established for the practical
“IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW SALT LAKE CITY, OR UTAH, WAS BUILT, IT WAS BUILT ON JOURNALISM IN A VERY BIG WAY.”
reason that there was no better way to transmit information at the time. “Before our internet universe, the best way to communicate to just about everybody was through a newspaper,” says Brad Westwood, former director of the Utah
Historical Society. “It was the place to learn. To experience. To sell. To buy.” It was the place to make sense of the wider world — in words and, later, in pictures.
The Deseret News published its first local news photos on May 12, 1900, in a spread about a mining disaster in Scofield that killed over 200 men. Photos soon became a dominant force in newspapers, with better resolution and color printing added over time. The images helped tell the story of what the Intermountain West was and wanted to become. They were one among many innovations to that end, from a sports page, added in 1893, to the first bylines in the 1920s and ’30s, as the Deseret News grew and became something both new and familiar at once.
“What’s interesting about the Deseret News,” says Ed Adams, a scholar of media history at Brigham Young University, “is this evolutionary process of being a frontier newspaper, and then making its way to
THE DESERET NEWS OFFICES WERE AT THE CORNER OF MAIN STREET AND SOUTH TEMPLE, IN SALT LAKE CITY, 1930 S
JOURNALISTS TED CANNON (LEFT), STEVE HALE AND LES GOATES (SEATED) IN THE DESERET NEWS NEWSROOM, ABOUT 1956.
THE PAPER EXTENSIVELY COVERED THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF THE FIRST ARTIFICIAL HUMAN HEART TRANSPLANT, A GROUNDBREAKING FEAT OF CARDIOTHORACIC SURGERY CONDUCTED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH IN 1982.
TYPESETTERS IN THE COMPOSING ROOM, JUNE 1950, AT WORK ON LINOTYPE MACHINES, THE METHOD FOR ENTERING COPY FROM THE LATE 1800S UNTIL THE 1970S.
DELIVERY TRUCKS LINED UP FOR NEWSPAPER DISTRIBUTION, 1930 S
REPORTER ROBERT MULLINS INTERVIEWS A SHERIFF’S DEPUTY NEAR MOAB, UTAH, IN 1961, DURING A KIDNAPPING-MURDER INVESTIGATION IN DEAD HORSE POINT STATE PARK. MULLINS WON THE PULITZER PRIZE IN 1962 FOR HIS REPORTING ON THE CASE.
a commercial newspaper.” Indeed, the Deseret News was always more than a newspaper about the dealings of church leadership, even if it certainly was that. Those early settlers also had to contend with the difficult demands on life in the Mountain West. The Deseret News offered a kind of common language across this vast, arid country, connecting people across what Westwood calls the “Mormon commonwealth” — the land that we know today as the Intermountain West, plus parts of Canada, California and Mexico. It also connected those pioneers and their viewpoints to the rest of the continent. “It communicated to its members, then it communicated to (their) neighbors in Utah,” Westwood says. “And then it was communicating to the nation.”
It did so with a voice that amplified church views on social issues and criticized the sensationalism that emerged among its larger contemporaries along the East Coast, particularly during the “yellow journalism” era that marked the early 20th century. It could do so because Salt Lake City was, at the time, one of the most isolated cities in the country, which insulated the Deseret News from having to copy the New York tabloids to stay afloat. The paper did, however, have to adapt to a changing journalistic business environment. It adopted classified ads and
FOR A PUBLICATION THAT MADE SENSE OF THE “WILD WEST” FOR READERS ACROSS THE FRONTIER, THE DESERET NEWS IS WELL-POSITIONED TO WEATHER THE CURRENT STORM.
came to embody the corporate structure of most major newspapers. It added the Church News in 1931 to stay relevant to its longtime constituency. Most importantly, it partnered in 1952 with its biggest rival, The Salt Lake Tribune, to share production costs and advertising revenue as part of a “joint operating agreement” that kept both papers afloat.
Despite that shared business arrangement, editorially the two Utah papers of record competed fiercely. The Deseret News defended the church and a more conservative outlook. The Tribune was often critical of the church and promoted a more liberal worldview. Their frequent opposition shaped each other, and the surrounding region, in a way that continues to reverberate. “If you want to know how Salt Lake City, or Utah, was built,” Westwood says, “it was built on journalism in a very big way.”
The Deseret News won its first and only Pulitzer Prize in 1962. The Tribune won its first in 1957 and its second in 2017. Both papers ended the joint operating agreement
in 2020, reflecting broader changes in the media landscape.
The Deseret News has weathered changes before, but nothing so seismic as the digital revolution that has shuttered legacy publications across the country. “With the onset of social media, the power of publishing is in the hands of everybody,” Adams says. “So now everybody can say anything — and they do. … We’re out in the Wild, Wild West again.” For a publication that quite literally made sense of the “Wild West” for readers across the frontier, the Deseret News is as well-positioned as any established media company to weather the current storm. A 175-year history connotes a certain level of authority. Even if it’s not nearly as dominant a voice as it once was, Westwood says, the Deseret News “can speak from experience. And it (does).”
More recently, the organization has poured more resources toward its digital initiatives, bolstering the online home it founded in 1995. In 2021, the Deseret News ceased daily print publication in favor of a biweekly edition. That same year, it launched Deseret Magazine, a monthly print publication, to add more national depth and analysis to the mix, with more changes surely on the way as media continues to evolve. “The main change in the Deseret News since (its inception) is that now we can have global reach, with global influence, and we want to make use of that,” says Executive Editor Doug Wilks. “We do not think we are greater than we are, but we think it is worthwhile to make an effort to, if not change the world, then change the hearts of people in the world.”
In that sense, the Deseret News hasn’t changed much since that first issue in 1850, when it proclaimed that “a paper that is worth printing is worth preserving.” And conveying the true people, places and events of today is still just as valuable as it was 175 years ago. It’s still an enduring force, and one worth preserving in new ways. In words and photos that will continue to make sense of a region and its people — to each other and to the wider world.
BY NATALIA GALICZA
One spring afternoon, when the weather is warm enough to make doing anything feel possible again, I pick up my acoustic guitar. It has waited in a corner of my bedroom for months, unstrummed. Flecks of dust paint its mahogany form an almost ghostly white, but glint like stars when the sunlight falls just right. A fitting treatment for an object on which I’ve cast many wishes. Today, though, I choose action over dreaming and brush off the dust. I rest the smooth wooden hourglass against my leg and lean in to inspect the guitar more closely. I catch a whiff of spruce from the soundboard, earthy and sweet. Feeling hopeful, I trace my fingers against the cool metal frets and scrape my pick along each coiled wire. The sound it makes is grating and metallic, like a zipper — I’m told this is an Eddie Van Halen maneuver, but it sounds off to any ear, trained or not. And mine is not. I’ve spent countless hours staring at my Yamaha. I’ve pictured myself, in concert with my instrument, bending airwaves to sound bright and brassy, rich and resonant. Harmonic, even. For five years I’ve hauled this thing thousands of miles, north and south and west across the country, but I’ve daydreamed far more than I’ve practiced. Maybe it’s guilt, or a jolt of seasonal motivation, but I find myself searching the
internet for beginner guitar tabs, settling on “A Horse With No Name” by America. This ’70s folk standard consists of only two chords, so it feels within my range. A video tutorial instructs me to stack two digits on the second fret to produce an E minor, then contort my fingers across five strings for the D major sixth-ninth. It takes me several minutes to learn the awkward hand placements, but once I start strumming, I notice that one chord sounds contemplative and the other jazzy. Laced together, the combination feels nostalgic and curious. I alternate between them for at least an hour, watching the strings vibrate and blur with each note.
Even with zero fluidity and an instrument that’s slightly out of tune, it feels like I’m taking a step toward actualizing my adolescent visions. Like I’ve started to unlock a language that everyone can understand but only some can speak. I have yet to play a song all the way through, but for the first time, I believe myself capable. That potential alone feels rewarding. So when I plunk my guitar back on its stand in the corner, where it makes a hollow thud and the strings faintly reverberate in response to the impact, I’m not worried. I know it will be there when I need it next, no matter when that time comes.
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