“Beneath crystal chandeliers, the architects of a new ‘patriot’ identity set out to redraw Europe’s political map.”
54
STILL BREATHING
LOVE AND SURVIVAL IN BAKERSFIELD, AMERICA’S MOST POLLUTED CITY. by natalia galicza
CAN THE CENTER HOLD?
INSIDE EUROPE’S IDEOLOGICAL CRISIS. by leyre santos
DEMOCRATS
IN THE
WILDERNESS
CAN LIBERALS FIND THEIR WAY? by eric
schulzke
A professor at Harvard University, Brooks is also an Impact Scholar at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Before joining Harvard’s faculty, Brooks was president of the American Enterprise Institute for 10 years. He is a bestselling author and a contributing writer for The Atlantic magazine. His essay on loving your enemies is on page 68.
Perry Martin is primary spokesperson for Brigham Young University and directs the university communications. Prior to her current role, Perry Martin practiced as an election and political attorney, working for Congress, the Federal Election Commission, and presidential campaigns. Her commentary on trusting elections is on page 13.
Based in Łódź, Poland, Rzeczy’s design studio specializes in editorial illustrations and digital collages. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, Time, The Economist, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. Her illustration can be seen on page 44.
Skorup is an attorney and legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Law, The New York Times, Reuters and Wired. His essay on the U.S. Supreme Court’s handling of cases on executive power is on page 62.
Santos is a freelance journalist and doctoral degree candidate in history at the University of Oxford. She was previously based in New York City, where she was a correspondent for several Spanish media outlets, including Cadena SER, Spain’s leading radio station. Her story about the fate of centrist politics in Europe is on page 44.
Braylovskiy is a fellow at Deseret Magazine. Raised in California’s Bay Area, she is a graduate of Santa Clara University. Her writing has been published in Santa Clara Magazine, ZYZZYVA, Sky Island Journal, Academy of American Poets and ONE ART. Her story about declining military recruitment is on page 22.
VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY
ARTHUR C. BROOKS
BRENT SKORUP
LEYRE SANTOS
AUDREY PERRY MARTIN
KLAWE RZECZY
BETWEEN EXTREMES
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a congregation in downtown Detroit, he’d been going through it. White supremacists had threatened to kill him. His home had been bombed. He had plenty of reason to want retribution, to seek justice, or even to hate. But that’s not what he told his audience in March 1961.
Instead, the Rev. King turned to the gospel of Matthew and quoted from the fifth chapter, reminding his listeners that we are not commanded to “like” our enemies. “Like is sentimental; like is an affectionate sort of thing,” he said. “And you can’t like anybody who’s bombing your home and threatening your children.” No, the command was to love. “Love seeks to convert. Hate seeks to live in monologue. Love seeks to live in dialogue.”
I was reminded of that sermon recently by Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author, at a gala at the Commercial Club in downtown Salt Lake City. The Deseret News was celebrating its 175th birthday, and Brooks was the guest of honor. Just weeks before, Charlie Kirk had been killed at Utah Valley University. Emotions were raw. Tensions were high. On social media, and in text messages, I had seen friends and family turn on each other. We were at war, the sentiment went, and it was not the time to seek understanding, or reconciliation, or to search out forgiveness or brotherly love.
The weight of the Rev. King’s sermon hit me that night, and for a moment at least, the squabbles of our political discourse — over tariffs, or immigration, or the national debt — seemed small in comparison to what he had endured. Imagine trying to break bread with a man who doesn’t think you have the right to sit at the same lunch counter.
At this magazine, we have often urged readers to find common ground. I admit, there have been moments when this call has seemed insufficient for our times, amid the intractability of our differences. I’ve also feared that we ask too much of the wrong people.
Asking the wounded to meet the comfortable halfway. Asking those who’ve lost to give up a little more — for the sake of civility. I do want to believe in the middle, but sometimes it can feel like a place where you go to stop fighting for what matters to you.
But since that night at the Commercial Club, I’ve been seeing things differently. The call for moderation doesn’t ask us to give up our values, and loving those we disagree with has a power beyond the confines of faith. Simply put, this is how democracy works, and moderation is where it lives. The middle is a zone of consensus that sustains our most treasured infrastructure: rule of law, free elections, peaceful transfers of power, a shared respect for truth.
So what happens when the center doesn’t hold? Two stories this month examine that question — one playing out stateside (“Democrats in the Wilderness,” page 34) and the other in Europe (“Can the Center Hold?” page 44). What connects these stories are not merely parallel political crises, but a shared moral one too.
I hope you’ll read the stories in this issue not as reports of decay, but blueprints for renewal. The Democratic Party, the conservative center in Europe, liberal democracies around the world — these are test cases. And they will not be the only ones. The most important test, after all, lies within each of us.
Every act of patience, every conversation that bridges a difference, every time we treat an opponent as a neighbor rather than an enemy, is a small but vital defense of the civic space that sustains democracy. “And so when Jesus says, ‘love the enemy,’” the Rev. King told the congregation in Detroit, “He’s saying love the enemy because there is something about love that can transform, that can change, that can arouse the conscience of the enemy. And only by doing this are you able to transform the jangling discords of society into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood and understanding.”
—JESSE HYDE
EXECUTIVE EDITOR HAL BOYD
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OUR READERS RESPOND
Our annual EDUCATION issue featured essays and reported stories on whether higher education is delivering on its promise of preparing young adults for a meaningful and secure life. A collection of essays by educators and scholars explored how colleges and universities should focus on creating a community of belonging and offer courses that help students meet today’s moral, ethical and economic challenges (“Degrees of Change”). The discussion among readers gravitated to the economic value of a college education, with many arguing that tuition has become too expensive for a degree that doesn’t offer a reasonable return on the investment. Some saw the crisis as a revolt against academia that encourages protest and divisive political debate. “As a person with right-leaning views who works in academia in Utah, I would say that the clear liberal slant within academia has definitely been annoying, and at times frustrating,” wrote Kristen West. “Though I would say the anti-higher education and anti-research movement led by the Trump administration, along with more subtle efforts by the Utah Legislature to root out ‘ DEI ,’ is downright terrifying.” Others blamed substandard high school education for forcing colleges and universities to steer resources toward remedial education rather than teaching marketable skills. But an online reader called “ Amy Cuscuriae” warned against an expensive education system that focuses on graduates’ earning potential instead of teaching critical thinking. “We are taking a wrong turn, and denying our kids a good future, if we reduce education to learning market-ready job skills. We would be much better off returning to the idea that education should be accessible to all who want it.” Staff writer Natalia Galicza reported on the increasing number of young adults who are finding vocational education and training in the trades a more stable path to job security than the traditional college degree (“A Sure Thing”). The story caused reader Lloyd Calderwood to reflect on his father’s career advice. “He taught me that if I choose an occupation or job that a lot of people can do, I will never make much money and will never have much job security. Conversely, if I choose an occupation that few people are able to do, I will make a lot of money and have great job security. He was right.” We gave readers an upbeat change of pace with Ethan Bauer’s story about some American owners who led a floundering English soccer club on a journey to the world’s top league (“Believe in Burnley”). The story brought back fond memories for retired sportscaster Steve Brown, who was raised in Burnley and has followed his hometown club’s rise. “I retired from TV about three years ago and am enjoying the respite from the day-to-day media grind, but I wanted to let you know you brought a smile to the face of an old Lancastrian.”
“We are taking a wrong turn, and denying our kids a good future, if we reduce education to learning market-ready job skills.”
COURTHOUSE
PEAK, RIDGWAY, COLORADO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN
THE BIG LIE
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO RESTORE TRUST IN ELECTIONS?
BY AUDREY PERRY MARTIN
In the shadow of the 2020 election, a storm of distrust has swept across America’s electoral landscape. From cries of “fraud” on the right to accusations of “suppression” on the left, the faith that once bound citizens to the democratic process has been fraying with each new headline.
This loss of confidence in elections is not just a fringe concern for academics — if citizens don’t believe in their fairness, our entire system of democracy can collapse. In a nation built on the principle that the people’s will governs, preserving confidence in elections is the cornerstone of a stable and legitimate democracy.
However, distrust is almost entirely disconnected from the facts. By any standard, fraud in American elections is rare; certainly not near enough to influence a presidential election where around 150 million people cast ballots. The decentralized, locally controlled system of voting used in the United States makes the sort of widespread fraud that would influence state and federal elections beyond improbable. Similarly, contrary to claims of voter “suppression,” there have never been fewer obstacles to voting in the United States. Increased access to early voting, mail voting and online voter registration has made voting easy and convenient.
But voters, politicians and public officials seem obsessed with election administration issues — red state legislatures passing laws to assure election integrity, and blue states passing laws to make voting more accessible. There is always going to be a tension between making voting more accessible and making sure elections can be run smoothly and securely. However, balance is key: Security must coexist with access. Any law that changes a voting process isn’t voter suppression. Any law that gives more access to voting isn’t election fraud.
These issues that are dividing our country were not always partisan and controversial. For example, in 2005, a bipartisan commission, headed by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker, recommended that photo IDs be implemented in elections nationwide.
In every election cycle for the past 20 years, I have helped run Election Day legal operations for state parties in various states. These operations always include a voter helpline call center. Every election cycle, someone calls into a radio show and reports a perceived fraud at a polling location. Then, our hotline becomes flooded with calls from people who “heard” about election fraud. We dutifully track down these reports, only to find out that the caller didn’t understand how the voting machine worked. On other occasions, voters in a West Coast state will be watching a news story about ballot counting in an Eastern state. They become convinced that “fraud” is going on because the ballot processing is being done differently than in their state. They aren’t aware of the differences and alternative safeguards built into each state’s election system.
Of the less than 1 percent of calls that turn out to be legitimate, almost all of the original issues are quickly resolved. Within minutes, a poll worker is given better directions, campaign workers are asked to keep their distance from polling places, a voting machine is recalibrated, more ballots arrive at the polling location, etc. While these examples are anecdotal, research has consistently shown that election fraud is extremely rare.
I often advise people concerned about election security or access to visit their local election office before they spread their concerns more widely. I recommend they walk through the process and ask their “gotcha” questions. Almost every time, they realize that their local election officials are well prepared to ensure the election results are accurate and secure.
Not everyone will take the time to visit their local election office. Then, how else can we rebuild trust in elections? Transparency is key: consistent audits, livestream ballot counting and allowing trained observers to monitor without disruption. Our elections have had a spotlight placed on them, and they can no longer be conducted in a black box. Reasonable election security measures — like voter ID laws or cleaned-up voter rolls — can bolster confidence without disenfranchising anyone.
Problems arise when rhetoric outpaces reality. Fraud, while rare, exists in isolated cases, but claims of widespread manipulation lack the evidence to match their volume. Political thought leaders must temper their rhetoric. Hyping fraud or suppression may energize bases and raise money, but it poisons the well of public confidence.
By establishing security, embracing transparency and rejecting divisive hyperbole, we can ensure that democracy endures, not as a relic of the past but as a promise for the future.
TRUTH OR CRIME
THE FACTS BEHIND AN AMERICAN OBSESSION
AMERICANS ARE PREOCCUPIED with crime, and convinced that it’s always getting worse. On one hand, they’re fascinated by criminals and their lifestyles, often glamorized by Hollywood and the media. On the other, they live in terror that criminals present a growing threat to order, peace and prosperity — a fear so pervasive that it shapes elections and defies the statistical reality that crime has been declining since 1991. What can we learn about that gap? Here’s the breakdown.
—VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY
1,000,000 COPIES
That was the circulation of the New York Daily News, America’s first crime-obsessed tabloid, when it became the top-selling newspaper in 1926. Prohibition, bootlegging and organized crime made mafiosi like Al Capone household names. True Detective became the first true crime magazine in the 1930s, reaching more than two million readers. The Depression saw homicides surge, while celebrity bank robbers like Ma Barker and “Pretty Boy” Floyd became famous on the radio.
FLAWED STATS SINCE 1930
The FBI started compiling nationwide crime data under Director J. Edgar Hoover, who would become one of Washington’s most powerful people. Uniform Crime Reporting still relies on the disparate numbers volunteered each year by 16,675 different agencies — federal, state and local. Critics question their consistency, reliability and timeliness. The Real-Time Crime Index is a private alternative that makes monthly projections based on samples rather than comprehensive data.
8,000 PAGES OF NOTES
Truman Capote did extensive research to write the first true crime novel, recounting a killing in rural Kansas and the murderers’ eventual punishment. Published in 1966, “In Cold Blood” has sold millions of copies. In 1967, the hit film “Bonnie and Clyde,” about a couple who robbed banks together, helped spawn the “New Hollywood” movement, which would produce numerous crime movies inspired by real life, like “Chinatown” and “The Godfather.”
716 VIOLENT CRIMES
That was the rate per 100,000 people in 1991. In 2024, that number was 359, or roughly half — though still one every 25.9 seconds. All crime has declined since 1991, with a brief exception during the Covid-19 pandemic. Property crime declined 8 percent in 2024 to its lowest level since 1961. The murder rate that year fell 15 percent nationwide and 33 percent in St. Louis — America’s “murder capital.”
64% PESSIMISTIC
Two-thirds of Americans in 2024 believed crime had increased nationwide, while 49 percent felt the same about their own neighborhoods. Perception is also related to political affiliation: 90 percent of Republicans believed that crime was rising nationwide, compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. In that year’s election, 76 percent of Donald Trump supporters cited violent crime as an important issue in their voting decision, as opposed to just 46 percent of Kamala Harris supporters.
“PERCEPTION IS SHAPED NOT BY NUMBERS AND DATA, BUT BY TWO THINGS: WHAT PEOPLE FEEL AND SEE WHEN THEY GO OUTSIDE, AND WHAT PEOPLE HEAR AND READ ON THE NEWS.”
COUNCIL
ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE VICE PRESIDENT INSHA RAHMAN
84% OF AMERICANS
That’s how many over age 13 consumed true crime books, docuseries or other content last year. In podcasts alone, this market is worth $2.3 billion, reaching 42 million Americans each month. One third of U.S. podcast listeners choose true crime shows, including 44 percent of women — and 57 percent among women with a high school education or less. “Crime Junkie” is the country’s second-most popular podcast, with two billion downloads.
TECH CRIME UPTICK
Cryptocurrency fraud grew by 66 percent in 2024, costing Americans $9.3 billion. The U.S. reports the most crypto-related kidnappings in the world since 2014, known as “wrench attacks” for using real-world violence to obtain digital assets. Deloitte forecasts that by 2027, generative AI could enable malign actors to net $40 billion in fraud. People over 60 filed the most internet crime complaints last year.
THE TRUE CRIME PODCAST MARKET IS WORTH
THE PROS AND CONS OF A STRONG DOLLAR BUYING POWER
THERE ARE SUBTLE signs that the world is losing trust in the United States dollar. It’s still the lingua franca of global transactions but now makes up 58 percent of the world’s currency reserves, down from 72 percent in 2001. That’s not a fire sale, but it reflects worrisome barometers, like the crash of domestic savings, ballooning federal debt and whiplash fiscal policy shifts every four or eight years. S&P Global still gives U.S. credit worthiness an AA+ rating — but that comes with a warning that it could change if deficit spending is not held in check. All of which also impacts the dollar’s value on the foreign exchange market. Should America fight to keep the greenback strong or let market forces dictate its value?
—NATALIA GALICZA
MORE BANG
THE DOLLAR’S HISTORICAL reliability — even after it was decoupled from the gold standard in 1971 — has made it a powerful policy tool that reflected America’s place in the world and its economic health at home. The U.S. was a bulwark of liberal democracy and a leader in manufacturing and innovation, outpacing counterparts that were still rebuilding after World War II. But the country also practiced sound stewardship of its own finances, varying by party but largely within reason. That consistency helped to fuel American influence and soft power. That’s worth fighting for.
America’s dominance of currency reserves is often called an “exorbitant privilege,” as it grants the nation tremendous influence. Historically, this has been leveraged to promote democratic values, human rights and ethical practices across borders. That could change if a currency backed by different ideas took the dollar’s place. “We don’t want to do business with child labor or human rights abuses,” said Zongyuan Zoe Liu, an expert for the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2023. “But in a different system, perhaps some of those values would be more likely to be ignored, rather than preserved.”
That kind of power becomes even more apparent when you look at international trade. Most of these transactions are carried out in dollars, using an international banking system pioneered and managed by the U.S., but private and government participants are also subject to American sanctions. For example, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. cut Russia off from the dollar — along with access to the banking system — instantly freezing $300 billion in funds. That money was then used to subsidize military aid that allowed Ukraine to defend itself. One reason America has these tools at its command is the dollar’s consistency. Though its value may fluctuate, a stronger dollar can benefit American businesses and consumers alike. Simply put, the more a dollar is worth, the more it can buy abroad. That lowers costs for importers, whether they bring in raw materials or finished products. As manufacturing has been moved overseas, the U.S. imports far more goods and services than it exports — a difference of $78.3 billion as of July. For consumers, that makes for more affordable purchases, from bananas to pickup trucks, and cheaper international tourism.
LESS BUCK
BEING THE WORLD’S bank comes with costs and risks. While commerce and finance can be used as tools for diplomacy, their best interests are not always aligned. For example, America’s practice of imposing financial sanctions has pushed trading partners like India to drop the dollar when doing business with Russia. In extreme examples, this combination can make the U.S. a target, both in terms of national security and trade. China has been known to manipulate the value of its currency to take advantage of the stronger dollar.
Keeping the dollar strong also impacts American businesses and even jobs by making exports more expensive and therefore less competitive on the global market. This tends to hurt states that are focused on manufacturing, as in the Rust Belt, to a disproportionate degree. “Both the United States and the world at large would benefit from a less dominant U.S. dollar,” wrote Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University in Beijing, in 2023. “The U.S. economy in particular would benefit because it would no longer be forced to absorb, through higher unemployment or more debt, the effects of the mercantilist policies of surplus countries.”
There are also international benefits to a weaker dollar, which enables smaller countries to practice financial autonomy. The currencies of these countries often drop when the dollar rises, which makes the alternative of “dollarization,” or pegging their currencies to the dollar, more attractive. But in the process, they forfeit the right to print their own money and enact monetary policies that serve their sovereign interest. The U.S. should encourage emerging economies to become financially independent for the sake of global stability.
A stronger dollar also makes the U.S. a more expensive destination, which inevitably discourages foreign tourists from visiting. Steep exchange rates mean foreign visitors get less value for their money, which could put America out of reach for travelers who can’t afford such a loss. The corresponding drop in tourism undermines that market for many local businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector, and local economies in areas that depend on their success. Another cost is less concrete: reduced benefits of cultural exchange.
WE’RE NOT REALLY STRANGERS
A CASE FOR KNOWING YOUR COUSINS
BY JENNIFER GRAHAM
Looking back over a lifetime of warm memories of family vacations at the beach, I am struck by how often they have little to do with the beach. More often, they’re all about cousins.
Crammed around a long table that was meant to accommodate eight but can seat 16 because we really like each other. Escaping the oversight of stern elders by sneaking off together to walk on the shore after dark, or biking down to a corner market to buy a Pepsi and peanuts. Cousins who, despite seeing each other only once or twice a year (if that), once thrown into each other’s company by their parents, immediately stick to each other like sand on wet skin.
There are the stories that I’ve heard at least 20 times that get us laughing all over again. Like the time a gaggle of youngsters decided to put on a talent show, which started with our insistence that everyone rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance
before the show would start. The adults did their best to obey, but by “and to the Republic for which it stands,” they were covering their faces and turning around, desperately trying to hold back their laugh-
RESEARCH HAS FOUND THAT COUSINS ARE BRIGHT SPOTS IN THE “FAMILY CONSTELLATION.” THEY PROVIDE THE BENEFITS OF FAMILY WITHOUT THE BAGGAGE.
ter. But cousins cannot live on oft-repeated stories alone. That’s why I’m glad my children and I were able to spend time together with cousins while on vacation this
summer — to make sure we keep adding fresh memories to the stockpile.
I love the time I get to spend with my cousins. But, I wonder, would we have been this close of friends had we not been related? That seems to be the litmus test for truly defining what “cousin” means to each of us — and whether the relationship can transcend from talent shows into adulthood, especially in a time when it seems so difficult to cultivate or maintain relationships of any kind.
That said, cousins are hard to define — honestly, how many of us can explain what “once removed” actually means? Franklin D. Roosevelt and Teddy Roosevelt were fifth cousins — they shared the same great-great-great-great-grandparents. Cousin calculating could be a new Olympic sport, with the gold going to whoever figures out that former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush were 10th cousins, once
COUSINS ARE OFTEN OUR FIRST PLAYMATES; THEY SHARE A NOTUNSUBSTANTIAL PART OF OUR DNA, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THEY SHARE AN EVEN LARGER PART OF OUR MEMORIES.
removed, by virtue of a common ancestor who lived on Cape Cod. “We know we’re related in some way, but it’s not always clear exactly how,” says Heather Hessel, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, and a co-author of one of the surprisingly few studies that have been done on cousin relationships.
In their study, which was published in the journal Adolescence, Hessel and Rachel J. Christiansen examined cousin dynamics between young adults 18 to 29 years old. They examined how these relationships develop and what benefits they provide. Among 192 people who took the survey, they collectively had 561 people they identified as cousins — although it’s important to note that Hessel and Christiansen let the respondents define what a “cousin” was to them. (In other words, a “cousin” for the purpose of this survey might mean the child of your mother’s sister, but it also might more generally mean a grandchild of your aunt’s stepbrother, or even just someone completely unrelated, but who feels like family in your mind.)
Regardless, within families, the researchers found that cousins are bright spots in what they call the “family constellation,” in part because they provide all the benefits of family without some of the baggage that can come with closer relationships. According to the study, cousin relationships are “generally protective and enriching” and, as such, can be “emotional resources through various life stages.” These relationships stand to be ever more important as the number of close friendships that Americans report dwindles. Unfortunately, the number of cousins in America is also dwindling, as families get smaller. But this also offers incentives for us to appreciate the cousins we have.
IN THE U.S., our friendship networks have been decreasing over time. As we become more isolated and siloed into online and physical bubbles, our opportunities to connect with others shrink with our environment. Recent research has found that,
compared to decades ago, adult Americans are four to five times more likely to have no friends. One of the biggest factors in this “friendship recession” in people’s lives is a decrease in organic opportunities for connection. Multiple recent studies show that nearly half of American adults find it difficult to make new friends because the chance to connect just isn’t there — or it’s too difficult to find.
In our cousins, we have a built-in connection. They are often our first playmates; they share a not-unsubstantial part of our DNA, and more importantly, they share an even larger part of our memories. It’s an opportunity to “skip past go,” knowing what connects you, and knowing that it’s not something as transient as a college major, a summer camp or a penchant for running marathons. It’s somehow more grounding, yet less committal. It doesn’t demand that you be inseparable or the best of friends or someone you’re not. But it implores loyalty, and a dedication to remembering all your most embarrassing moments as kids.
Hessel shared with me one of her own cousin memories from a few decades ago, when her grandmother passed away.
On the weekend of the funeral, she and her cousin “took our grandmother’s old 1969 Ford out to the Dairy Queen — it was so rusted, you could see the road through the floorboard. Even though we don’t talk all that often, we have that memory together, which is potent. This was my grandmother — this was our grandmother.”
The memory highlights another function of cousins: They are present at the most poignant moments of our life, moments of mourning and celebration, like deaths, weddings and births.
In the Gospel of Luke, there’s a story that follows Mary, the mother of Jesus, as she traveled to meet her cousin Elisabeth, who was also pregnant. Upon their reunion, it’s written that Elisabeth’s child leapt in her womb. It was perhaps the most joyful meeting of cousins ever. Some two millennia later, my cousin Stephanie and I played out this scene when I arrived, pregnant, at
COUSINS CAN FEEL LIKE SIBLINGS “BECAUSE THEY WANT TO BE, NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO BE.”
her baby shower. It was a small and sublime pleasure for two cousins to sit side by side, with our sons — second cousins — in utero.
My son and his cousin are 25 years old now, and although they live 700 miles apart and only see each other once a year, they have much more in common than an impending deadline to find their own health insurance plans.
For example, they both play a mean game of Scat, an obscure and simple card game that I’ve only ever seen my own cousins play — and then only at family reunions. They have their own memories, these young men, but they are also repositories of the memories of others in the family, those talent show stories that will be repeated year after year, with tears or laughter.
Hessel and Christiansen would tell these young men that they need to put in a little bit of effort to reap the full benefits of this special connection. It’s “repeated and intentional interaction” that builds and sustains these relationships, even if the interaction is just exchanging birthday greetings, their research found.
THERE IS NO special word to describe a gathering of cousins, other than, perhaps, a reunion. A “group of friends” works, too.
But if we were to choose one from the variety of words used to describe gatherings of animals, I’d pick the one used to describe a gathering of lions: pride.
My own pride of cousins, scattered about the country, is widely diverse when it comes to how we live and work and practice our religious faith. We have little in common and everything in common at the same time. There is a warmth between us that transcends the cold explanation of shared DNA, and none of the chill that can sometimes arise between people who grew up in the same house.
“Sibling relationships can have a lot of baggage that cousin relationships don’t necessarily have. With cousin relationships, you have a lot more autonomy. You can choose to connect, but you don’t have to. Some cousins are close — they will say, ‘She’s like a sister to me.’ But that’s because they want to be, not because they have to be,” Hessel says.
In other words, unlike a parent, for whom we have moral if not legal obligations, when a cousin shows up in an RV (think Cousin Eddie in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”), we can have them camp in the yard, not giving up the best bedroom in the house. And speaking of Cousin Eddie, that’s
something else that Hessel’s and Christiansen’s study found — cousins sometimes bond over “difficult” family relationships, with one person saying it “made me happy that someone understood how I felt.”
Every pride of cousins has its own Cousin Eddie, it seems.
And just as in “Christmas Vacation,” every cousin can turn out to be an unexpected source of support. Hessel noted that there is an element of surprise when cousins come through for each other, as they’re not obligated to each other, and most are not in our lives daily, and yet, there is a bond that makes us want to help each other.
“Frequently participants mentioned that older cousins wanted to play a mentoring role,” Hessel said. “I think there is an opportunity to remind people, especially young people, that this is another resource for you, and you might be able to share something special with this person.”
The older we get, the more we come to realize how precious and rare it is to be let into another person’s life, in an age of cocooning and silos. The thing about cousins is, we don’t have to let them into our lives or wait for them to invite us into theirs. They’re already part of our story — no matter what chapter we’re on.
THE SOLDIER IS THE ARMY
THE SPECTER OF A GENERATIONS-LONG MILITARY RECRUITING CRISIS
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY
On January 27, 1973, nearly 4,000 miles away from the signing of the Paris Peace Accords that withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird stood in front of the whirring film cameras and crackling pop flashes of the Washington, D.C., press and announced: The draft was over.
“I wish to inform you that the armed forces henceforth will depend exclusively on volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines,” he said.
The decision to formally end troop conscription and transition into an all-volunteer military had been a long time coming. In 1969, on the heels of campaign-trail promises made for reelection, President Richard Nixon established the Gates Commission, a group of officials and researchers, to make a case and a plan for a full-time all-volunteer military. A year later, they published their findings.
“We unanimously believe that the
nation’s interests will be better served by an all-volunteer force. … We have satisfied ourselves that a volunteer force will not jeopardize national security, and we believe it will have a beneficial effect on the military as well as the rest of our society.”
IF YOU ZOOM OUT, DESPITE SMALL PEAKS, MILITARY MEMBERSHIP HAS BEEN STEADILY DECLINING FOR DECADES, DROPPING
36
PERCENT FROM 1980 TO 2024.
It was determined that an all-volunteer force was not just desirable, but achievable.
The reasoning was patriotic at an almost cellular level — a volunteer force
promotes the American values of personal liberty and freedom by allowing citizens to enlist themselves.
The logic worked, until it didn’t: The military has again been facing a recruitment crisis, one of its worst since the Vietnam War. And while the numbers could be on the upswing, the shortfalls are still being felt at a time of global instability.
While there have been ebbs and flows in recruitment levels since the formal institution of the all-volunteer force, if you zoom out, active-duty membership has been steadily declining the entire time, dropping 36 percent from 1980 to 2024. In 2022, military enlistment hit an all-time low — just 128,000 new recruits total across all branches. While young people still comprise the majority of new recruits, those 25 and younger now represent the biggest membership drop in the past five years.
The recruitment crisis may say something about the health of our military, but
it also points at something bigger: Gen Z is the least likely generation to enlist, meaning fewer people than ever before feel an obligation to serve their country.
The reasons are complicated and multifaceted, but they reflect deepening anxieties about politics, polarization, inequality, trust in institutions and even physical fitness.
They also raise an uncomfortable question: If generations coming into the age of service don’t feel compelled to serve, what is next for America?
THIS YEAR MARKS the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, Marines and Navy (the Coast Guard and Air Force came later). To kick off celebrations, a military parade was held in Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia, in June — more specifically, on Flag Day and President Donald Trump’s birthday. Over 6,000 soldiers from at least 11 corps and divisions nationwide, 150 military vehicles, 50 helicopters, warplanes, horses, mules and parachutists marched, flew and floated overhead, while millions of Americans across the country protested the event.
“This parade is comprised of our sons, daughters, mothers and fathers — the very best of us,” wrote Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman. “Regardless of your politics, it’s appropriate to celebrate the 250 years of sacrifice, dedication and service.”
Considering the widespread protests, it was a large-scale study of the disconnect between those who serve and those they’re serving. The chasm is wide enough that during a time of job market instability and economic uncertainty, the military — as an employer — is still having to double down on incentives and byways for young Americans. For the first time, the Army introduced a $35,000 bonus to soldiers who agree to “quick ship” within 45 days. Other branches offered their own incentives, like the Air Force’s revived college loan repayment program. Within a month of the parade, the Army met its fiscal year goal of 61,000 new troops months ahead of the deadline.
Kelly (who asked that only her first name be used out of fear of retribution for speaking out) is emblematic in many ways of recruits who have found their way to a uniform over the last 30-40 years. She joined the military not so much out of a sense of patriotic duty, but because she “wanted a way out.” Growing up in a middle-class household with two Mexican immigrant parents, she struggled to stay motivated in high school and didn’t have any plans past graduation. Joining the military seemed like the “easiest way out” — a steady paycheck, and access to the military’s tuition assistance program that allowed her to take online classes.
“THE HISTORIAN IN ME SAYS THERE ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE EBBS AND FLOWS IN RECRUITMENT. ON THE OTHER HAND, I DO THINK SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT RIGHT NOW.”
“I really wanted a quick fix to my situation,” she says. “(And) at first, I did feel patriotic, wanting to serve my country. But as the years went on and I experienced some things in the military, that has definitely not been the case anymore. … I feel like people are just trying to get numbers up and they don’t really tell you what you’re signing up for.”
When Kelly, who is now 21, got a guardian to sign her enlistment papers (she was 17 at the time), she only knew her ship-out date for basic training, unaware of how often she’d be deployed, how the ranking system worked or what field events were. Currently deployed in South Korea, the specifics of her position are classified, but her day-to-day life is somewhat monotonous. Physical training before dawn, breakfast and then a full day at the office, while some
of her fellow soldiers are out in the jungle training with little cell service.
“Attempts to sell (the military) purely as a vocation have not been successful in many cases because the services can’t provide that vocational experience,” says military historian and Texas A&M emeritus professor Brian McAllister Linn. “If you sell the Marines or the Army as jumping out of airplanes and riding around in a tank, and in fact what they’re doing is shining their boots and picking up cigarette butts, after a while that recruitment strategy isn’t going to work.”
These experiences for new enlistees aren’t new, and the mismatch between what service could be and what it is has plagued recruitment since the ending of the draft. The transition to the all-volunteer force saw an almost immediate drop in the “quality” of recruits, as measured by high school graduation rates. The percentage of new enlistees who had at least a high school diploma fell from 67 percent in 1972 to 61 percent in 1974. According to a 1987 report from the Congressional Budget Office, by 1979, “the active services had fallen 7 percent below their recruiting goals, and, in 1980, fully half of all Army enlistees scored in category IV on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), below the 31st percentile among American youth.”
In the face of a stagnating economy in the early 1980s, Congress authorized military pay raises that increased entry-level compensation by over 10 percent, larger cash bonuses (reaching up to $8,000 — equivalent to about $31,400 in today’s world) were offered to attract recruits, the Montgomery GI Bill and other educational benefits were introduced as a pathway to higher education for young Americans, and reenlistment bonuses to encourage experienced personnel to stay were introduced. It was enough to draw people in, and back.
By November 1983, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger declared an end to the “experiment” of the all-volunteer force. “We know now that an All-Volunteer Force can succeed,” he said, “and we know what it takes to make it succeed.”
The military launched a new marketing campaign, anchored by the tagline “Be all you can be.” It was a message that seemed to be just as much for the branches themselves as it was for potential recruits. And, it seemed, for a while, they measured up. Over 2.8 million Americans enlisted in the 10 years following the launch of the campaign.
But that didn’t stick, either. Since its beginnings, the all-volunteer force “experiment” has not proven to have actually reached a solution.
The longstanding problem that always returns, Linn says, is this disconnect between what volunteers think they’re signing up for and what they actually signed up for. Linn adds that complaints from both sides — recruits on broken promises and recruiters on low standards — are as old as the military itself. “The fact that people nowadays are complaining about their recruiting promises, welcome to the club. You and some recruits from 1815 have a lot in common.”
Amy Rutenberg, a professor at Iowa State University and a historian of post-Vietnam military manpower policies, says a disconnect between the perception of the U.S. military and the reality of it is a sign of “a very unhealthy civic-military” relationship.
“It’s really fun to see a flyover at a football game, and then never think about what the military actually has to do or what it means to deploy or function within it,” she says. “It’s easy to assume that whatever our military is doing, it’s doing because it’s the right thing and that all the people who are in it are heroes. Keeping that imagery absolves American people of having to really think about the harder questions.”
Harder questions like: What does it mean to serve? What should the military be used for? What does it mean if the people the military serves can’t see themselves in it?
The last one is particularly relevant today. If a draft were ever reinstated on the brink of another world war, millions of Americans — many of whom know the armed forces through catchy slogans, adrenaline-pumping movies or air shows — would be called to
serve. By law, the Selective Service Act still requires all men aged 18 to 25 to register, yet so many opt out that it’s become negligible.
“The fact is, traditionally, soldiering and sailoring has been a blue-collar occupation and people go into it like they would go into a trade school,” Linn says. “Within the army, (there’s) the big effort to have warriors … not just skilled labor. That’s an effort in some ways to separate military culture from civilian culture.”
The military has always walked a fine line between appealing to ideals — being separate from “civilian” life, creating warriors, bringing patriotism to life, fighting for freedom — and practical matters like
THE MILITARY HAS ALWAYS WALKED A FINE LINE BETWEEN APPEALING TO IDEALS — CREATING WARRIORS, FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM — AND PRACTICAL MATTERS LIKE HAVING HEALTH CARE AND FINANCIAL STABILITY.
having a job, health care and financial stability. For many recruits, it’s the latter that resonates during times of economic crisis and recruitment booms. There’s full tuition coverage, free health care, a housing allowance, military spouse support and VA benefits through initiatives like the G.I. Bill. Being in the military can allow one to save up to $25,000 in the first four years and potentially sidestep debt. In 2024, a youth poll study run by the then-Department of Defense’s Joint Advertising Marketing Research and Studies department found that people’s top two reasons when considering joining were pay and receiving money for future education.
“The historian in me says there are always going to be ebbs and flows in recruitment,” says Rutenberg. “On the other hand,
I do think something is different right now. … What really concerns me as a citizen and historian is what it means when the military is deployed domestically against American people. It is a symptom of our broken system that it can even happen.”
IN MARCH 1987, the Congressional Budget Office published a report on the prospects for military recruitment in the coming decade. It found that quality was just as important as quantity when it came to enlisting volunteers. But it wasn’t as easy a measure to meet. “High-quality males,” defined as “high school graduates of above-average aptitude,” proved the most difficult group to recruit.
Reforms in recruitment were actioned. “Recruiters are deemed successful only if they achieve all their separate quotas for high-aptitude graduates, high-aptitude nongraduates, and so forth,” the report stated. So began a new era of in-school recruitment. Scott Harding, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Connecticut’s School of Social Work, and UMass Ph.D. candidate Seth Kershner have been researching the long history of recruitment in schools, both through informal tabling and ROTC/JROTC programs, documenting how recruiters focus on visiting public schools more frequently in lower-income areas, knowing military service can be more enticing when college feels unfeasible.
“It’s not recognized as a substitute for the military draft, but it raises real questions about the appropriateness of having military values and structures in a school setting with a vulnerable youth population,” says Harding. “There has been this continuing problem that the military has had to contend with — that only a tiny slice of American young people are interested in serving.”
But in 2023, most young Americans didn’t even qualify for military service. In fact, 77 percent of young adults didn’t qualify due to factors like obesity or preexisting medical issues. The waiver process, standardized among all branches in 2008,
RIGHT NOW, THE PICTURE OF WHAT SERVING IN THE MILITARY LOOKS LIKE IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION DOESN’T MATCH UP WITH THE REALITY OF SERVICE. WHETHER SERVING WAS EVER REALLY ALIGNED WITH THAT VISION OR NOT IS UP FOR DEBATE.
exists to allow exceptions for certain conditions — ranging from childhood asthma to ADHD — that might otherwise disqualify someone when they apply at a Military Entrance Processing Station.
Before 2008, exceptions were granted across all military branches for reasons like medical conditions and past offenses. Beyond that, a culture of discretion has long existed between recruits and recruiters — like “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1993 policy. The concept of nondisclosures isn’t novel, and neither is the use of waivers. But the number of waivers being used is. In 2022, at least 1 in 6 recruits received waivers for their enlistment process.
One explanation for the recent influx of waivers is the military’s gradual transition, starting in 2017, to MHS Genesis, an electronic medical record system that accesses a recruit’s entire medical history. Diagnoses that once may have flown under the radar — a past medication, a childhood ADHD diagnosis — are now automatically flagged, overwhelming short-staffed recruiters dealing with too many waivers, and impacting aspiring recruits.
Bre — a 22-year-old from Virginia Beach — has been trying to join the Marine Corps for over a year, driven to continue her family’s long tradition of military service on both her birth and adopted sides. Despite being physically qualified as a weightlifter and scoring high on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, she was disqualified in January due to medications she took
in high school for PTSD following a sexual assault, as well as a false flag for bipolar disorder, all found on the Genesis system. She pivoted to the waiver process, completing a psych evaluation, which confirmed she did not have bipolar disorder and found her mentally fit to serve. Still, she was rejected. Now, Bre is aiming to join the Army, which has a more lenient waiver policy.
Growing up half an hour from Norfolk (home to the world’s largest naval base), military life is all she’s ever known. For her, the military is a path to escape what she calls “a dead-end town.”
“I’m just trying to get out of here,” she says.
That’s the allure that brings many recruits into service, according to experts and the Pentagon’s own research. But, often, it can’t keep them there. During times of economic security, recruitment numbers historically dip. According to researchers like Linn, there has to be more than money during an economic slump that brings people into a uniform. If it’s not personal liberty and freedom, then what is it? It could be redrawing the picture of what serving in the military looks like, so the collective vision matches up with the reality of service, Rutenberg adds. Sure, the sacrifice, dedication and service that Fetterman wrote of have always existed. But when the points of pride that come with being a member of the U.S. military feel just askew of where they ought to be, it’s hard not to focus on the hollow space in between. Perhaps the physical
and intellectual ideal of the American soldier that the military itself came to embrace — the warrior-philosopher type with “Saving Private Ryan” courage, “The Hurt Locker” prowess and “Top Gun” swagger — is simply too enticing and too fictitious. “(The ideal of the American soldier) has survived because it’s useful,” says Rutenberg. “There are people who join up because they see the military as the best of us.”
At a recent military summit, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for returning to a “warrior ethos” after what he described as “decades of decay.” That revival appears to be underway — all branches met their recruiting goals last fiscal year, and the Navy recorded its highest recruiting numbers in nearly 25 years.
So, after nearly 45 years, the “Be all you can be” campaign is back.
The call to young Americans to be able to see themselves in uniform is reimagined in HD resolution, with high-energy montages and visual effects. But, ultimately, it still looks the same. Will the next 10 — or 50, or 250 — years for the military look the same, too?
“The idea of military personnel as heroes and their need to be thanked for their service comes from specific historical rationale. … If service personnel do put their lives in danger for the nation, then that is something admirable that most of us statistically are totally unwilling to do,” Rutenberg adds. “But, our system doesn’t work if we stop there.”
Make this the year. PEACE
THIS ONE’S FOR MOM AND POP
HOW ONE CORNER OF THE COUNTRY KEEPS THE VISION OF SMALL-TOWN AMERICA ALIVE
BY NATALIA GALICZA
At the only traffic signal in the entire town of Driggs, Idaho, three young girls in pink helmets atop their wobbly scooters and bikes wait to cross the street. Green yields to yellow. Yellow to red. Trucks with mudflaps and cattle dogs on flatbeds and SUVs bedecked with “Baby on Board” warnings lurch to a stop. The three pink dots glide across the two-lane Main Street and head toward the Corner Drug. It’s about as close to a weekday lunch rush in August as one can get here.
Summer is peak season in Driggs. Every year, 500,000 visitors breeze through the Teton Valley on their way to float the Snake River or to watch geysers erupt in Yellowstone National Park. Some of them wander into the Corner Drug and end up buying souvenirs; huckleberry syrups and jams, potato scented lotion, Idaho “river rock” candy. More likely, they’re tempted into a root beer float, huckleberry milkshake or lime freeze — specialties served
up behind the positively ancient-looking solid wood bar at the soda fountain. But for those not just wandering in for a delightful vacation stop, the Corner Drug functions as a community resource — and even a lifeline — to the town of 2,000. As it has for 119 years.
AMERICANS TRUST
SMALL BUSINESSES MORE THAN ANY OTHER INSTITUTION, INCLUDING UNIVERSITIES, CHURCHES AND THE MILITARY.
Aisles are filled with more toys than any other store in Driggs and hundreds of books — including titles by local writers. The back houses a full-service pharmacy that, up
until 15 years ago, was the only one within a 50-mile radius. “When you live in a small town, you know everybody. You take care of their kids, you take care of their grandparents,” says Sally Myler, a pharmacist at the Corner Drug who has owned the store for 25 years with her husband, Aaron. “We’re an anchor at the corner. If we weren’t here, I don’t know what Main Street would be.”
Last year, Pew Research Center reported that 86 percent of adults say small businesses — those with fewer than 500 employees — positively affect the country. Americans trust them more than any other institution, including universities, churches and the military. The Small Business Administration estimates they account for 99.9 percent of firms nationwide. Yet they generate less than half of the nation’s gross domestic product, and only account for 39 percent of the nation’s payroll. In the face of large corporations, small businesses are eclipsed. And they struggle. Numbers
FOR GENERATIONS, THE FAMILY-OWNED DRUGSTORE IS WHERE LOCALS HAVE COUNTED ON GETTING THEIR PRESCRIPTIONS — OR AN ICE CREAM SHAKE.
CORNER DRUG SITS AT THE CORNER OF MAIN STREET AND CEDRON ROAD, UNDERNEATH THE ONLY STOPLIGHT IN DRIGGS, IDAHO.
OPENED IN 1906, CORNER DRUG HAS SERVED THE SMALL TOWN OF DRIGGS FOR NEARLY 120 YEARS.
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, nationwide, 20 percent of new, small businesses fail in their first year, and about 65 percent don’t make it past 10 years, with only a quarter surviving for 15 years or more.
But, as a region, the West has created a culture — and economy — that may make it easier for small businesses to thrive. States like Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho consistently rank among the most business-friendly in the country, thanks to a mix of community values and business policies. “The West is a really interesting story in that there are so many states that are hubs of innovation and economic growth and opportunity,” says Jonathan Williams, president and chief economist of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a think tank focused on promoting business and limited government.
As shoppers file into the Corner Drug on a Monday, floating around for small talk and filled prescriptions, it becomes clear how much is at stake when local institutions threaten to shutter. There’s history, identity and autonomy to consider. Sally can’t imagine her community without the Corner Drug. If it ends with her, it’s gone for good.
WHEN HER FATHER owned the Corner Drug before her, Sally grew up washing dishes at the soda fountain. Her great-grandfather ran the business before the both of them, starting in 1920, decades before the town got electricity. There were no ice machines in his days. Instead, locals harvested ice from ponds and rivers, preserved it in sawdust, then delivered it door to door by horse-drawn wagon. Sally’s greatgrandfather rode to work on horseback. He held the shop open late, until moviegoers got out of theaters or school athletes got out of games, in case anyone wanted to stop at the soda fountain. Then he rode the eight miles back home at midnight. Even in the dead of winter. “I think there’s a lot to be said about legacy and taking care of people,” Sally says. “I think what we do is important.
We’re not in this to get rich. We’re in this to support ourselves … and to help people.”
All American businesses were small, often family-owned, businesses until about the 20th century. Back in 1781, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that a nation without farmers and small business owners “begets subservience and venality.” Americans who went into business for themselves, he felt, fostered a sense of economic independence that prevented the new country from ever again falling under imperial control. He concluded that small businesses created a citizenry with stronger moral character and contributed to a free and democratic nation. He even went so far as to call these laborers “the chosen people of God.”
“I THINK THERE’S A LOT TO BE SAID ABOUT LEGACY AND TAKING CARE OF PEOPLE. WE’RE NOT IN THIS TO GET RICH. WE’RE IN THIS TO SUPPORT OURSELVES AND TO HELP PEOPLE.”
The same ideologies pushed the pioneers westward in the 19th century in search of land and economic opportunity by way of the Homestead Act. Not without hardship and sometimes brutal violence, families bartered and traded with other settlers and Indigenous people so they could build roads, construct schools, raise cabins, harvest crops and eventually create a system of government on the frontier range.
“Everybody’s dream was to own a business,” says Naomi Lamoreaux, professor emeritus of economics and history at Yale University. “You didn’t want to work for someone; that was considered a failure in a sense.” Until the economy shifted from
agrarian to industrial in the 19th century, that is. The term “big business” entered the lexicon, and the public grew concerned about monopolies and robber barons. Those concerns weren’t unfounded. America’s proud embrace of the idea of a free market economy encourages businesses to compete without much government interference, for the most part. That means large, consolidated businesses — namely national chains like Walmart or McDonald’s — can leverage their purchasing power and mass production to overpower small, local counterparts. Those high rates of early failure for small businesses are a direct consequence; they’re just not able to compete with corporations. Suddenly, the idea that any individual or family could make a living with their own business became threatened, and the small business became the underdog of a nationwide David and Goliath story — an idea that average citizens can see themselves in and root for.
“The same way that corporations gobble up land and make it hard for wild animals to live, corporations have gobbled up the economy and made it much more difficult for small businesses to thrive,” says Cindy Kam, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University who has researched public opinion of small business. “This idea that there are identifiable human beings within a community who open up a shop, hang a shingle, interact with humans, interact with their neighbors. It is very idealized. It’s similar to myths that we have in the Wild West about the untamed wilderness and the free spirit of American enterprise.”
Except in some places, it’s not a myth at all.
A FEW PIANO chords float into the corner office at Daynes Music Company in Midvale, Utah, from the front showroom. It’s about an hour before closing on a Friday in September, so business is slow, but Kerwin Ipsen listens to the stragglers tinker with the store’s Steinways as he quietly settles into his new desk and new role.
Ipsen has worked at Daynes for 38 years,
but he only recently became president of the company when Skip Daynes, the fourth-generation owner, died last year. The piano shop has been in business since 1862, making it the oldest continuously running family business in the state of Utah, and one of the oldest in the country. The founder, Joseph John Daynes, was a pioneer who, legend has it, Brigham Young enlisted to be the first organist in the Tabernacle Choir shortly after his arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. What Ipsen believes is the very pump organ Joseph John Daynes strapped to his back and carried across the plains as he made the trek to Utah sits beside his desk today. “One of the reasons we’re so successful in Utah,” he says, “Utah has always been one of the most family-oriented states in all of America. Most of these families grew up around a piano at some point in time. We come from a really music-oriented culture.”
Regardless of how prominent the music industry is in the state, the policies are what allow small businesses like Daynes to prosper for more than a century. Utah has a flat individual income tax rate of 4.5 percent, which means all taxpayers pay the same rate, while the average individual income tax nationwide is 14.5 percent. For
businesses, Utah’s tax rate is also 4.5 percent, compared to the national average of 6.5 percent.
Between 1995 and 2019, small business employment in Utah grew by more than 60 percent — more than the national average. That’s why the American Legislative Exchange Council has ranked it the most business-friendly state for 18 years in a row. Nearly half of all employees in Utah work for small businesses. Here, it’s possible to carve out a space among the national chains, franchises and big boxes. “Our customers are really comfortable because of the same experience they have here. It’s comfortable. They’re willing to refer us to their family members, their friends. It comes back to us that way, too,” Ipsen says. “I’m not brave enough to change it.”
Idaho similarly has a flat individual income tax rate and business income tax rate of 5.8 percent, still well below the national average. Wyoming is widely believed to have the most business-friendly tax climate in the country because it doesn’t have any individual or business income tax. Neither does Nevada, making it a low-cost state for startups. “The current policy environment in many of the Western states is very competitive because of limited regulation, low
tax rates and generally pro-business policies,” says Williams. “But it’s also this idea that they are going to remain competitive states and their elected leaders will have that philosophy of prioritizing small business and individuals in the case that we have some sort of an economic downturn.”
Ipsen didn’t even play piano when he first began working for Daynes. But, over the years, he’s developed a practice of playing — and listening — each day. He’s taken his three children out to camp near Priest Lake in Idaho. They’d look up at the stars from the roof of their camper van and listen to “The Swan” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals.” And he does everything he can to share that same magic with customers. That is to say, his neighbors, his family, his community.
THE PRESSURE OF being the first non-Daynes to run the Daynes Music Company in 162 years is not lost on Ipsen. He runs the business exactly the same as his predecessor, down to the smallest interior design choice. He’s made zero changes to his office, which took him more than a year to even work up the courage to move into. After devoting decades of his life to a company that has prospered since the American Civil War,
COMMUNITYFOCUSED CULTURE AND BUSINESSFRIENDLY POLICIES MAKE THE WEST UNIQUELY POSITIONED FOR MAKING FAMILYOWNED BUSINESSES SUCCESSFUL.
KERWIN IPSEN IS KEEPING DAYNES MUSIC COMPANY, THE OLDEST FAMILYRUN BUSINESS IN UTAH, OPEN.
SMALL, LOCAL BUSINESSES PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE ECONOMIES OF COMMUNITIES, BUT FOR MANY IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT TO STAY IN BUSINESS.
he wants to maintain the delicate balance that has rendered its continuing success. Especially when so much else around him is uncertain.
This year is on track to be one of the worst years for bankruptcies in about a decade. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts already reported that bankruptcies have increased by more than 13 percent in the last year, and the Chamber of Commerce found that as the current administration doubles down with tariffs on about $3 trillion worth of imports, small businesses face rising costs and closures. More than 50 percent of small businesses couldn’t afford to take out a loan with current interest rates, either. “When you talk to business owners,” Williams says, “they want predictability in the business environment and low taxes they can reasonably expect to continue in the future.”
Small businesses are the least equipped to survive the loss of revenue associated with economic uncertainty. To make matters worse, employees see that and leave small businesses behind for more stability. It’s a sort of work flight. About 53 percent of Americans now work for large
companies, compared to before the Great Recession in 2007, when the majority worked for small firms.
Present economic challenges play a large part for many, but there’s also the fact that most small business owners are at or near
employees to live in their communities. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reported in 2023 that these operations in states like Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington report difficulties with the growing cost of goods, services and wages as well as hiring, retention and supply chain issues.
THIS
YEAR
WILL BE ONE
OF
THE WORST
FOR BANKRUPTCIES IN A DECADE. ALONG WITH TARIFFS AND RISING COSTS, SMALL BUSINESSES ARE MOST AT RISK. MORE THAN 50 PERCENT CAN’T AFFORD TO TAKE OUT A LOAN WITH CURRENT INTEREST RATES, EITHER.
retirement age with no succession plan. Especially in rural areas, where employers feel inflation the most and struggle to hire because of difficulties attracting potential
Myler doesn’t have a successor in mind for the Corner Drug. Ipsen doesn’t have a clear picture yet, either — and his own rise to the lead of the company has already broken the family line of ownership. Times do change, after all. Residents flock to lower prices, even if that means shopping at a chain store that only keeps about 13 percent of each dollar spent in the local community on average. Fewer families purchase luxury items like pianos. Lime freezes don’t sell well when the weather outside is freezing, too, come winter. Cultures change and towns sometimes morph into strange new iterations of themselves. Though it’s worth hoping that whoever lives to see those futures has the ability to carve out their own slice of it, make their American dream come true and, maybe, somehow, make it last.
FILL YOUR HOME with His Light
Discover 500+ Nativities in every size, every style, and every budget
BY ERIC SCHULZKE ILLUSTRATION
WILDERNESS IN THE
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ISN’T JUST UNPOPULAR. IT’S ADRIFT, UNSURE IF ITS PATH FORWARD IS THROUGH CENTRISM OR A SHARP TURN LEFT
A BROOKLYN STREET festival in August, Zohran Mamdani failed to bench-press 135 pounds. Why he was even subjecting himself to such a stunt is a good question. Call it a sign of the times. The likely next mayor of New York — a trim 34-year-old socialist who wants to freeze rents and open government-run grocery stores — grimaced through two attempts, the bar quivering inches above his chest before a spotter stepped in.
The optics were brutal, as was the ridicule. Current Mayor Eric Adams posted a video of himself benching at the same event, dubbing his opponent “Mamscrawny.” Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines — a prominent critic of transgender women in women’s sports — boasted she repped 165 while weighing only 130. Miami’s Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, posted a video pressing 225 for 13 reps.
Politics have always been about spectacle — think the Gipper chopping logs, Bill Clinton playing his sax, or Barack Obama playing basketball. All performative politics meant to convey strength, accessibility, virality. But the message was coded.
Now, as with much of our political moment, there is no nuance. And pumping iron, or struggling to do pullups, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently filmed himself doing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has become a sort of litmus test.
These displays of machismo play well with
the MAGA base, where strength-as-spectacle is part of the brand. But when Democrats try the same stunts, they not only fail; they embarrass themselves. They also reveal something deeper, maybe even existential: a party so desperate to reconnect with voters that it resorts to gestures it doesn’t understand.
For Democrats, the state of affairs is dismal. According to a poll by The Wall Street Journal, the party has reached a 35-year low in popularity. Polls by Quinnipiac and NBC News also found a majority of voters do not view the party favorably. According to The New York Times, the party has lost 4.5 million registered voters to the GOP from 2020 to 2024.
Democrats are still processing not just losing the 2024 election, but how they lost. Exit polls showed Democrats slipping among Black men and Hispanics, constituencies they thought they could count on. President Donald Trump even gained women voters between 2016 and 2024. In another big shift, nonvoters favored Trump over former Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points. This revealed “an uncomfortable truth for Democrats,” researchers at Tufts University concluded. “This wasn’t about turnout, messaging or campaign tactics. When the same realignment appears among people who don’t even vote, it signals something more fundamental — the Democratic Party has lost touch with where Americans, engaged or not, actually stand.”
So far, the official party response has been muffled. After a spring devoted to embarrassing leadership battles, the Democratic National Committee spent the summer dodging hard questions.
The DNC’s much-touted postelection “autopsy” was repeatedly delayed. And if that report ever sees daylight, rumor has it that it won’t probe former President Joe Biden’s hiding-in-plain-sight senescence or Harris’ built-in weaknesses and strategic failures.
Consultants have filled the vacuum. Some urge a hard left turn: no compromise on social issues and more billionaire bashing. Others blame hard-liners for saddling the party with out-of-touch purity demands.
The party is lost, uncertain whether its future lies in moderation, or something more radical.
In the years before Trump’s election, voices on the right were beginning to critique what both parties had become, and to chart a path forward. In 2012, the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray published “Coming Apart,” which depicts a bicoastal elite detached from a fraying working class in middle America. Murray cited the explosion in CEO pay — which doubled from $1 million in 1970 to $2 million in 1987, doubled again by 1992, again by 1998 and yet again by 2006 to $16 million. He decried Gatsbyesque homes and other “unseemly” luxuries. But Murray, too, was a bit early. When “Coming Apart” appeared in January 2012, Republicans were preparing to nominate a private equity investor worth more than $200 million whose four homes in four states included one in La Jolla, California, worth $12 million and equipped with a car elevator. If optics is messaging, the Republican message in 2012 was clear.
HOW DEMOCRATS LOST their way is a story about money, hubris and the rise of the consultant class. But it’s also a story about the Republican Party, and how it pivoted to meet the demands of voters in a way the Democrats are still struggling to understand.
That pivot, which shocked the world in 2016, was actually decades in the making. The hubris was clear only in hindsight. In 2002, political scientists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted in “The Emerging Democratic Majority” that Democrats would build a lasting center-left majority, grounded in favorable demographics and “progressive centrism.” Democrats could hold working-class voters, consolidate growing minority support and claim the cultural middle ground. Republicans would remain tied to neoconservatives of the military industrial complex, the evangelical right and corporate interests. Democrats would be the reasonable party: protecting social programs, advancing equal opportunity and showing cultural restraint. Republicans would be trapped by their failure to adapt to an increasingly diverse, urban and moderate electorate.
Two more American Enterprise Institute scholars dropped related books in 2016. Yuval Levin published “The Fractured Republic.” “The poor,” he wrote, “are more isolated — economically, culturally, and socially — than they used to be in America.” Levin’s
MANY DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONSULTANTS SEE NEW YORK MAYORAL CANDIDATE
ZOHRAN MAMDANI AS EMBLEMATIC OF A NEEDED SHIFT TO THE LEFT FOR THE PARTY.
DEMOCRATS LOST GROUND AMONG KEY CONSTITUENTS IN THE 2024 ELECTION, INCLUDING BLACK MEN AND HISPANICS.
solution was a “mobility agenda.” Meanwhile, Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work” noted that from 1965 to 2015, millions of prime-age male workers simply exited the workforce. “It is imperative for the future health of our nation,” Eberstadt wrote, “that we make a determined and sustained commitment to bringing these detached men back: into the workplace, into their families, and into civil society.”
Vice President JD Vance’s bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” also published in 2016, became a runaway smash. His story of Middletown, Ohio, became a metaphor for the forgotten working-class voters already buying up MAGA hats. This version of Vance had no love for Trump, however. He called Trump “cultural heroin” and warned that “the eventual comedown will be harsh.” Nonetheless, Vance conceded that a vote for Trump sent “a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen.”
Some Democrats were listening, and were beginning to grow worried that the “Democratic majority” wasn’t as stable as Judis and Teixeira had predicted. In “Listen, Liberal,” released in March 2016, Thomas Frank flayed Hillary Clinton and the party for leaving the working class behind and leaving open space for a populist challenger. “Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness,” he wrote, knocking Clinton’s campaign for an “atmosphere of acute virtue — of pure, serene, Alpine propriety.”
But liberals weren’t, in fact, listening. As Trump outflanked Democrats to reach the working class, Democratic elites bragged about trading up for better voters. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., boasted in July 2016, “we will pick up three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” He predicted “a Democratic generation.”
Instead, Clinton lost almost every swing state in 2016 to Trump, and Harris did
the same in 2024. Democrats spent 2025 trying to understand why they had been abandoned by voters whom Schumer had seen as dispensable and Clinton had infamously called a “basket of deplorables.” In sum, the Democrats’ shift away from working-class voters arguably began in 1993 with one Clinton and culminated in 2016 with the other.
Two decades later, Teixeira looked back on the predictions he’d made in “The Emerging Democratic Majority” and surveyed the wreckage. Sometime in the early 2010s, he argued in an op-ed last year, Democrats abandoned the working class and embraced progressive orthodoxies on race, gender and climate. “In reality,” Teixeira wrote, “a lot of these ideas were terrible and most voters outside the precincts of the progressive left itself were never interested in them.”
EVERY ELECTORAL LOSS prompts an internal reckoning. The postmortem after Michael Dukakis lost in a landslide in 1988 was that he lacked charisma and didn’t connect with voters. Al Gore didn’t seem authentic enough in 2000. Mitt Romney, he of the car elevator in La Jolla, was out of touch. A popular critique among the Democratic consultant class after the 2024 election is that party leaders like Clinton, Schumer and Harris lived in a progressive echo chamber. “Trump exploited that to devastating effect against Harris,” Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith said. The orthodoxy, he said, was “noticeably out of step with what was electorally optimal or viable.”
Days after the election, Smith’s polling firm Blueprint, in a survey of over 3,000 confirmed voters, found that undecided voters broke for Trump, 52 percent to 38 percent. Asked what pushed them, five of the top eight responses were immigration related. But when asked which issues were most decisive, “swing voters ranked the Democratic Party’s perceived focus on cultural issues over middle-class concerns
as their top criticism, even above inflation and immigration.”
Swing voters heavily dinged Harris for specific policy positions on cultural issues: “supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants, mandatory electric vehicles by 2035, decriminalizing border crossings, and defunding the police.” On climate policies, the party was also on defense: a June Pew survey found 65 percent of Americans opposed mandates to phase out gas engines. And an Associated Press poll found that only 28 percent of independents favored EV tax credits in 2025, down from 49 percent in 2022.
On multiple fronts, Harris struggled to balance shifts in public opinion against an activist base unwilling to yield, a symptom of what election prognosticator Nate Silver calls “blueskyism” after the progressive social media platform launched in 2023 to counter Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. “Bluesky … embodies all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people,” Silver wrote. He listed three characteristics: policing ideological boundaries, emphasizing who is speaking rather than the strength of the argument and treating every issue as an existential crisis. The result is politics as tribal signaling rather than persuasion.
Policing boundaries puts careers at risk. In 2020, David Shor, head of political data science at Civis Analytics, was fired after tweeting about a 2020 study by Princeton’s Omar Wasow. Wasow’s peer-reviewed study of county-level data found that in 1968, nonviolent civil rights protests boosted Democrats’ votes, while violent protests improved Republican turnout and may have tipped the presidency to Richard Nixon. Posted amid the George Floyd protests in 2020 and denounced by progressives, Shor’s tweet led to his firing within days.
Shor was and is a loyal Democrat, having gained prominence on Barack Obama’s 2012 data team, where he helped build microtargeting models. After Civis fired him, he went on to work for Blue Rose Research
and he remains a prominent Democratic data analyst. The good news for Democrats is that Shor fought his way back. The bad news is that he had to. Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, laments that Democrats struggle with (and too often oppose) diversity of thought. “You can’t be a good Democrat if you undercut core party priorities,” Schlozman told me. “We don’t want anyone who is on the wrong side of our litmus test — and there is no obvious moment when the calibration stops.”
On transgender issues, Democrats may have been lulled by polls that were framed to get the answers they wanted. A 2024 Gallup poll reported that 60 percent of American adults supported “gender-affirming care” for minors. But note the halo words: “affirming” and “care.” Polls that avoided such nudges and instead named specific procedures or treatments flipped the results. A Washington Post/ KFF poll found 68 percent opposed puberty blockers for children ages 10-14, while 58 percent opposed hormone treatment for teens 15-17. Pew showed majorities or strong pluralities against giving minors “medical care for a gender transition,” against trans participation in women’s sports, and against trans bathroom access.
FOR DEMOCRATS, THE STATE OF AFFAIRS IS DISMAL. ACCORDING TO A POLL BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE PARTY HAS NEVER BEEN LESS POPULAR IN 35 YEARS THAN IT IS NOW.
All of this put Harris in a bind. In 2019, she said on video that she had “worked behind the scenes” to ensure that California gave “every transgender inmate in the prison system” access to elective gender surgery at public expense. That clip became Trump’s most aired attack ad in 2024. NPR reported that the ad aired “more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states, and with a particular focus on NFL and college football broadcast audiences.” Harris was widely criticized for not responding to the ad. But she had no safe move. Denial was impossible, and reversal
would betray her unforgiving progressive base. Her only play was silence.
Harris was not the only one staying mum. In May 2025, Time’s Charlotte Alter found a few Democrats who would say that biological boys shouldn’t compete against biological girls in high school and college sports. Or that the party should be less gung ho about abortions later in pregnancy. But they would say neither for the record. “Yet the fact these lawmakers would only share these thoughts without their names attached,” Alter wrote, “shows how much Democrats still fear antagonizing their liberal base.”
In August, the center-left think tank Third Way urged Democrats to drop ideologically laden phrases. These include therapy-speak (triggering, holding space, privilege), seminar-room language (systems of oppression, Overton window), organizer jargon (food insecurity, the unhoused, person who immigrated), gender/orientation correctness (cisgender, LGBTQIA+, birthing person), the shifting language of racial constructs (Latinx, BIPOC, intersectionality, allyship), and euphemisms for crime (justice-involved, incarcerated people, involuntary confinement). “Latinx” is notable because the term is already passé. Coined in 2004 as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino/Latina, it gained currency in academic and journalistic circles but never among the people it was meant to describe. A 2020 Pew survey found that only 3 percent of U.S. Hispanics used “Latinx,” while 76 percent had never heard of it. The League of United Latin American Citizens formally rejected the term, calling it “a distraction.” Yet state agencies, major corporations, major universities and progressive organizations all continue to use Latinx.
over bold, authentic voices. In fact, a clip of a very angry and profane Hunter Biden railing against the consultant class recently went viral.
And yet, in spite of this long-standing critique, the party remains firmly beholden to it. If the problem is authenticity — if voters recoil from stiff, overly scripted candidates — then asking consultants how to be authentic is, by definition, an absurd exercise, and how a slim mayoral candidate in New York ends up barely bench-pressing 135 pounds. And yet, consultants still have a firm grip on the party: According to internal reports, Democratic operatives are searching for a “progressive Joe Rogan.”
In one way, the thinking makes sense. Where legacy media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post once held tremendous sway with voters, much of that energy and influence has shifted to other forms of media, and podcasts in particular. There is perhaps no podcaster with the reach and influence of Rogan, who moonlights as a UFC color commentator and considers stand-up comedy his main gig. Rogan’s brand is built on talking for hours with guests who range from fellow comics to renegade academics to conspiracy theorists (as well as the occasional celebrity or politician) with no filters whatsoever. He has over 20 million YouTube followers, and once topped 65 million views for a single episode. He may be the most powerful broadcaster in America. (For what it’s worth, Rogan has said he does 225-pound bench press sets and can max 315.)
SINCE THE 2024 ELECTION, DEMOCRATS HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIND THEIR OWN VERSION OF JOE ROGAN, THE POPULAR PODCASTER WHO PROVED A KEY FACTOR IN THAT ELECTION.
FOR DECADES, CRITICS have accused the Democratic Party of being held hostage to its own consultant class: a cadre of pollsters, strategists and messaging mavens who favor safe, testable, “electable” candidates
The campaign to find a Rogan for Democrats has included a number of schemes, according to The New York Times. One raised $7 million toward a planned $45 million. Another signed more than 90 influencers — offering up to $8,000 a month under secrecy and content-control clauses — to push progressive messaging online. A group called Speaking
“NOTHING IS MORE CHARACTERISTIC OF THE LIBERAL CLASS THAN ITS MEMBERS’ SENSE OF THEIR OWN ELEVATED GOODNESS.”
CHRIS UNGER/ZUFFA LLC
With American Men, or SAM, wants to raise $20 million to tap into podcasts and gaming culture. “Above all,” SAM’s prospectus stated, “we must shift from a moralizing tone to an aspirational and inclusive message that positions progressives as champions of opportunity, resilience, and economic justice.” Once SAM finds their Rogan, the plan seems to be to program him to “avoid this” and “promote that.”
SAM was right to flag the “moralizing tone.” But they missed the secret sauce. Rogan doesn’t offer “aspirational and inclusive” messages: He just says what he thinks. And as Rogan quipped after hearing Democrats wanted to clone him: “But they had me. I was on their side!” Rogan still calls himself a “left-leaning libertarian.” He has long backed same-sex marriage, abortion rights and drug legalization. He endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary. Rogan’s pivot toward the right came in 2020 with Covid-19, when he decided the mainstream press and public-health establishment weren’t being honest. His skepticism of vaccine mandates, media narratives and progressive orthodoxy shifted his profile — though many of his views never changed.
On Sarah Silverman’s podcast on August 7, Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” noted that there are “loud voices” in the party who “scare people from saying what they believe and make you think twice about a joke.” Kimmel called
“YOU CAN’T BE A GOOD DEMOCRAT IF YOU UNDERCUT CORE PARTY PRIORITIES. WE DON’T WANT ANYONE WHO IS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF OUR LITMUS TEST — AND THERE IS NO OBVIOUS MOMENT WHEN THE CALIBRATION STOPS.”
these voices “repulsive,” which he meant in the literal sense of the word: “I mean, they repel people. They go like, ‘Oh, you’re no fun. I don’t want to be around you.’” Silverman added, “And people go where they’re accepted, where the love is.” At a CNN focus group in Pennsylvania after the election, previously undecided voters were asked to describe Trump and Harris in one word. One woman called Trump “crazy” and Harris “preachy.” She said she chose Trump “because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me: ‘preachy’ does.”
Crazy, but not preachy. “Donald Trump has ruined political consultants,” said Paul Sracic, retired chair of political science at Youngstown State University. After three decades at a college serving the children of factory workers, Sracic watched Ohio shift from a union stronghold to Trump country. He’s seen what works and what doesn’t, and how the rules changed. “The job of consultants was to make you into something voters could buy,” he told me. “You looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, used the right talking points. Trump broke that mold. He smashed it. In this new paradigm, you have to be who you are.”
the Republican’s future was Paul Ryan, a wonkish, policy-driven congressman with a smile that could best be described as “mildly functional.” In 2014, no one imagined the rise of Trump, the shift to populism and the complete remapping of the party’s base. Nine years and two shocking presidential wins later, Democrats were suddenly anxious to figure out what they failed to predict. And many now see “authenticity” as the critical ingredient that drives Trump and eludes all but a few Democrats. One of those few is John Fetterman. He’s the closest the party is going to get to a Rogan-like figure, a burly and grouchy giant of a man who wears shorts and hoodies on the Senate floor. “He doesn’t care about orthodoxy,” Sracic says, “and he doesn’t even care about his own party.”
THE TEA PARTY was a brief “revolution” of polite suburban families whose parents shouted “darn” and “dangit” and cleaned up after themselves at rallies. For a short time
Immediately after the election, Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, published a New York Times op-ed asking, “When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?” Jentleson credited Trump with “supermajority thinking,” which he defined as “envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.” Last month, Jentleson launched the Searchlight Institute, named after the Nevada hometown of Jentleson’s other former boss, longtime Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Searchlight’s mission is to nudge Democrats toward the kind of durable majority that Teixeira had promised back in 2002. To get there, Jentleson
says, they’ll need more mavericks, meaning more Fettermans.
“Many voters are searching for leaders who can say no,” Jentleson said. Heterodoxy is a declaration of identity: I am someone who thinks, not conforms. Among die-hard MAGA and progressive loyalists, conformity may be demanded. But Jentleson believes those who decide elections want to know: Can I trust you to represent my interests when the choices get hard? In our conversation, he sketched the familiar two-by-two ideology grid — left and right on one axis, economic and social issues on the other. A credible candidate in a swing district, he said, must cross at least one of those squares.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 defeat, there are signs the party’s fealty to certain orthodoxies is breaking. Days after the 2024 election, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton called out the party’s misalignment on trans issues. “I have two little girls,” Moulton told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but
as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff under Obama, also was not cowed. In July, Megyn Kelly asked Emanuel if a man could become a woman. “No,” he replied. “That’s so easy, why don’t more people in your party just say that?” Kelly asked. “Because I’m now going to go into a witness protection plan,” Emanuel answered.
Other Democrats are hoping to create a bigger tent by loosening their own purity demands. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has made gun control central to his career, often calling out dissenters in the party. But after 2024, Murphy told Time, “I spent a long time trying to make the issue of guns a litmus test for the Democratic Party. I think that all of the interest groups that ended up trying to apply a litmus test for their issue ended up making our coalition a lot smaller.”
Whether abandoning certain shibboleths will move undecided voters to the Democratic side of the ledger remains to be seen. For many Democratic insiders, breaking from
orthodoxy and being seen as “authentic” will only get you so far. At a certain point, where candidates stand on issues matters.
To that end, Democratic strategists see “economic populism” as their best bet, a morality tale that casts struggling workers and families as victims against corporations and billionaires. Embodied by socialists such as Sanders and Mamdani, this brand of populism portrays a moral fight between “the people” and “corrupt elites.” The archvillain usually is the “neoliberalism” that led to NAFTA and turned a generation of Democrats into globalists. “Some of our top performing messaging,” Democratic data analyst Ali Mortell told me, “are policies designed to lower the cost of living and curb exploitative practices — like going after corporate price gouging and addressing abusive practices by credit card companies, insurance companies, and landlords.”
Which brings us back to New York, with Mamdani on a bench in Brooklyn, struggling to lift 135 pounds. While the stunt may be a commentary on our times, and a rather pathetic attempt to appear manly to attract voters, it’s a distraction. Because while Mamdani may never come close to matching the WWE theatrics of Trump as political theater, he may be similar to him in another, more substantive way.
In New York, no one thought a socialist advocating for free buses and free groceries could ever win, let alone beat a giant of Democratic establishment politics like Andrew Cuomo. That’s why Mamdani’s primary election victory was a shock, not just in New York, but among America’s elite chattering class. It’s why Megyn Kelly dedicated multiple segments to it and why The Wall Street Journal has dedicated multiple editorials to the implications of his election, if he were to win.
The lesson of Mamdani is the lesson of Trump: the old rules of politics no longer apply. Trump neither pandered to the center nor energized the party’s base. Rather, he inserted a new party into the hollowed shell of the GOP , powering it
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY HAS ADVOCATED FOR A BIGGER TENT FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BUT HAS ALSO USED POPULIST RHETORIC TO WARN THAT DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE.
with an upswell of voters whose fears had been ignored.
What would happen if insurgent Democrats found an anti-Trump, a charismatic socialist like Mamdani, but one constitutionally allowed to take the White House; a voice of chaos who managed to focus negative energy leftward the way Trump did rightward?
What if the resulting resurgent Democrats neutralized their social issue baggage and returned to the source of the party’s historical energy — economic populism, a focus on the working class, with clear villains to rally against?
“TRUMP BROKE THAT MOLD. HE SMASHED IT. IN THIS NEW PARADIGM, YOU HAVE TO BE WHO YOU ARE.”
The villains list is long: hedge-fund managers and CEOs faulted for outsized pay; monopolies and Big Tech billionaires; pharmaceutical giants; oil and gas companies blamed for price spikes; real estate speculators driving up housing costs; and media conglomerates accused of spreading misinformation.
At its best, populism combines grievance and aspiration, calling out issues elites neglect, while asserting that ordinary people can make things better. But an appeal to intractable resentments also can harbor an undercurrent of violence: if the game is fixed and only rubes follow rules, then tipping over the game board could be a valid move. And tipping the game board can take many forms, some of them more disturbing than others.
In 2016, a conservative writer named Michael Anton dubbed the battle to defeat Hillary Clinton a “Flight 93 election,” referencing the United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, where the passengers stormed the cockpit and crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania field to prevent the plane’s use as a weapon of terror. “If you don’t try, death is certain,” Anton wrote. He described a Clinton win as “Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.” With Trump, he said, “at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” The notion of existential threat, of an election loss as promising extinction,
took root and later bore fruit when Trump loyalists stormed the cockpit on January 6, 2021, and a dogged election denial took hold within the GOP.
Meanwhile, the same Sen. Murphy who wants to widen the Democratic tent has been using apocalyptic populist rhetoric. “Democrats need to act like our democracy is weeks away from disintegrating,” he said in February. He warned of a “red-alert moment” and “the billionaire takeover of government.” Such alarmist language is hardly unique to Murphy. From Black Lives Matter to Free Palestine, activists on the hard left have repeated the phrase “by any means necessary” so often that many have forgotten the literal meaning.
After 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested in the assassination of a health insurance CEO and explained his reasons in a leftist manifesto, he became a folk hero among many younger voters. An Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of young voters between 18-29 years of age felt “the actions of the killer” were “acceptable,” 19 percent were neutral, and only 40 percent opposed. On September 10, 2025, conservative activist and organizer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed allegedly by a 22-year-old extremist who had inscribed “Catch This, Fascist” on unspent bullets.
Both parties now know that playing on fears and naming villains is easier than building a credible program for economic security and opportunity. After being caught flat-footed — by Trump in 2016 and 2024 and by Mamdani in 2025 — it isn’t hard to imagine Democrats coalescing around a leader who combines a Trump-like chaotic authenticity with a leftward economic populism in a bid to reverse Trump’s inroads among vulnerable voters. A post-Trump GOP may double down to hold its gains, and a race to the bottom may follow, resulting in ever increasing division, instability and even violence. No one knows what comes next. But Zohran Mamdani’s failed bench press reminds us that political strength is hard to forecast, that the rules have changed and that the game is now wide open.
BY
C A N THE CE NTER HO L D ?
IN
THE MIDDLE OF JULY, A SERIES OF EVENTS UNFOLDED IN THE TOWN OF
TORRE-PACHECO, A SMALL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY IN MURCIA, SPAIN.
Over the course of a week, hundreds of individuals, mostly young men, gathered from all over the country, taking to the streets at night to “hunt and purge” roughly one-third of the town’s population. They had been summoned through social media and Telegram group chats.
The trigger? One act of horrific violence and a flood of disinformation. On July 9, Domingo Tomás, a 68-year-old resident of Torre-Pacheco, was physically assaulted while walking his dog. He was beaten and thrown to the ground, a gratuitous act of violence with no clear motive: The man did not know his attackers, and nothing was stolen from him.
The notion that the attackers were of Maghrebi origin — a predominantly Muslim group of people facing religious discrimination in Spain — quickly spread on social media, given the high percentage of Maghrebi people within Torre-Pacheco’s population. But the Civil Guard, one of Spain’s national police forces, had not released any information about the alleged perpetrators or made any arrests. The rumors quickly spread that it was two or three people of Maghrebi origin who had wantonly beaten Tomás. Videos of the attack circulated. It wasn’t until later that the footage was proven to be months old and from a different region altogether, erroneously passed off as this crime.
But the fire was already ablaze, and men were in the streets.
Anti-immigrant sentiment conflagrated in group chats. The Spanish section of Deport Them Now, a Europe-wide network of far-right, anti-immigration groups, pinned a message to the top of its chat so it would be the first thing anyone saw upon joining: “Let’s go hunt. Everyone to Torre-Pacheco.”
Within hours of the attack, hundreds of activists from different regions of Spain piled into cars to “fight, trap, hang, behead” immigrants, as explicitly stated in the group chat, which has since been shut down by police. The chat’s leader was arrested a week later, accused of “instigating a ‘hunt’ for immigrants in Torre-Pacheco.” According to the Spanish Observatory of Racism and Xenophobia, 33,000 social media posts containing hate speech against immigrants were posted in a single day, on July 12.
For over a week, night after night, dozens roamed the streets of Torre-Pacheco, targeting people of foreign origin, including many second-generation immigrants born and raised in Spain. Residents, afraid to leave their homes, stuck to a self-imposed curfew of 8 p.m. From their windows, they saw their businesses vandalized and people hurt. On July 13, according to witnesses and local media, a group of 40 to 50 individuals, armed with bats, pepper spray and stones,
stormed a kebab restaurant, shouting, “Moro, close up, no work today” (“Moro” is a colloquial, often derogatory term used in Spain to refer to people of North African or Muslim origin). They destroyed the business, causing thousands in damage, and forcing Hassan, the owner, to flee through the back door, running for his life.
The events in Torre-Pacheco, which lasted for more than a week, led to at least 14 arrests — among them the actual attackers of Domingo Tomás, three Moroccan immigrants who were not residents of the town — as well as 140 reports filed and the identification of 700 individuals by the police.
Several months later, however, tensions in Torre-Pacheco remain high. The violence may have stopped, but the community is still deeply divided. Abdelali Chergui, a local resident, says that in early September, a meeting was held with the mayor, the Moroccan consul in the Region of Murcia, and several representatives of the Islamic community to seek ways to improve coexistence in the town.
Torre-Pacheco, of my neighbors,” he says. “I live in Spain and I defend this country; we are all equal.”
But, nothing feels equal right now in Chergui’s community.
“People are scared. I go out at night, and I see fear in their faces. It’s the elderly and the young who suffer the most.” Chergui says that many far-right groups “took advantage of the situation to stoke hatred against foreigners.” But what worries him most is school days for the children.
Beneath crystal chandeliers, the architects of a new “patriot” identity set out to redraw Europe’s political map.
While he won’t speak of the meeting, Chergui refuses to be presented as a representative of the Islamic community. “I am a representative of the people of
“It wasn’t only people from outside the town; there are public videos showing well-known local residents taking part in the hunt,” says Paulino Ros, a journalist, a sociology professor at the National University of Distance Education and a resident of the region. “The severity of the trauma depends on the color of your skin.” Ros, who runs the Islam in Murcia blog, has spent years researching the integration of immigrants belonging to a religious minority in southeastern Spain. “It isn’t accurate to say the town has returned to normal,” he explains. “A part of the community was attacked, and there are children who still don’t dare to leave their homes.”
OVER 100 POLICE REPORTS WERE FILED DURING ANTI-IMMIGRATION RIOTS IN TORREPACHECO, MURCIA, SPAIN, IN JULY.
FOLLOWING THE RIOTS, ANTI-RACIST RALLIES WERE ORGANIZED ACROSS MURCIA.
Ros points out that many young people in the town feel they belong nowhere. They were born and raised in Spain, don’t speak Arabic, have never set foot in Morocco, yet they are still treated as foreigners. “If a young person is told every day, ‘Moro, go back to your country,’ it’s very difficult for them to integrate.”
When the events in Torre-Pacheco took place, the town’s mayor, Pedro Ángel Roca Tornel (a member of the People’s Party), said in an interview with Cadena SER , Spain’s leading radio station, that the town had seen an increase in crime linked to immigration. However, there is no data to support that claim. According to the National Statistics Institute, Spain has twice as many foreign nationals today than in 2005, while Ministry of the Interior data show the crime rate is lower.
The case of Torre-Pacheco sparked a wave of public support for immigrants among left-wing political parties. At the same time, far-right networks, not only in Spain but across the continent, watched the unrest and applauded it. A chasm was deepening.
Amid the back-and-forth of polarized politics now sweeping the world, mainstream conservative parties in Europe have watched their closest allies drift further toward the extremes. And as the edges of the
spectrum pull away, the center itself begins to shift too. The question is: In which direction will centrists move — or be pulled? Harvard professor of political science Daniel Ziblatt notes in his theory of the conservative dilemma that center-right parties face a fundamental issue: Their ideological kinship with economic elites often clashes with the need to win broad democratic majorities, many of whom are living with the consequences of deepening inequality. To square the circle, they recast economic divides in cultural terms, focusing on issues such as immigration. But the far right pushes that rhetoric further, translating words into action, sometimes violent. That leaves conservatives in Europe at a crossroads: They may share elements of the far right’s agenda on immigration or fiscal policy, yet recoil from the violence it foments — and so does the broader public.
terrain shaped by extremism. Centrists now govern with thinner mandates, fragile coalitions and agendas that drift toward nationalist talking points.
The shocks of recent years — wars, a pandemic, technological disruption, waves of migration — have magnified the strain. Social media and alternative platforms (Telegram, X, WhatsApp) have given right-wing movements new channels to bypass traditional media and channel grievances about sovereignty, identity and immigration. Mainstream parties have scrambled to adjust. In Denmark, the left embraced tougher immigration laws; in France, President Emmanuel Macron pivoted to security-first rhetoric. In Brussels, centrist blocs cling to power by stitching together shifting majorities.
In this new political landscape, conservative centrists have never felt further apart from the rest of their party.
In this new political landscape, littered with hate speech and violent demonstrations, centrists have never felt further apart from the rest of their party.
Over the past 25 years, Europe’s political center has held. Since the 2008 financial crisis, two political blocs — Social Democrats on the center-left and Christian Democrats and Liberals on the center-right — have governed most countries. In Brussels, the de facto capital of the EU, centrist groups have also kept control of Parliament and the Commission. Yet their power is now under threat. They may be at the wheel, but they are increasingly navigating
BEHIND THE TIMES
Ideological transformations happen across generations, a culmination of histories, and responses to the moment. How did Europe get here? Time will tell.
The results, country by country, have been stark. Since 2022, right-wing leaders won elections in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Finland, Slovakia and Sweden. In France, Germany, Poland and the U.K., far-right parties are expanding their reach. Across Europe, the far right is no longer just setting its sights on power — it is reimagining the entire picture. What was once the center is shifting under voters’ feet, and forcing them to choose a side — the left or the right — rather than remain in the middle. The battle isn’t just for Torre-Pacheco. It’s the fight for Europe’s political soul.
But this is not merely a European story about shifting coalitions. It is part of a larger, global struggle over the future of pluralism and liberalism — the very ideals
democracy was designed to serve. If the center cannot hold, the question is not just whether democracy survives, but whether the open, tolerant societies it underpins can endure.
ON MARCH 4, 1964, the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna welcomed its first guests with the sparkle of a city stepping into a new era. Rising right beside the Stadtpark, and facing the gilded statue of Johann Strauss, it was Austria’s largest hotel at the time — a gleaming newcomer meant to fill a gap left by the ghost of Hotel Métropole, once Vienna’s grandest. Built in 1873, it was seized by the Nazis in 1938 from its Jewish owners and turned into the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo. On March 12, 1945, in the war’s final weeks, Allied bombs struck the building. Its ruins were demolished in 1948.
Vienna’s skyline was left with a hole until the Intercontinental Hotel opened. It was the first in the country’s history to belong to an international chain, restoring a sense of cosmopolitan grandeur to the city. Sixty years later, within those very walls, a meeting would take place that marked another turning point in Europe’s political history.
On June 30, 2024, three of the most influential figures of nationalist and populist right-wing politics in Europe — Herbert Kickl, chairman of Austria’s Freedom Party, FPÖ; Viktor Orbán, chairman of Hungary’s Fidesz party and prime minister of Hungary; and Andrej Babiš, chairman of the Czech Republic’s ANO party — met with Harald Vilimsky, head of the FPÖ delegation in the European Parliament. They signed
1945 1948 - 1949
End of World War II: Divided Europe; liberal democracy vs. communism.
Marshall Plan. European integration starts.
the Patriotic Manifesto for a European Future, laying the foundation for what would become the largest opposition party in the European Parliament: Patriots for Europe.
In the gilded rooms of a global hotel chain beneath crystal chandeliers, the architects of this new “patriot” identity were setting out to redraw Europe’s political map. The words “nation” and “national” appear 15 times in the manifesto. Its ideals are clear: identity, homeland, economic protectionism, tradition and a hard line against immigration. “Only through the victory and cooperation of patriotic and sovereigntist parties across the continent can we guarantee our children’s inheritance,” it reads.
A few years before the chandeliers were hung and the doors to the Intercontinental Hotel had anyone behind them, French diplomat Jean Monnet was charting a new
course for the continent. He envisioned a European project that would begin by placing coal and steel — the backbone of industry and armament — under a shared authority, and from there weave the economic and monetary ties that might, in time, sustain a deeper political union: the European Union.
For 80 years, that was the essence of the European project: a union born from the ruins of war, meant to guarantee peace through democracy, the rule of law and shared prosperity. Two political blocs, Christian Democrats (center-right) and Social Democrats (center-left), built welfare states and an open market where goods, people, services and capital could move freely. The promise was simple: Together, Europe would be stronger.
Since this foundation, the European
project has advanced in uneven, baby-like steps, the silver lining of each economic crisis being an opportunity — or a pretext — for a fresh layer of integration toward the initial goal.
Like the Covid-19 pandemic. Its intense and sudden economic uncertainty opened a door that had long seemed bolted shut: the creation of a transfer union. For years, Berlin had reassured its voters that German money would remain in Germany. But in the summer of 2020, Brussels agreed to mutualize debt and launch NextGenerationEU, a shared fund to help member states weather the economic storm.
In doing so, the Union crossed a quiet Rubicon. Commentators, searching for precedent, called it “Europe’s Hamiltonian moment,” in reference to Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 persuasion of the new federal government to assume the Revolutionary War debts of the 13 states, binding them financially to the union and laying the foundations of the soon-to-be United States of America. Brussels took a step of similar ambition, pooling the debts of its member states to confront a common crisis and, in doing so, tightening the bonds of the European project. But amid consolidation, several voices emerged intent on halting the idea of a union, rallying instead around sovereignty, homeland and patriotism.
There was some tension. The budding EU built much of its postwar identity around social rights — what the European Commission called the “European way of life.” It rested on equality, freedom and welfare guarantees, such as free health care and public education, often highlighted in opposition to the American system. For
1957
The Treaty of Rome establishes the European Economic Community, laying the groundwork for the modern EU.
The
Wall falls, alongside the collapse of the USSR. Liberal democracy spreads eastward and new political parties emerge.
The Maastricht Treaty creates the European Union and the euro.
FROM LEFT: FORMER CZECH REPUBLIC PRIME MINISTER ANDREJ BABIS, AUSTRIA’S FREEDOM PARTY LEADER HERBERT KICKL, AND HUNGARY PRIME MINISTER VIKTOR ORBÁN ANNOUNCED A NEW FAR-RIGHT ALLIANCE IN VIENNA IN 2024, INVITING OTHER NATIONS AND POLITICIANS TO JOIN THEIR MOVEMENT.
Berlin
decades, that promise of social protection became Europe’s distinctive marker, the glue holding together very different nations under a shared project. Now, that identity is under strain: Rising inequality and cultural backlash have chipped away at the consensus, opening space for movements that question the very foundations of the European project. America is facing the same tension. These world powers that built their economies and democracies in very different ways now find themselves desperately trying to hold on to both.
THE 2008 FINANCIAL crash, the 2015 refugee crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, the energy crisis of 2022, inflation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A series of crises that seemed like a chance for union integration simultaneously left a large population of Europeans feeling abandoned and distrustful of the system. Leveraging that distrust has been easy for right-wing extreme sentiment and euroskepticism (that is, the view that the European Union holds too much power over its member states and that nations should reclaim more control over their own laws, borders and economies). Brexit, for example, was the direct consequence of a polycrisis — a convergence of economic turmoil, nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, the grievances of those left behind by globalization, and Britain’s long-simmering, deep-rooted euroskepticism.
This spreading doubt severed the longstanding political loyalties of many Europeans, weakening the Social Democrat (center-left) and Christian Democrat and Liberal (center-right) voter bases. Together,
these three parties have dominated European politics for decades, building welfare states and defending further EU integration. But Europe’s parliamentary systems are different from the U.S.; most are proportional, multiparty systems, not rigid two-party duopolies. That means new political forces can break through more easily, threatening the hegemony of the blocs. It also means coalition governments are the norm.
For years, this dynamic kept extremist parties isolated, since mainstream groups of different ideologies could band together to form “grand coalitions” and shut them out. The flip side, however, is that fragmentation weakens the traditional center, making governance more fragile. As doubt spread and loyalty to centrist parties frayed, the gaps widened, allowing extremist parties a way in. As the political noise amplified, more Europeans felt unheard.
This growing crisis of representation isn’t just a symptom of weakening traditional parties. It’s also a manifestation of growing dissatisfaction among the people of Europe, America and elsewhere around the world. It could be the end of the neoliberal order, an era of global capitalism, of relatively open borders that underwrote decades of prosperity.
Inequality is contributing to the “reservoir of discontent” among voters, which has recently achieved a critical mass and made the radical right an appealing choice.
for large segments of the electorate,” Martin Lukk, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, writes. “As the radical right has in many cases courted voters with similar messages for decades, inequality is seen as a key feature of the context that has recently made these appeals successful, evidenced by the dramatic successes of radical-right parties around the world and cases such as Trump and Brexit.” Lukk also points out that inequality on its own can suppress political participation among the segments of the population that right-wing groups are interested in. These voters are mobilized by tapping into the desire to assert in/out groups, and inequality creates the conditions for those feelings to flourish.
Many parties have learned to channel discontent, fear and anger into a discourse aimed at specific groups, with the “nation” cast as the unifying thread, in order to change policy or reshape a country.
THE PAST 20 YEARS
“Scholars have identified inequality as contributing to the formation of a ‘reservoir of discontent’ among voters, which has recently achieved a critical mass and made the radical right an appealing choice
In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has become an increasingly xenophobic and Islamophobic, euroskeptic, ethnonationalist, far-right conservative party with identitarian leanings, close ties to Russia and China, anti-American rhetoric, and authoritarian traits. This year, it secured second place in federal elections, becoming Germany’s largest opposition party with just over 20 percent of the vote, and performed especially well in the east. All major parties, however, continue to uphold a cordon sanitaire against the AfD, refusing to enter
2005
France and the Netherlands reject the proposed European Constitution, strengthening euroskeptic movements.
2007
Treaty of Lisbon reforms EU institutions, expanding the powers of the European Parliament and strengthening the EU’s foreign policy role.
coalitions or support legislation with the party at either the federal or state level.
In France, two far-right parties are expected to play a major role in the 2027 election: the National Rally, with Jordan Bardella as candidate after Marine Le Pen’s disqualification, and Reconquête, led by Éric Zemmour, known for his Islamophobic rhetoric and promotion of the “great replacement theory,” which claims that foreign Muslims will supplant the native French population.
The stakes are high. If both France and Germany, the EU’s two most influential members, were to elect right-wing, euroskeptic governments, the union could face a profound transformation. The shift has already begun, and this would tip the scales.
The 2024 European elections consolidated three distinct right-wing, euroskeptic groups in the European Parliament: Europe of Sovereign Nations (an alliance of extreme-right, nationalist parties including Germany’s AfD), Patriots for Europe (a far-right, populist coalition built around Austria’s FPÖ, Hungary’s Fidesz and the Czech Republic’s ANO), and the European Conservatives and Reformists (a more traditional conservative and euroskeptic alliance that includes Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party and Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party). Their growing numbers matter well beyond their member states. In Brussels, they now have the numbers to shape the balance of power within EU institutions and shift EU legislation.
Already, there has been a slowdown in certain elements of the Green Deal — the EU’s flagship climate and environmental
agenda — in response to an erosion of support and to protests in countries such as the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland and Spain. These protests, which halted economies and literally highways across Europe, put an unlikely character at the center of global political debate: the farmer.
FEW GROUPS ILLUSTRATE Europe’s crisis of representation as vividly as farmers do. Across the continent, they have taken to the streets, convinced that no one is listening. “We protest because no one sits down with us to ask our opinion, and when they do, they ignore us,” says Andrés Góngora, a farmer and board member of the Coordinator of Professional Agrarian Organizations, which keeps an office in Brussels to lobby on agricultural policy. Their frustration has become fertile ground for new politics, fueled as much by fear as by anger.
Góngora says farmers feel “marginalized” by the system. “We are going through one of the worst moments in the history of agricultural policy. Decision-makers in Brussels have turned their backs on us and see agriculture only through the lens of the environment.”
Speaking with Góngora, it becomes clear that the problem is not just a clash between the productive model of agriculture and green policies, but, more so, a profound lack of communication.
José Manuel Roche, a farmer and the secretary of international relations at the Union of Small Farmers, agrees.
“I’ve always said that we farmers would be far worse off outside the European Union. But when commercial and environmental
projects are pushed through without listening to us, it fuels deep discontent within the sector. It feeds euroskepticism.”
In several countries, farmers’ protests have been large, highly visible and at times disruptive, blocking highways and bringing major cities to a standstill. In the Netherlands, France and Germany, they have drawn tens of thousands of participants; in Poland and Spain, they have spread nationwide, halting major highways. In many of these cases, far-right parties and movements have encouraged the demonstrations, amplifying farmers’ grievances and folding them into a broader anti-EU narrative.
The protests, of course, are about much more than farming. They’re morphing into something larger, more combustible. Economic grievances become cultural grievances; calls for fairness harden into calls for nationalism; suspicion of outsiders turns into outright xenophobia. And from there, the slide is familiar: racism, the corrosion of democratic norms and, ultimately, the unraveling of liberal society itself.
These dynamics are not confined to Europe. They are seeping into the American psyche, too. In a nationally representative poll by Tufts University’s CIRCLE and Protect Democracy, nearly one-third of Americans ages 18 to 29 say they have little confidence in democracy, and are increasingly open to authoritarian alternatives.
But globally, there are voices that are trying to calm the rising tensions.
Joshua Steib, a 22-year-old climate advocate from Germany, recalls that he began climate activism at the age of 15. What started as a school project eventually became his life mission. He served as an EU Young Energy
2008 - 2015 2010 2015 - 2016
European migration crisis boosts far-right narratives. Brexit becomes official, signaling nationalist and anti-EU sentiments.
Global financial and eurozone crises fuel the rise of populist and antiestablishment parties.
Viktor Orbán returns to power in Hungary and promotes “illiberal democracy,” influencing far-right movements across Europe.
Ambassador and has been a delegate at more than five United Nations conferences.
“Many people think of the EU as a technocratic body that harms their way of life, when in reality most of the EU’s climaterelated decisions are tied to subsidies and incentives for economies and businesses,” he says. “This agenda is being instrumentalized by certain parties and conservative associations to create a mainstream narrative about climate action in the EU that is completely false.”
In his view, the EU needs to find a way to rewrite that story. “People get angry because they believe certain climate measures will take something away from them … that’s a sentiment quite widespread in the EU. That’s scary. Fear of change is fundamental to human psychology,” he says.
But rather than working to address specific concerns within the public, experts
note that political parties are instead using those concerns to reshape democracy. By some definitions, this is a textbook case of autocratization.
According to the 2025 Varieties of Democracy report, Slovakia’s liberal democracy score has plummeted in just two years. The country is now “deeply polarized” and “only a thin margin away from the autocratization threshold.” In Hungary, it began quietly, with just a few legislative changes. Then, the government gradually undermined judicial independence by appointing loyalist judges.
When Viktor Orbán began his third term as prime minister in 2018, he told Parliament: “The age of liberal democracy is at an end.” Except, this time, there were no tanks in the streets, no curfews announced over loudspeakers — only laws rushed through in late-night sessions, and critical voices pushed aside.
IN 2024, FARMERS STAGED MORE THAN 4,000 PROTESTS ACROSS THE CONTINENT TO EXPRESS POLITICAL DISCONTENT — BLOCKING ROADS AND SUPERMARKETS WITH THEIR TRACTORS IN RESPONSE TO SUBSIDY ROLLBACKS, ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS AND IMPORT POLICIES.
Central European University, for instance, was forced to leave Budapest and relocate to Vienna. The school’s exodus echoes similar tensions across the Atlantic, where traditional universities and Ivy League institutions have been rebranded as adversaries of the government, instead of institutions of educational ideals and liberty.
“This is not just a way to suppress dissent,” says Dimitry Kochenov, the head of Rule of Law research at CEU Democracy Institute. “It was precisely the image of excellence in the social sciences, of an open society, that threatened (Orban.) It was absolutely impossible for the government to tolerate the school. … Because in order to be world-class, you need to think a little bit.”
The Central European University was founded by Hungarian American billionaire George Soros in 1991. “The mission of the university was about building liberal, pluralist democracies around the world,” says Kochenov, who was one of the last to stay when Orbán expelled the university, and now commutes to Vienna to teach.
“When Orbán decided that Hungary would be an ‘illiberal democracy,’ the government’s official line became incompatible with what CEU stands for.”
Aside from education, Orbán has also targeted religious freedom. His “church
Far-right coalitions gain traction in Italy, while Yellow Vest protests take place in France, fueling euroskepticism.
Covid-19 pandemic deepens polarization.
Far-right populism advances: Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Vox in Spain, National Rally in France; entrenched ideological polarization across Europe.
law,” for instance, stripped hundreds of religious organizations of their official status. In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the law violated the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of association.
As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn in “How Democracies Die,” the end comes “at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”
IN HIS NEW YORK Times article, “Why My Father Votes for Le Pen,” French writer Édouard Louis recalls that when he emailed the manuscript of his novel “The End of Eddy” to a major Paris publisher, the editor replied that they couldn’t publish it because the poverty he described “hadn’t existed in more than a century.” But it had. And its victims were voting for Marine Le Pen. “Today, writers, journalists, and liberals bear the weight of responsibility for the future,” Louis writes. “To persuade my family not to vote for Marine Le Pen, it’s not enough to show that she is racist and dangerous. … We have to fight for the powerless — people like my father.”
Why are people voting for extreme parties? Sociologists and political scientists don’t seem to agree, but many blame the economy.
As Thomas Piketty argued in his bestseller, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” growing inequality is a key driver. Yet the problem is not only shrinking purchasing power, unemployment or inflation. It is also the fear of losing social standing. This fear helps explain why populist parties across Europe attract not only those who have already been hit hard by economic crises but also people who fear they could be next. Research has long noted the gap between how voters see their own lives and how they judge the nation as a whole. Ivan Tubio, a political scientist and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, argues that while the roots of Europe’s far-right surge are varied, certain patterns recur across democracies on both sides of
the Atlantic. “Job insecurity is a recurrent factor,” he says, “but it accounts for less than a quarter of the far-right electorate, which shows why the ‘economic losers’ explanation is too limited.” More often, the common threads are lower levels of education and a simmering hostility toward immigration, forces that cut across borders and repeatedly push politics toward the extremes.
Immigration has been a central theme in far-right speech across Europe, as seen in events such as those in Torre-Pacheco and in the electoral success of leaders like Meloni in Italy, whose 2022 campaign for prime minister placed immigration at its core. Other recurring themes include concerns over sovereignty, religion, traditional values, and the political mobilization of women and minorities.
Other experts, however, blame the system.
Iago Moreno, a sociologist and an expert on disinformation campaigns, argues that the far right’s success is rooted in massive disinformation campaigns. “There are structures that connect the organizers of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol with far-right groups in Europe and, for example, with the rise of Javier Milei in Argentina,” he says. “That goes beyond sharing a common ideology. They come together in international forums and pursue financial and political goals through think tanks that keep them connected.”
fundamental tension between inclusive welfare policies on the one hand and the consequences of immigration on the other. A similar strain is evident in the conservative predicament: Center-right political parties often find themselves torn between their alignment with economic elites and the need to win over broad majorities in democratic elections.
But if the politics of each ideal are facing dilemmas, then the biggest of all is being faced by voters.
Whether it’s economic hardship or sociocultural grievances, a growing share of voters is drifting away from the center — and time to figure out the “why” is running out.
Javier Padilla, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Politics at the City University of New York, explains that far-right voters are deeply dissatisfied with how democracy works and feel poorly represented. “This is structural, not circumstantial,” Padilla says. “It has less to do with the policies of any given moment and more to do with how they perceive the world.” He notes that this dissatisfaction is particularly pronounced among young male voters, who tend to have especially low levels of trust in the democratic system. What remains of center-right parties faces a difficult strategic choice in responding to far-right movements. According to Padilla, they can either ostracize these parties, keeping a clear distance, or accommodate some of their positions to try to win over their voters.
Whether it’s responding to the will of voters, economic hardship, sociocultural grievances or the pull of disinformation campaigns, a growing share of voters is drifting away from the center — and time to figure out the “why” is running out. The question now, according to Moreno, is how to respond.
CONSERVATIVES AROUND THE world are in a dilemma. So are progressives. The progressive dilemma poses the
Neither strategy is without risk. Padilla warns that even if a far-right party disappears, another is likely to take its place. On the other hand, when mainstream parties adopt the far right’s rhetoric, they make its logic part of the mainstream, many voters feel they only have one choice, and the consequences are felt long after the crowds have gone home.
In Torre-Pacheco, as local Paulino Ros recounts, the violence dissipated, but its shadow has not. The streets may be quiet now, but the fear, the suspicion and the politics that fed them are loud.
IN 2012, AFTER BEING ADMITTED TO THE HOSPITAL FOR ALMOST A WEEK
FOLLOWING AN ASTHMA ATTACK, A 7-YEAR-OLD DYLAN
IVEY MEASURED HIS AIR INTAKE. SEVERE ASTHMA CONTINUES TO BE WIDESPREAD IN BAKERSFIELD MORE THAN A DECADE LATER.
STILL Breathing
LIFE IN AMERICA’S MOST POLLUTED CITY
BY Natalia GALICZA
| PHOTOGRAPHY BY Lexey swall
Every night, not long after the sun drops below the dusty horizon on the o utskirts of Bakersfield, Jesus Alonso begins the ritual of safely putting his eight-year-old son, also named Jesus, to bed.
In the same home he grew up in, in the same bedroom where he slept throughout his own adolescence, the older Jesus goes to his child’s bedside and sets him at a 45-degree angle, so his head is elevated, to help him breathe, and always on his side — in case he throws up in his sleep. He puts a bucket beside the mattress for the same reason. A freshly cleaned and refilled humidifier infused with a liquid cough suppressant exhales camphor- and menthol-scented mist. Jesus aims an air purifier at his son’s bed, but not directly; the air is angled to blow onto him from off the wall so it works without hitting him too hard. Jesus developed this routine out of desperation. It’s the only measure — despite dozens of medications and doctor visits — that seems to work.
The child has had coughing fits for more than half of his young life. The spells always strike at night, usually during seasonal transitions. They can last 15 to 45 minutes and continue for days or weeks at a time. He
usually coughs so much he vomits. Sometimes Jesus adds extra steps to the routine, like slathering VapoRub on his son’s chest or sleeping beside him to make sure he maintains that 45-degree angle throughout the night.
The American Lung Association has ranked Bakersfield, California, worst in the nation for year-round particle pollution six years in a row and worst for short-term particle pollution for three. The association’s 2025 State of the Air report, released in April, also places the metropolitan area in third for ground-level ozone. The only two cities that out-polluted Bakersfield in that category are Los Angeles and Visalia, each around 100 miles away in either direction.
There’s no escaping the pollution that wreaks havoc on Jesus’ family’s health. Only the attempt to manage the fallout. Especially where they live, in Lamont, an unincorporated community 14 miles out of Bakersfield where 94 percent of people are
Hispanic and 35 percent live below the poverty line. The nearest refinery is less than two miles away from home, while oil wells and agricultural fields surround the house on all sides.
This intractable problem surrounds Jesus in other ways. It envelops not only his home life — which includes his adult brother, their parents, Jesus’ wife, young Jesus and another child, five-year-old Carlos, all under the same roof — but his professional life, too. An organizer with Clean Water Action, a nationwide environmental advocacy group, the 34-year-old is tasked with liaising between conflicting interest groups: industry leaders in energy and agriculture throughout Bakersfield, California, and the people who live amid their pollution. Through his work, Jesus has successfully advocated for more mandated distance between oil wells and private residences. He visits households across Kern County, teaching them how to report air quality
concerns and how to protect their air at home with purifiers and filters. He attends events like community harvest festivals to connect with people who might otherwise not know what to look out for when the problem is invisible and everywhere all at once. He speaks out at town hall meetings, pressing local lawmakers to confront the impact pollution has on residents. But it’s notoriously difficult to legislate solutions. Even more so now than when Jesus was growing up, coughing and wheezing and struggling to breathe like his son does
today. Federal laws passed as recently as 2025 have collared California’s ability to reduce harmful emissions.
His entire life, Jesus has fought this seemingly endless battle. He’s done so knowing there’s no guarantee he’ll see dramatic results within his lifetime. And if it were just him, that knowledge would feel easier to grapple with. As his family grows, so does his need to find some slight semblance of control over his situation. Even if it’s just a carefully calibrated routine to keep a child alive, one night at a time.
HE COULD FEEL his heartbeat in his ears as his soles struck the ground. He thump-thump-thumped all the way to the end of the track at Mountain View Middle School. In seventh grade, in the early 2000s, when his P.E. class ran the mile, Jesus challenged himself on the final stretch by sprinting as fast as his feet could carry him. He was on the cusp of his teen years then, just beginning to learn what the body is capable of. Sometimes, during those sprints, he saw plumes from the smokestack across the street billow and blow over the field. But he never thought anything of it. Until one day, in 2004, when his chest started stinging after a routine run.
The pain came from deep within his lungs, as if there were daggers under his rib cage. He couldn’t breathe. He gasped for air for seconds, minutes, likely inhaling microscopic particles of soot, dust, heavy metals and carbons. These tiny solid and liquid particles hung everywhere in the air around him — byproducts of wildfires, agriculture, vehicle emissions and mining operations. Or maybe it was the ground-level ozone blocking his airways — a mix of nitrous oxides and volatile organic compounds, gasses also released by transportation and energy production, that chemically react with heat and sunlight to produce smog. Both microparticles and ground-level ozone can cause asthma attacks, lung infections, heart attacks, cancers, strokes and premature death. Risk is especially high for people of color, who make up an estimated 92 percent of Californians living within a mile of oil and gas drilling. Not that Jesus knew any of that. He puffed and wheezed and tried to suck in as much air as he could.
At first he chalked it up to physical activity. Maybe he just pushed himself too hard. But it kept happening. He had coughing fits even when he wasn’t running. Most kids in his school carried inhalers, but Jesus didn’t understand his symptoms as warning signs of asthma. The following fall, in eighth grade, during football practice, a windstorm kicked up dust and pesticides from the nearby farm fields. Some of his
MICHAEL GILBERT LOPEZ
COMMUNITY ORGANIZER JESUS ALONSO GREW UP IN THE BAKERSFIELD REGION, WHERE HE ADVOCATES FOR CLEANER AIR AND WATER — AND FIGHTS FOR THE LIVES OF HIS COMMUNITY AND FAMILY.
teammates were sick for weeks afterward. Even then, Jesus didn’t think to connect the pollution to his health. So used to the constant haze, he assumed the color of the sky everywhere was the same grayish blue. He thought all of it — the pain, the trouble breathing, the air — was normal.
Before he was born, in the early 1990s, Jesus’ father moved to California from Guerrero, a state in southwestern Mexico near Oaxaca. Jesus remembers hardly seeing his dad during some of the harvest seasons because he’d leave too early in the morning to go to the fields and arrive home too late at night. When his father came home from harvesting, pruning and sorting grapes all across the Central Valley, he’d be covered in dust and pesticides. Jesus couldn’t hug his father or even stand near him until he showered off all the chemicals and grime. “That was pretty much the life of everyone here,” he says. “All our parents worked in the fields.”
Kern County produces much of the nation’s agriculture, including 20 percent of citrus, 44 percent of grapes and 80 percent of the carrots consumed across the country.
It also produces the second largest share of oil out of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States. Roughly 1 in 5 jobs in Kern County are agricultural, while 1 in 7 workers have ties to the oil and gas industry. Hundreds of thousands more work in the transportation sector statewide, which contributes to vehicle emissions, the foremost source of pollution in California and the country at large. (Just under half of all Americans live in an area where they’re exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution. But nearly all Californians — more than 90 percent — live with unhealthy air.)
Bakersfield sits in a bowl surrounded by the California Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada mountains, which traps in contaminants. Along California Avenue, the main corridor through the city, hotels and restaurants share real estate with nodding steel pumpjacks pulling oil from the earth. They’re more plentiful and stand taller than any nearby trees. And though the beige landscape looks drained and picked through, the sky tinged sepia with dust, there’s undeniable pride in the bounty plucked from the ground beneath the community’s feet. The
high school football team is the Bakersfield Drillers. Two unincorporated towns nearby are dubbed Oil City and Oildale.
More than half of the buildings in Bakersfield are considered at risk of wildfire, and more than half of the people who live there are actively affected by drought. These disasters create the dry, dusty conditions that ultimately worsen pollution, while energy production increases the risk of fire and drought by baking the world in carbon. “Being from Bakersfield is like being born as a frog in boiling water,” says Cesar Aguirre, associate director with the Central California Environmental Justice Network.
“You don’t know that it’s dangerous until someone comes and tells you that the water is boiling. Then you start to feel the heat.”
Further out, in the outskirts where Jesus, his family and his community members live, the land is even harsher, seemingly every surface covered in dust, debris floating in the air like glitter in a snow globe. “Parents are often really concerned about their kids’ health. People don’t want to go outside. They will try to find how they can stay inside as much as possible,” says Vivian
ALMOND HARVEST SEASON, AUGUST THROUGH OCTOBER, KICKS UP DUST THAT SPREADS THROUGHOUT THE BAKERSFIELD REGION.
KERN COUNTY PRODUCES MUCH OF THE NATION’S AGRICULTURE AND THE SECOND LARGEST SHARE OF OIL OUT OF THE MORE THAN 3,000 COUNTIES IN THE UNITED STATES.
Underhill, an anthropologist who researches environmental justice across the West. “It creates a disconnect from the environment that becomes really oppressive over time.”
One in 6 children in Kern County are diagnosed with asthma, and regular exposure to pollutants means an otherwise treatable illness can easily turn life-threatening. That’s “very difficult to grasp, because we know that asthma is manageable,” says Graciela Deniz-Anaya, director of community health for the nonprofit Central California Asthma Collaborative. Yet the most recent numbers from the California Health and Human Services Agency show that in 2023 alone, 2,845 people in Kern County visited emergency departments due to complications of asthma. Another 246 people were hospitalized by it.
California has always had a push-and-pull relationship to air pollution. The state enacted the first vehicle emissions standards in the nation in 1966, years before the federal Clean Air Act, making it a national policy leader on air quality issues. Then, in 1984, it set a nationwide precedent for environmental redlining, when the California Waste Management Board paid half a million dollars to a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, Cerrell Associates, to identify demographics that would be least resistant to nearby construction of waste incinerator facilities. These facilities don’t just decrease property value, they damage health by burning trash and releasing heavy metals, acidic gasses and toxic chemicals into the air. The now-infamous “Cerrell Report” identifies rural, low-income communities as ideal targets. It would go on to become one of the most egregious, widely cited examples of how industry and government collude to place certain demographics near environmental health hazards. It would also go on to act as grounds for perpetuating the cycle.
In California, historically redlined areas with higher concentrations of low-income residents and people of color report more emergency room visits due to asthma. That’s largely why asthma is considered the most racially disparate health condition in the
United States. “It’s not someone’s fault if they have asthma,” Deniz-Anaya says. “Unfortunately not everyone has the ability to move somewhere that is not heavily polluted.”
Jesus continued to endure coughing fits into college. At their worst, the spells lasted months at a time. He’d hack so hard and so uncontrollably that he’d go entire nights without sleeping. He struggled to breathe, went to doctors, tried different medications and asked himself countless times: “Why is this happening to me? I don’t know what I did.”
As he moved into early adulthood, he came to realize the people who keep polluting industries alive by financial or circumstantial necessity — people like his father, his neighbors, himself by proxy — are the same people who suffer most from that pollution. As far as the air quality lottery, he now saw, he’d been born with a losing ticket. That’s part of what drove him toward organizing for environmental justice. Though that same realization struck much harder later, once he learned how that luck would come to affect his own children.
BY 2020, JESUS had a family of his own, including then-three-year-old Jesus Jr. and a newborn. They slept in Jesus’ childhood bedroom, with his parents living in the primary bedroom down the hall and his brother in the room across from his. Largely the same setup Jesus grew up with, except now the white walls were sky blue with painted trees in each corner. He wanted to give the illusion of an outdoor oasis where his family could relax and breathe fresh air. One night that year, Jesus tucked his eldest into bed, directly under glow-in-the-dark star stickers and a Crayola family portrait the three-year-old had drawn on the wall in blues, greens, yellows and purples. Then he tucked himself in beside his wife and went to sleep.
Soon he woke to a familiar sound. Only this time, it came from his kid. The child gasped for breath. Jesus and his wife shot out of bed. They rushed over, trying to sit their son upright and keep him calm but
“PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO GO OUTSIDE. THEY WILL TRY TO FIND HOW THEY CAN STAY INSIDE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. IT CREATES A DISCONNECT FROM THE ENVIRONMENT THAT BECOMES REALLY OPPRESSIVE OVER TIME.”
he kept coughing. He coughed so hard he threw up. After nearly an hour, once he could breathe again, he fell back to sleep from exhaustion.
The whole time he watched his son struggle to breathe, Jesus couldn’t stop thinking back to his own childhood. It was as if he could feel those same daggers in his chest. That same panic. The nearest hospital was half an hour away. Despite trying every cough medication Jesus could get over the counter or prescribed through a doctor, his son coughed each night until he threw up for a week and a half straight. “I think I’m pretty calm in emergency situations,” Jesus says. But when it comes to his son, “I’m always struggling not to crack.”
He and his wife considered moving from the Bakersfield area. They’d be leaving their extended family and community behind, and they could hardly afford a move, but when he saw the physical toll the pollution took on his son, Jesus knew they had to consider it.
But he worked for an environmental nonprofit because he wanted to strengthen his community for future generations. This is the place that made him, that made his family. He’d seen the toll pollution had taken on others — the residents who call him when they see or smell smoke out of fear it’s a gas leak or a fire or some other cancer-causing disaster. He understood more than most people that air, as much as it gives life, can also take it away. He also knew that change can happen. And he understood he had to be around to push for it.
Last year, the Central California Environmental Justice Network independently inspected oil and gas infrastructure in disadvantaged neighborhoods around Kern County and found that 30 percent of the surveyed oil wells and gas tanks were actively leaking methane, which contributes to ozone pollution and can be fatal to humans. Leaks like these have been proven to enter individual households in the area, like in Arvin back in 2014, when an underground pipeline leaked explosive levels of methane gas inside eight homes. Those families
had to be evacuated for seven months. One sample came from inside the bedroom of a pregnant woman. “And the person who owns that house, her sister lived with her then and now has lung cancer,” says Aguirre, with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, who helped investigate the leak.
In 2018, just two years before his son’s first asthma attack, Jesus’ organization worked together with Aguirre and the Committee for a Better Arvin to successfully pass a city ordinance that required at least 300 feet between any new oil and gas wells and homes, schools and clinics. This legislation helped pave the way for Senate Bill 1137 to become law in 2022 — which mandates a 3,200-feet buffer between wells and sensitive areas. More recently, in March 2025, California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation created the first pesticide alert system in the nation. Residents can sign up to receive digital notification of whether pesticides will be sprayed within a square mile of their address up to two days in advance.
Even the last State of the Air report shows marked progress in air quality for the metropolitan area. Bakersfield experienced a weighted average of 17.5 fewer “bad air” days between 2021 and 2023 and the fewest-ever number of days with unhealthy ozone levels. Financial incentives for driving electric freight trucks and swapping diesel irrigation systems for electric alternatives are driving that change. “You can see improvements coming from the transportation sector shifting from older trucks to cleaner trucks that need certification standards for emission,” says Mariela Ruacho, senior clean air advocacy manager for the American Lung Association in California. “And then we’re slowly going into electrifying some of these pollution sources.”
Now federal interference is blocking preventative policies to curb pollution in the state. In 2022, California passed a law that would gradually phase out gas-fueled cars, mandating that, by 2035, all new cars sold within the state be zero emission. It was the most aggressive policy action in
the country to tackle the largest source of pollution in the United States. Until May 2025, when the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed a measure that supersedes the state’s power and blocks the mandate on the grounds that it unfairly created a new national standard. The state of California has countered by filing a lawsuit and vowing to create new mandates. Whether that will materialize at all, let alone soon enough to benefit Jesus’ family, remains unclear.
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON this August, Jesus drove 14 minutes from his home in Lamont to Arvin — the same community where he helped advocate for a mandatory buffer zone between energy infrastructure and homes or schools. He went to look at oil wells, to remind himself of what’s already been accomplished and what there is left to be done. Dust and smog hung heavy in the air.
The pumpjacks bowed and rose and bowed again, pulling oil from the earth. As they bobbed up and down, like novelty
drinking birds scattered across the field, they kicked up dirt. Or maybe the haze came from the almond trees, which are shaken down by the hundreds of millions at the end of summer for harvest, flinging their debris skyward. Jesus wasn’t sure. He could see both outside the car window: the steel machines, the fields of sandy soil. A brown tinge to the sky around him. And when his phone rang, he knew he wasn’t the only one who saw it.
“Bueno,” he answered.
“Buenas tardes.” The caller went on to say, in Spanish, that she smelled a strong odor. Something was burning, maybe grass or wood, she didn’t know. But the sky was thick with smoke.
Jesus directed her to an environmental monitoring system where she could file a report and get connected with an enforcement agency to investigate the issue. He didn’t know the woman on the line. Not really. Just that she’s a community member in Lost Hills, 50 miles away, and she’d been exposed to something she shouldn’t. He couldn’t help shake the feeling that it
would be a long while before incidents like this surprised him. In 2015 and 2020 and again in 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency found that the San Joaquin Valley — the southern portion of the Central Valley that includes Bakersfield — was the only major air basin in the country that failed to meet federal standards for long-term exposure to particle pollution set back in 1997.
There have been steps toward progress in more recent years, steps worth celebrating, yet Jesus knows there remains far more to be done. And plenty can happen in the time it takes to work toward safe air quality standards. To Jesus, his child, or anyone else in their community. Recent budgetary reshuffling, like a $1 trillion slash to Medicaid (known as Medi-Cal in California) within the next decade, has placed undue strain on asthma resources. The Central California Asthma Collaborative’s Kern County staff was halved from eight people to four earlier this year. “The team wasn’t that big, but it was big enough for us to serve close to 3,000 residents of Kern County. So at 50 percent capacity, that’s definitely going to lessen,” says Deniz-Anaya, the director of community health for the nonprofit. “I think this is the first wave of what we’re going to see coming in the next couple of years.”
On his way back home, Jesus drove past an elementary school that sits some 200 feet from an oil well. He drove past a high school that’s surrounded by almond, pistachio and pomegranate trees, and half a mile from an oil well that leaked noxious gas a few years ago. He drove 15 minutes until he passed his old middle school, near a refinery. Then he got another call.
The same woman had learned the smell she noticed earlier came from an accident on I-5. A car flipped over and burned a stretch of grass. Officials put out the flames around one in the afternoon, but by five o’clock that evening, the fumes were still there.
“No sale el sol por el humo,” she told him. The sun can’t come out because of the smoke.
OIL PUMPS DOT THE LANDSCAPE ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BAKERSFIELD.
POWER PLAY
HOW TRUMP IS TESTING THE COURT’S SKEPTICISM OF EXECUTIVE POWER
WBY BRENT SKORUP
ITH A DIVIDED Congress that long ago ceded much of its responsibility to the executive branch and an energetic president eager to take advantage of that, litigants often look to the least democratic branch to police the boundaries of government power — the federal courts. Under those current circumstances, the nation’s highest court now carries an outsized burden in deciding how much authority presidents can wield.
If recent years are an indication of where the U.S. Supreme Court stands, majorities of the nine justices have shown a greater skepticism toward broad assertions of power by the executive branch. In a 2022 case
involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of the Clean Air Act, the court held that Congress must “speak clearly” before the justices let lawmakers delegate decisions of “vast economic and political significance” to the executive. The following year, the court struck down President Joe Biden’s attempt to use a vague statute to cancel over $400 billion in student loans. And in a landmark government regulation case overturning the longheld Chevron deference legal doctrine, the court ruled last year that an agency’s interpretation of ambiguous laws is not entitled to deference; rather, it is the judiciary’s duty to “determine the best reading” of a contested statute.
The key question for the Supreme Court’s upcoming term is whether its recent pushback on presidential authority will continue. For 50 years, the court has steadily decided fewer cases, and Chief Justice John Roberts’ court now issues the fewest decisions in modern history. A newer trend is its growing reliance on its “emergency docket” to issue terse, sometimes cryptic guidance. Meanwhile, the Trump administration — governing largely through executive orders on tariffs, birthright citizenship and more — appears poised to test the court’s skepticism of sweeping presidential power.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S 2020 defeat gave him and the MAGA movement four years to plan and to learn from the real and perceived mistakes that frustrated Trump’s agenda in his first term. This time, things are different. Several prominent agencies have been dismantled or left operating with skeleton staff. Deportations have surged. The president discontinued the system of racial preferences for federal employees and contractors that President Lyndon Johnson established in the 1960s.
FROM THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION UNTIL BIDEN’S TERM, PRESIDENTS HAVE AVERAGED A FEW DOZEN EXECUTIVE ORDERS PER YEAR. TRUMP HAS ALREADY ISSUED AROUND 200 AND IS ON PACE TO EXCEED HIS FIRST-TERM TOTAL WITHIN A SINGLE YEAR.
Hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops have been dispatched to assist police in Washington, D.C., and other cities. And beginning this past spring, Trump started to impose huge trade tariffs — the administration boasts it will generate $300 billion to partially offset a budget deficit this year.
Whatever one thinks of these actions, what is striking is how quickly this agenda was accomplished — within weeks — largely because the president acted unilaterally with executive orders rather than new legislation. Former President Barack Obama once championed this approach — “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone” — but Trump, far less trusting of career bureaucrats than his predecessors, has concentrated decision-making in a tight inner circle. The result is a muscular assertion of presidential power in domestic affairs not seen since the Richard Nixon and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations.
Modern presidents’ reliance on executive orders largely begins with Roosevelt. When he entered office in 1933, he inherited a fragile economy. Within 48 hours, he shuttered much of the banking system, citing a strained reading of a World War I statute. Congress quickly ratified his move in the Emergency Banking Act.
This episode inaugurated what might be called the “emergency presidency” — since 1933, the United States has been almost continuously under some form of presidentially declared national emergency. Roosevelt issued over 1,500 executive orders in his first term alone, including one criminalizing “gold hoarding” and requiring Americans to surrender their gold to banks. Congress responded by passing the Gold Reserve Act, which put the president in charge of monetary policy, and Roosevelt promptly devalued the dollar by raising the gold price about 40 percent by proclamation. Other orders spawned massive programs like the Works Progress Administration, which employed millions and authorized the government seizure of aviation plants in preparation for war.
The use of emergency orders was not limited to economic policy. In 1941, before America was at war, Roosevelt officials boasted they’d changed international financial regulations into “a frankly aggressive weapon against the Axis.” In 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the creation of military exclusion zones and initiating the forced internal deportation of more than 110,000 people of Japanese, German and Italian descent, including tens of thousands of U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court upheld those actions in the Hirabayashi (1943) and Korematsu (1944) cases under the logic of wartime necessity.
Congress largely acquiesced to Roosevelt’s sweeping measures, sometimes ratifying them after the fact, sometimes urging him on. For Roosevelt and his immediate successors, courts were hesitant to intervene, and presidential power grew immensely. In the 1970s, Congress attempted to limit the president’s broad emergency powers to respond to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to America and the government’s foreign policy. While that sounds like a limit on the president’s power, presidents have long interpreted “emergency” quite loosely. The internal politics of and conflicts within faraway locales — like Cote d’Ivoire and Balkan nations — are deemed extraordinary threats to the U.S.
So temporary emergency actions have hardened into permanent expansions of presidential power. The World War I statute Roosevelt invoked is still used today to impose sanctions and seize assets. The “legal dark matter” of emergency powers he created remains embedded in American law.
Seen in this light, Trump’s, Biden’s and Obama’s heavy reliance on executive orders is not a historical aberration but a continuation of a trend stretching back nearly a century. But Trump does stand out from his immediate predecessors. From the Eisenhower administration until Biden’s term, presidents have averaged a few dozen executive orders per year. Trump has already
issued around 200 and is on pace to exceed his first-term total within a single year. The Supreme Court’s emergency docket is swelling with litigation in response. If those cases eventually get a hearing, the justices will have to decide whether to extend the same deference Roosevelt enjoyed or finally draw a new constitutional line around emergency powers.
THE SUPREME COURT is unique. It is the only court created by the Constitution itself, and the only one Congress cannot abolish. It also has wide discretion to reject cases. And reject them it does: In a typical year, over 8,000 petitions for review are filed; lately, the court hears only 50 to 60.
That output follows a 50-year steady decline and is historically low. In the 1960s, the court decided more than 350 cases per year. Today’s numbers are closer to the 1850s, when the court had the same number of justices (nine) but a far simpler legal landscape. The decline has heightened the significance of the emergency docket — dubbed more recently the “shadow docket” for its expedited nature and abbreviated rulings — which now shapes national policy in ways once reserved for decisions based on their full merits.
Whether the court should hear more cases is debated. Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues are acutely aware of their role: They are the only branch lacking electoral accountability, yet the court’s opinions are respected by the much more powerful Congress and president. As a result, the court is cautious and slow to correct errors; it took decades to dismantle “separate but equal” and over 70 years to repudiate its approval of Roosevelt’s concentration camps for Americans deemed “unreliable” in wartime. The court’s newfound skepticism of executive power, likewise, is proceeding in fits and starts.
But one reason for the shrinking “traditional” docket is that the justices are frequently called on to decide emergency cases. Today, the court often checks or sustains presidential power not through
lengthy arguments but through emergency orders — typically unsigned and unexplained — that resolve disputes in days rather than months.
Historically, such orders dealt with routine matters like scheduling. In the past decade, they have become vehicles for decisions of enormous consequence as regulators and presidents stretch statutes past their breaking points. In 2021, the court struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ban on evictions and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine mandate the following
lawmakers’ actions create time-sensitive disputes: During the 2024 campaign, several parties and state officials attempted to remove Trump from state primary ballots, and the justices acted quickly (and unanimously) to restore his name. In others, urgent civil liberties issues demanded immediate review: During the Covid-19 crisis, state and local officials singled out churches and other places of worship for stricter restrictions than businesses, prompting repeated Supreme Court rebukes of lower courts that upheld the policies.
With a new Trump administration governing aggressively by executive order, the emergency docket will likely feature prominently in the constitutional battles to come.
THE ROBERTS COURT’S GROWING SKEPTICISM OF SWEEPING EXECUTIVE POWER HAS MANIFESTED NOT ONLY IN LANDMARK DECISIONS, BUT ALSO IN TERSE EMERGENCY DOCKET RULINGS THAT SHAPE NATIONAL POLICY ALMOST INSTANTLY.
year, both through emergency rulings. Even election procedures during the pandemic were determined in part by emergency docket interventions.
As a result, the Roberts court’s growing skepticism of sweeping executive power has manifested not only in landmark decisions like their rejection of Biden’s student loan forgiveness or repudiating agency-empowering Chevron deference, but also in terse emergency docket rulings that shape national policy almost instantly.
There are several reasons for this reliance on the emergency docket. In some cases,
IF HISTORY SHOWS how presidential power has grown through emergencies and executive orders, and if the court’s emergency docket demonstrates how those powers are contested today, the next term may well bring some of the most consequential tests of executive authority in decades. Several flashpoints stand out.
Immigration. No area has generated more high-stakes executive orders — or more litigation — than immigration. Trump has already imposed a series of aggressive measures, including mass deportations. These orders have been challenged immediately by civil liberties groups, states and affected individuals. Lower courts have issued broad injunctions, setting the stage for the Supreme Court to step in on its emergency docket. The question is whether the court’s skepticism of broad executive power will extend to immigration, an area where presidents have long been given wide latitude under the banner of national security.
Tariffs and trade policy. Trump has also imposed sweeping tariffs, invoking vague emergency powers Congress authorized long ago. These tariffs are expected to collect over $300 billion this year, dramatically reshaping global trade. The court has historically been deferential in this area, treating tariff and foreign affairs powers as
THE JUSTICES HAVE SIGNALED A NEW WILLINGNESS TO CONSTRAIN THE PRESIDENT AND HIS DELEGATES. AT THE SAME TIME, THE COURT HAS RELIED INCREASINGLY ON ITS EMERGENCY DOCKET, OFTEN SHAPING CONSEQUENTIAL QUESTIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER WITH ONLY A FEW SENTENCES.
quintessentially executive. But the economic disruption the tariffs produce prompted challenges under the “major questions doctrine.” A federal appellate court struck the tariffs down as unlawful, and while the case did not arise on the emergency docket, it moved quickly through the courts. The Supreme Court has already agreed to hear the government’s appeal. If forgiving student loans requires explicit congressional approval, does not a president’s unilateral imposition of hundreds of billions in new tariffs also require it?
Birthright citizenship. Perhaps the most explosive test could be over birthright citizenship. Trump signed a Day 1 executive order to stop granting citizenship to children born in the U.S. to mothers who are living in the country illegally or on temporary visas. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause has long been understood to guarantee citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, with some narrow exceptions. It seems inevitable the court will hear this case. A decision this summer about birthright citizenship resolved only a procedural issue, leaving the core constitutional question: how far a president may go in reshaping the 14th Amendment through executive action.
Taken together, immigration, tariffs and citizenship represent a trifecta of challenges that will force the Roberts court to define the limits of presidential authority. Will it apply and extend its new doctrines, even when national security and foreign affairs are invoked? Or will it revert to the deference shown to Roosevelt and his immediate successors?
FROM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S sweeping emergency orders during the Depression and World War II to today’s late-night emergency docket rulings, the American government has wrestled with the same problem: How far can a president go when acting alone? Each generation has confronted the temptation of “government by executive order” as courts struggle to balance energy in the executive with constitutional limits. For decades, the pattern has been one of drift. Congress, finding lawmaking cumbersome and politically perilous, has delegated many of its lawmaking powers to the president. Courts, reluctant to wade into political disputes, have too often deferred. The result is a one-way ratchet: Powers asserted in crisis become permanent tools of the presidency.
Yet the Roberts court has shown signs of change. By dismantling Chevron deference, embracing the “major questions” doctrine of Congress needing to explicitly delegate authority to the executive, and scrutinizing executive actions on immigration, student loans and public health, the justices have signaled a new willingness to constrain the president and his delegates. At the same time, the court has relied increasingly on its emergency docket to manage disputes, often shaping consequential questions of presidential power with only a few sentences.
The coming term will test whether this skepticism of executive power is a phase or a lasting realignment. If the court permits expansive reliance on inherited emergency statutes and executive proclamations, it will entrench a presidency that often displaces Congress as the nation’s lawmaker. The nation’s founders didn’t anticipate that imbalance. But it’s difficult to constrain a president when Congress has charged the executive branch with overseeing much of the country’s domestic and global affairs.
BRENT SKORUP IS AN ATTORNEY AND LEGAL FELLOW IN THE CATO INSTITUTE’S ROBERT A. LEVY CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL STUDIES.
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
WHY WE SHOULD STAND UP FOR THOSE WE DISAGREE WITH
ABY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
DECADE AGO, when I was running the American Enterprise Institute — a think tank in Washington, D.C. — I read an article in a psychology journal that really shocked me. It was about something called motive attribution asymmetry. That’s a fancy set of words for a very simple concept. It’s when there’s an implacable hostility and conflict between two people or two groups, and it’s motivated by the fact that both sides believe that they love and that the other side hates. Now, it’s impossible that two sides could both simultaneously love and hate. But that error is incredibly common. The article shocked me because it showed that the United States was going into a period
where the motive attribution asymmetry phenomenon was as acute in America as it is between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East. I thought, “That can’t be right. I know people don’t get along politically, but is it really that bad?” Well, yes. That dark cloud was coming and it’s upon us today.
I travel around and give talks for a living, and I’ll talk to any group about any subject because I’m interested in ideas. I talk to people all across the political spectrum. And the night after I read that article in 2014, I was in New Hampshire giving a speech to 600 conservative tea party activists, and I thought I would test out if motive attribution asymmetry was actually happening among us. I came a little early to my engagement, and I always like to do that so I can get a kind of a lay of the land. There were 15 speakers: me and 14 presidential candidates. I thought to myself, “Why did God call me here?” God called me to say something that nobody else can say. I was listening to the political candidates who were all vying for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination on the Republican ticket. They were telling their audience that they were right and that the liberals who weren’t among them are stupid and evil and hate this country. Red meat for this audience.
I thought to myself, “Why did God call me here?” God called me to say something that nobody else can say, and that could be anything, because I don’t need any votes. I silently prayed, crossed myself and started my prepared speech about economic policy or something lost in the sands of time. But in the middle, I stopped and I said, “My friends, you have been hearing from all these presidential candidates that you’re right and the people who aren’t here don’t love America. Maybe I actually agree with you on many political ideas. But I want you to think about those people that the
“THOSE ARE YOUR NEIGHBORS. THOSE PEOPLE ARE YOUR FAMILY. THOSE PEOPLE AREN’T STUPID AND EVIL. THEY’RE JUST AMERICAN CITIZENS WHO HAPPEN TO DISAGREE WITH YOU ON POLITICS.”
politicians have been talking about. Those are your neighbors. Those people are your family. Those people aren’t stupid and evil. They’re just American citizens who happen to disagree with you on politics. And if your job is to convince them, which it should be, well, news flash, nobody has ever been convinced by hearing that they’re stupid and evil. Nobody can be insulted into being convinced.”
That was not an applause line. But there was applause that came right after when a lady in the audience yelled: “Actually, they are stupid and evil.” She repudiated me. I didn’t take it personally. It was a joke. Not a very funny one, but it was a joke nonetheless. That took me, in my mind, to Seattle, where I grew up. Seattle is the most secular, most left wing city in the United States. My father was a college professor. My mother was an artist. And when that lady yelled that out, she was insulting my mother, and I took it personally. Now, I didn’t happen to agree with my mother on politics. I was the odd man out. Our home was like that old sitcom “Family Ties.” I was Alex Keaton growing up. My mother, at one point, was so worried about my dangerous capitalist ideology that she asked, “I want you to know that we will love you either way: Have you been voting for Republicans?”
That is where I come from. But that’s not the point. The point is, nobody has the right to say that my mother is stupid and evil because of how she votes. And in that moment, motive attribution asymmetry came into view for me because I realized what we need to do as Americans in this political moment when we are so divided.
We need to stand up to the people with whom we agree. You want to fix America? Let’s stop standing up to the people with whom we disagree, which is a waste of time, and start standing up to the people with whom we agree on behalf of those with whom we disagree, who are Americans just like us. That’s how we love our enemies.
POLARIZATION IN THIS country is the fruit of motive attribution asymmetry, to be sure.
And a lot of people will blame anger. We’re so angry, if you turn on cable TV and listen to a talking head show, you’ll see a lot of anger, for sure. Wind them up and they debate. But anger isn’t the problem. I am a behavioral scientist, and I assure you that anger is a hot emotion produced in the limbic system of the brain, saying: “I care what you think and I want it to change.” Believe it or not, divorce and anger are uncorrelated. The hot emotion of anger doesn’t predict divorce. It’s another emotion that enters into anger that actually makes us polarized and turns us against each other: disgust.
There are four basic negative emotions: anger, fear, sadness and disgust. Disgust is supposed to be relegated to pathogens. We’ve evolved the emotion of disgust that is produced by the insular cortex and the limbic system of the brain. We have a specialized organ to make us feel disgust, and that was the only thing that stood between us and the poisoning from pathogens before vaccines and antibiotics were developed. That’s what’s kept you alive and kept your ancestors alive. But when you deploy it toward other human beings, you have instant enemies. And when you mix it with anger, you get the most noxious of all human emotions that will make enemies, forever. It’s called contempt. Contempt is disgust plus anger that results in a conviction of the utter worthlessness of another human being. And that’s what American politics has become today. It’s like a large, dysfunctional marriage.
John Gottman is a social psychologist who teaches at the University of Washington and the world’s leading expert in marital reconciliation. He’s brought thousands of couples back together that were on the brink of divorce. I had heard he could tell in an hour, with 97 percent accuracy, if a couple will be in divorce proceedings within three years. And I asked him if that was true and he said no, “I can do it in half an hour.” He asks couples to discuss something contentious and looks to see if either one of the partners rolls their eyes. It seems innocent, right? But it is perceived
TO LOVE YOUR ENEMIES IS AN ACT OF COMMITMENT. IT’S AN ACT OF WILL. AND ONLY IN THAT WAY CAN YOU REDEEM YOUR ENEMIES.
by the other party as a sign of contempt and worthlessness. It’s almost like a physical attack. And that’s exactly how we treat each other in politics in America today. We’ve forgotten, actually, what it’s like to have a functional conversation.
OUR PROBLEM IS contempt and the culture of contempt is tearing us apart. People often ask, so what do you do? One solution is to be more civil to each other, or more tolerant of each other. I say, that’s nonsense. If I told you that my wife and I are civil to each other, you’d say, “You need counseling.” If I told you that my employees are tolerant of me, you’d realize I have a huge HR problem on my hands.
The solution can be found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount recorded in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew 5:44: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Are you strong enough for that? Are we strong enough for that? Because that’s the medicine we need. That’s the only thing that’s going to bring our country back together again. And we need people dedicated to do that and do it in public. It’s the only way that we save this enterprise.
Now, one thing that Jesus didn’t say in the sermon is to like your enemies. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a famous sermon on this in 1957 at the Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in which he says it’s significant that Jesus
didn’t say to like your enemies. “Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. … And love is greater than like.”
To love your enemies is an act of commitment. It’s an act of will. And only in that way can you redeem your enemies. This is the hardest thing you can possibly do. And it’s the best thing that we can possibly do. It’s a measure of who we are as people. How are we going to do it? Let me be really practical here. What I’m not suggesting is that we start agreeing, because agreement is a kind of a mediocrity. The competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society. This country was built on competition, economic competition, political competition, ideological competition. That’s something that so many universities have forgotten. So I’m not asking you to agree. I’m not asking you to disagree less on politics. I’m asking all of us to disagree better. Let’s stop being used. Let’s stop being monetized. When we hate for political reasons, somebody’s profiting and it’s not us. We have been utterly “transactionalized” in this country by media and politicians who tell us that people who disagree with us are a danger to us and must be despised. That gets clicks and dollars and votes and attention, and we can make it stop. How? By walking away from our own side.
Following the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk in September, Utah’s Gov. Spencer Cox said what he thought was right on how we should respond to the violence — and he got attacked. A Republican got attacked by conservative politicians for that. If you’re getting attacked for talking about love, you’re doing it right. That’s the acid test. If
your side is going after you because you’re proposing more love, congratulations. You’re halfway to heaven. But it feels like hell, doesn’t it?
The next thing we can do is go out and find contempt. Go running toward it with your love. Go looking for contempt and what will happen when you treat conflict as an opportunity?
Let me quote the Book of Mormon: “And it came to pass that they did go forth and did minister unto the people, … and as many as were convinced did lay down their weapons of war, and also their hatred, and the tradition of their fathers.” That’s how peace gets made, but only when you find the hatred and respond with love.
Last but not least is one of the things that we’ve forgotten and the greatest tool at our disposal: gratitude. One of the things that the right and left can agree on in America today is that this is a country in decline, that our best days are behind us, that everything’s wrong in America. You know that’s false. You know there’s a reason everybody still wants to come here. You know you’re all proud to be Americans, and we should be grateful for that. Our greatest apostolate is the gratitude that we show for the country that we love. How are we showing that gratitude? When we show that gratitude, it’s magnetic. It’s what people actually want. I’m grateful to be here in Utah. I’m grateful to be American, and I know you are, too. ARTHUR
BLUEBIRD IN MY HEART
HOW WALLACE STEGNER LEFT UTAH AND FOUND HIMSELF
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY
Arow of painted brick storefronts speaks to me. I just moved to Salt Lake City, but I can imagine how this small street in the Sugar House neighborhood might have felt before the modern offices and stucco apartments moved in. One of the stores catches my eye with a bright red façade, striped awning and rooftop sign, tucked between an antiques shop and a defunct plumber’s office. I’ve been wandering the streets, feeling disoriented after leaving home for the first time. A bookstore seems like a natural place to find my bearings.
Inside, the shop smells of cedar and old paper. It’s quiet but for the rustle of pages as a man flips through a coffee table book. It feels like the bookstore in San Francisco where I worked when I was growing up. I weave through narrow aisles, past sections devoted to history, psychology and romance. At the back of the store, where the lighting is dim and the air is heavy with dust, I find a small shelf labeled “Utah Writers.” A familiar name repeats across the top three rows: Wallace Stegner.
Back in California, Stegner is known as a Bay Area icon. A prolific author of essays, histories and semi-autobiographical novels,
he spent most of his life living in the Los Altos Hills and teaching at Stanford, where he founded the creative writing program and taught students like the poet Wendell Berry, environmental firebrand Edward Abbey, Western novelist Larry McMurtry and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
“IT IS ARIDITY THAT GIVES THE AIR ITS SPECIAL DRY CLARITY; ARIDITY THAT PUTS BRILLIANCE IN THE LIGHT AND POLISHES AND ENLARGES THE STARS.”
O’Connor. Born in Iowa, he summered in Vermont and died in New Mexico. But he once called Utah home.
I pick up a paperback with mountains on the cover that look like the Wasatch. Published in 1992, “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West” was Stegner’s last book, a collection of essays that feels relevant to
me. Growing up, I thought you couldn’t get more west than the beach, but the drive here — a hypnotic marathon of basin, range and sagebrush — showed I’ve got a lot to learn. His photo on the back cover shows an outdoorsy old professor: sun-worn but sweet, with soft features and thick white hair. I decide to take the book home.
I SOON LEARN that Stegner was born in 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, a town of around 1,300 people near the Minnesota state line. But he didn’t stay long. His father had a penchant for chasing get-rich-quick schemes that gave Stegner a peripatetic upbringing. His childhood spanned 20 locations across eight states and Canada. He finally found some stability in his adolescence, when the family settled down in Salt Lake City — though his father still ran a speakeasy, an illegal drinking establishment under Prohibition.
By comparison, Stegner’s adult life was a model of patient achievement. He earned master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Iowa. He spent 34 years in academia, mostly at Stanford — though he lectured in Greece on a Fulbright
Scholarship in 1963. He was remarkably productive, publishing 14 novels, 16 nonfiction books, seven collections of essays or short stories, and a chapbook. His novels won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Of course, to friends, he was simply Wally, who was regimented but gentle, and loved a prank.
Stegner wrote extensively about the West, in all forms of writing. “Mormon Country” (1942) paints an affectionate portrait of Latter-day Saint culture across the Intermountain region. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West” (1954) is a definitive biography of the explorer who first traveled the Grand Canyon. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (1943) is a novel that echoes the author’s rootless childhood; in its sequel, “Recapitulation” (1979), the character who most resembles Stegner returns to Salt Lake City, attends a family funeral and reconciles with his troubled past. “If there is one recurring theme in Stegner’s work,” writes Alex Beam in “Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers,” published this year by Signature Books, “it is his search for a home.”
Stegner’s nature writing made him an environmental icon, though political extremes made him uncomfortable. In the 1960s, he found himself at odds with the
methods used in campus protests against the Vietnam War. He must have been mortified when Abbey, a former student, celebrated “monkey wrenching,” the sabotage of construction equipment and other tools used to reshape the Western landscape. The Washington Examiner described Stegner as “not exactly a conservative, but rather an old-fashioned — now-out-of-fashion — liberal,” one who valued mutual respect and cooperation.
Stegner retired early from academia in 1971, fed up with counterculture, postmodernist colleagues and the new literary establishment. He even moved his papers from Stanford to the University of Utah. But he kept writing. “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs” — or “Bluebird” — is a collection of 16 essays and letters to his late mother and a former student. It also offers a loosely chronological look into Stegner’s life and work, divided into three sections: personal, habitat and witnesses. Mostly, it reads as a look back on a lifelong relationship with the West.
STEGNER
of “Bluebird,” like “images on a broken film flapping through the projector.” He’d bounced from remote Saskatchewan to a North Dakota farm, the woods around Seattle and the suburbs of Great Falls, Montana. It wasn’t easy to put down roots after such a frenetic run. The Stegners would never be a typical “family with an attic and a growing accumulation of memorabilia and worn-out life gear and the artifacts of memory,” he writes, but they “began very soon to feel at home.”
NEVER LEFT THE WEST BEHIND, AT LEAST NOT IN HIS WRITING. OVER AND OVER, HE GRAPPLED WITH THE IDEAS OF HOME, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE FROM A PLACE, AND THE WEST IN PARTICULAR.
A SUNSET WALK takes me to a modest bungalow behind a rickety picket fence, with worn white siding, green trim and one gable above a broad porch. It looks much like the old black and white photo I saw in “Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City,” by Robert C. Steensma. The same unkempt cottonwood tree leans over a roof lined with the same thin asphalt shingles. I can almost picture Stegner as a teenage boy, sitting on the steps with a book in his lap or eyeballing the wilds of Liberty Park on the other side of Seventh East on an evening much like this. Just having a home must have been a welcome respite.
Stegner was 12 years old when his family landed here after a childhood of “constant motion,” he writes in “Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood,” the opening essay
Salt Lake City was “an easy town to know,” Stegner would write in 1950 for “Tomorrow” magazine. “You can see it all.” The nearby foothills offered an aerial perspective, while the grid made navigation simple. By high school, he’d hang out at the main library on South Temple and State streets, the Deseret Gymnasium next to the Hotel Utah or the old Bonneville Baseball Park at Ninth South and Main. Sometimes he’d venture further afield, catching railroad freights into Lamb’s Canyon, backpacking in the High Uintas or staying in his family’s cabin at Fish Lake.
The young writer always excelled in school. He graduated from East High at age 16 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Utah in 1930. He left to accept a teaching fellowship at the University of Iowa, which was pioneering a new approach to literary training that would become the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, he found that he hated the weather and missed his adopted home. “Homesickness is a great teacher,” he writes. “It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from arid lands, and liked where I came from.”
He started dating an Iowa girl, an undergrad who worked in the library, named Mary Stuart Page. They married in 1934. Stegner’s mother and brother had died,
WALLACE STEGNER, FROM HIS COLLECTION.
but when he graduated with a doctorate the next year, he moved with his wife back to Salt Lake City. He taught classes at the U. and won a contest for an early novelette in 1937, around the time their son, Stuart Page Stegner, was born. But success soon confronted him with another difficult decision, considering a full-time offer to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If contentment were the only basis for choice, we might have chosen to stay (in Utah),” he writes, “but I had my father’s restless blood in me, and the habit of moving.”
Stegner’s father died two years later, severing the author’s last living tie to Utah.
MY SEA-LEVEL LUNGS are searing as I trudge toward the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon. My shoes are caked in dust. I smile at purple lupines clinging to the canyon walls. Finally, I find a rock where I can sit and watch turquoise ripples across Cecret Lake. The air starts to feel crisp, even delightful. It’s not the paradise Stegner describes in “Crossing Into Eden” — hidden in the High Uintas — but it does make me feel closer. I pull “Bluebird” from my bag and start reading.
By the time Stegner accepted a tenured position at Stanford in 1945, he was an acclaimed author, about to publish his seventh book. He had taught at Harvard and the renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where he now kept a cabin. In Palo Alto, he founded the nation’s second creative writing program and a prestigious fellowship for budding writers. Over the next 26 years, he’d mentor renowned fiction writers like Thomas McGuane and Raymond Carver, and poets like Robert Haas. Abbey called Stegner “the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel,” adding to three Guggenheim Fellowships and a litany of other honors.
But Stegner never left the West behind, at least not in his writing. Over and over, he grappled with the ideas of home, what it means to be from a place, and the West in particular. In “Living Dry,” he writes that his West spans “a dry core of eight public-lands
states — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming” — that should feel familiar to Deseret readers. California is “west of the West,” set apart by its mega-economy, coastal climate and a culture less concerned with space.
People of the interior West, Stegner believed, are shaped by the endless struggle between infinite space and finite resources, particularly water. He didn’t see this as a curse, as he lays out in “Thoughts in a Dry Land”: “It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars; aridity that leads the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than as turf.” It is no wonder that Westerners often leave to seek fortune elsewhere, though Stegner had of course seen the other side of that dream.
“HOMESICKNESS IS A GREAT TEACHER. IT TAUGHT ME, DURING AN ENDLESS RAINY FALL, THAT I CAME FROM ARID LANDS, AND LIKED WHERE I CAME FROM.”
Perhaps Stegner would think of Utah as he wandered the foothills above his home or hiked the Vermont backwoods each summer. An advocate for natural spaces and traditional communities, he detested the Bay Area’s growing urbanization and sprawl. “Without any remaining wilderness we are committed (to) the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment,” he wrote in 1960, dubbing the West a “geography of hope” in his famous “Wilderness Letter” to Congress. These spaces should be preserved to remind us who we are, he writes, “because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”
All those years later, Stegner still wrestles with his early life. More than anything, he seems to be coming to terms in these
pages with an idea that has long eluded him: that home is a place you never really leave. In the book’s introduction, he writes that “whenever I return to the Rocky Mountain states … the smell of distance excites me, the largeness and the clarity take the scales from my eyes, and I respond as unthinkingly as a salmon that swims past a rivermouth and tastes the waters of its birth.”
Stegner died at 84 after a car accident in New Mexico, a year after “Bluebird” was published.
A FEW BLOCKS from Stegner’s old Salt Lake City home, I sit on my backyard patio and play “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” the 1928 folk song that inspired two of Stegner’s book titles. Over a jaunty acoustic guitar, a man sings of a vagrant’s fantasy land, rich with free stew and soft-boiled eggs, with “lemonade springs where the bluebird sings.” It’s the kind of mirage that might have appealed to Stegner’s father. Nearby, I hear a rooster crowing, crickets chirping and children laughing in the distance. I can understand why Stegner felt at home here.
Like him, I felt pushed out of the Bay Area, now a dense web of traffic jams and robot cafes where few can afford to live. I felt more at peace hours away in the redwoods or along the coast than in the suburb where I was raised. I’d get nostalgic reading about the farm towns and art movements that had disappeared before I was born. There wasn’t much to be homesick about when I left, but I’m still wondering where I’m headed.
Similar perils now confront the Wasatch Front, but people here still seem to have the strong sense of identity that resonated with Stegner. “Bluebird” gives me hope that I too can find a place that feels like home, or find a home I already know. With a little patience. In “The Sense of Place,” my favorite essay in the collection, Stegner writes: “Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.”
DOLLED UP
AN ODE TO MY SISTER’S MAKEUP BRUSH
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY
The bristles tickle, dusting my cheekbones with blush. I take a deep breath to keep a straight face, inhaling warm vanilla and shower steam. “Stop breathing on me, you weirdo,” my sister says. My eyes are closed. The makeup brush swooshes against my skin, its texture like peach fuzz. I feel pampered, though my 14-year-old, self-taught beauty guru has just 15 minutes to fix me so we can get downstairs for our cousin’s wedding. Our grandmother will be here soon to make sure I’m up to feminine standards. When I hold a makeup brush, it feels like trying to write with my off hand. This one is the size of a thick pencil, with a soft dome of hazel-brown bristles and a pink plastic handle that narrows in the middle, forming a natural spot for the thumb and index finger to rest. Using it is supposed to be intuitive, like painting on a canvas. But I’ve never been a girly girl, despite my very traditional grandmother’s cajoling. I was lucky if I remembered to wash my face, and more likely to show up looking organic, flaunting puberty zits and bushy eyebrows. Until recently.
Something happened when I took my sister to her happiest place on Earth, a glitzy cosmetics chain called Sephora. From the moment she entered my life — when I was eight years old, digging in the dirt for roly-polies — she was unabashedly feminine. Even as a toddler, she would dig through my mom’s vanity drawers to
get dolled up for bedtime. So I asked her to help me pick out my first makeup brush, braving a store that reeked of perfume and expectations. I bought her a tube of lip gloss, but she was clearly the big sister that day.
Owning a brush doesn’t make you an artist, but this one moves naturally at my sister’s command, like a poet’s pen or a dancer’s feet. Humans have been doing this since ancient Egypt and Han Dynasty China, though we’ve moved on from bamboo handles and sable hair. Brushes now come in at least 16 shapes and sizes: wide and flat to lay on the base; fine-tipped to contour lips; angled to fill in eyebrows. It’s overwhelming. “I love your eyes, so I’m not doing much,” my sister says.
She tells me to look and I peek reluctantly. The mirror can become more daunting than a simple reflection for young women, but I’m not rebelling against its judgments or demands anymore. Rather, I’m relieved to see that I’m still me — just amplified, with flushed cheeks, sharpened brows, shimmery eyelids and pink lips. We zip each other up and dance like we’ve got all day, until a knock comes on the door. My grandmother looks regal in her navy gown. She feigns a gasp at my getup, as if I was some long-lost loved one she didn’t just have breakfast with this morning. I catch my sister stifling a giggle. We share a knowing look.
DESERET NEWS’ 175TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
The Deseret News celebrated its 175th anniversary with a gala at the Commercial Club in downtown Salt Lake City in September. The keynote speaker was New York Times bestselling author and Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks, who was awarded the inaugural Deseret News Civic Charity Award. Brooks encouraged the audience to heal America’s political divide by seeking out those we disagree with. “Stop being used and stop being monetized,” Brooks said. “When we hate for political reasons, somebody’s profiting, and it’s not us.”
PRESIDENT DALLIN H. OAKS, PRESIDENT OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, AND HIS WIFE, SISTER KRISTEN M. OAKS.
PRESIDENT AND CEO OF DESERET MANAGEMENT CORP. JEFF SIMPSON PRESENTS ARTHUR C. BROOKS WITH THE DESERET NEWS CIVIC CHARITY AWARD.
PRESIDING BISHOP GÉRALD CAUSSÉ OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, WITH HIS WIFE, SISTER VALÉRIE BABIN CAUSSÉ, LEFT, SPEAKS WITH NICOLE STIRLING, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE STIRLING FOUNDATION.
AMANDA COVINGTON, CHIEF CORPORATE AFFAIRS OFFICER FOR THE LARRY H. MILLER COMPANY, LEFT, SPEAKS WITH UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESIDENT TAYLOR RANDALL AND HIS WIFE, JANET RANDALL.
FROM LEFT, BYU PRESIDENT SHANE REESE SPEAKS WITH CHERYL FLAKE AND HER HUSBAND, FORMER AMBASSADOR JEFF FLAKE.
UTAH FIRST LADY ABBY COX, CENTER, AND FORMER UTAH GOV. GARY HERBERT, SPEAKING WITH OTHER GUESTS.
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PRE-DAWN: THREE SISTERS
BY JUSTIN EVANS
I am awake hours before the sun, looking at the dark shadow that is my mountain. Its hulking curve lumbers and shifts slightly with my every breath.
Whenever I come back to this place after years of absence, it is the mountains which startle me the most, their size always shrinking in my mind like the old memory of a broken arm.
Though the minutes pass slow it is time well spent, waiting with the world as it shakes off the night, small details quietly gathering beneath the shirt tails of morning.
JUSTIN EVANS IS THE AUTHOR OF EIGHT POETRY COLLECTIONS, INCLUDING “CENOTAPH” (2024) AND "A WALLED PLEASANCE” (2025).
CAPITOL CREEK, PITKIN COUNTY, COLORADO | PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN
