“A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents in comparison to millennials and their parents 20 years before. This was especially true for male Republican teenagers. Younger people are also more skeptical of major American institutions, including political parties, the government, and the media.
Trump’s campaign directly spoke to this demographic: He echoed that same mistrust in institutions, and did so while stopping at seemingly every podcast, Twitch stream, YouTube channel, and TikTok page whose viewership is dominated by Gen Z men and boys. He joined Adin Ross, a now 24-year-old streamer who once famously looked up and struggled to read the definition of “fascism” on camera, for an interview during which Ross presented Trump with a Rolex and a Cybertruck.
He went on the mulleted comedian Theo Von’s podcast, where they discussed cocaine, golf, and UFC.
He palled around with YouTube millionaires like the Paul brothers and the Nelk Boys, known for their distasteful pranks and crypto scams.
And, of course, he talked to Joe Rogan, the most famous podcaster in the world; the two rambled to each other for three hours. For this, he received Rogan’s much-coveted endorsement.”
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“Nearly half of men between 18 and 29 say there is “some or a lot” of discrimination against men in America, up from a third in 2019, according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. They believe the Me Too movement was an overreach and that many women are simply lying about being abused.
It’s not exactly surprising they’re drawn to media that speaks to these grievances — and more often than not, that media comes in the form of individual influencers who are unaffiliated with existing media institutions.”
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“men are even lonelier, more likely to be single, more skeptical, and more afraid than ever. They find solace and community online, in places that older folks still don’t understand, where they see idealized versions of masculinity winning. They cheer on UFC fights and boxing matches, use “edgy” slurs, trade in risky crypto investments, bootlick Silicon Valley billionaires, listen to toxic dating advice, and denigrate women.
They vote for a man who has done everything you’re not supposed to do — steal, lie, rape, idolize Hitler — because his election fulfills their fantasy that men really can get away with whatever they want.”
“The transformation is clearest in the GOP, thanks to the elevation of Vance to the GOP presidential ticket. Vance, according to most accounts, was selected in a moment of confidence, as an heir apparent meant to extend and intensify Donald Trump’s core appeal rather than as a counterweight to the former president’s electoral weaknesses.
Vance spent the last half-decade transforming himself into one of the GOP’s most prominent neopopulists. He’s an advocate of tariffs and trade restrictions, a walker of auto-worker picket lines, and a harsh critic of foreign labor. He’s even complimented Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair who has helped lead the Biden administration’s newly aggressive (if mostly unsuccessful) approach to antitrust enforcement. Vance, who is among those who have a habit of taking swipes at libertarians, combines a rejection of individual liberty with a rejection of economic liberty—and he’s Trump’s newly anointed successor.”
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“What’s striking about this particular political moment is that on both the left and the right, a new elite consensus appears to be forming, one that is skeptical of, and in some cases quite hostile to, free market ideals and principles.
The neopopulist consensus is still rough, but in broad terms, it favors propping up domestic labor, cracking down on immigration, using taxes and spending incentives to carry out industrial policy, and implementing tariffs and trade restrictions for reasons of national security, job creation, or international competitiveness. Notably, the Biden administration left most of Trump’s tariffs in place—and in some cases increased them.
Whatever their other disagreements, the leaders and rising intellectuals in both parties seem to agree that the important thing is to leave out classical liberals, libertarians, and believers in economic liberty.
It’s true that the parties have never fully embraced these values, and at times have distanced themselves from them. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), a self-described socialist, has long helped pull Democrats to the left on economics. Former President George W. Bush implemented tariffs on imported steel, and his brand of “compassionate conservatism” was partly an attempt to dampen the party’s libertarian tendencies.
Until recently, there was a place for those who prized individual freedom and markets. They were seen as valuable, or at least necessary, partners: As recently as 2012, none other than Democratic stalwart Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) pitched herself to libertarians. That same year, former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R–Wisc.), who was probably most well-known for proposals to reform entitlements, appeared on the GOP ticket. Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, was similarly a link to the GOP’s Reaganite past.
There may be some holdouts in the party who still embrace a more orthodox pro-market economics. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s Republican National Convention speech paid homage to the “core principles of American conservatism,” which included “fiscal responsibility,” “free markets,” and “limited government.” But with Trump and Vance as the party’s reigning avatars, it seems likely that these values will remain only as limp, legacy platitudes.
That’s a shame. Personal liberty and market freedom are bedrock American political and economic values: That synthesis is explicit in the American founding, and it has long been deeply embedded in American life. In the 1830s, when America was still a young nation, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness.” That boldness has made America wealthy on a scale that is almost taken for granted: Today, the vast majority of American states are richer than most European countries. The neopopulists take this wealth for granted, and then propose policies—tariffs, labor regulations, vast new spending programs—that would make America poorer, that would slow its progress, that would deplete its strength and greatness.”
“Routh said on social media that he supported Trump in 2016, but by 2020 he had soured on him, writing “I will be glad when you gone [sic]” in June that year. Around the same time, he also tweeted in support of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and then-Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who is now an independent, saying Biden “stands for nothing.”
Far beyond simply repelling Russia’s invasion, he said on X in 2022 that “we do not stop until Putin is dead and Moscow is a pile of rubble,” calling for the U.S. to bolster its nuclear arsenal.
He also extended an open invitation to North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un in 2020 to come “to Hawaii for vacation,” saying that “it would be an honor to have you at our beaches. I an a leader here and can arrange the whole trip. Please come.”
Other aspects of his online profile have not yet been explained. His WhatsApp bio says, “We each need to help the Chinese,” without further explanation.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, he was a vocal presence both on social media and in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, where he pitched a tent and erected billboards trying to rally volunteers. Photos online showed him with dyed blue and blond hair — the colors of Ukraine’s flag — swaddled in a star-spangled banner neckerchief and a bulletproof vest.
That summer, NBC News spoke briefly with Routh, who said in a message that the West’s “limited response” to Ukraine’s war was “an indictment of the entire human race” and “extremely disappointing.” There was never any formal interview, and his comments were not included in NBC News’ coverage of the war.”
“Overall, defining Walz in terms of the party’s ideological camps is surprisingly difficult, which makes him interestingly reminiscent of Joe Biden.
Often during his long career, Biden was a mainstream Democrat. But he’s also long harbored anti-elite inclinations, being skeptical of Wall Street and the economic policy establishment. He also rejected the foreign policy establishment’s consensus on Afghanistan, advocating against a troop surge during the Obama administration and ordering full withdrawal once he was president himself.
And once in office with a narrow Democratic majority, like Walz, Biden wanted to go big with an FDR-sized agenda. (Walz had no pesky Senate filibuster rule or recalcitrant Joe Manchin to spoil things.) In office, Biden has mostly tried to keep his coalition happy, but when the politics looked dire on immigration this year, he did try to pivot to the center with new asylum restrictions.
So while Walz may be a new face, his political style and instincts may represent a good deal of continuity with the current president.”
“Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.”
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“Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”
“The most important issues here, to me, are the related topics of China and climate change. I used to think the engagement with China strategy made sense, and I thought the people who objected to it were mostly driven by economic ignorance about the benefits of free trade. I still think the economic arguments for free trade are sound, but the actual geopolitical situation has evolved to the point where it’s clear that commercial ties between the United States and China were not fostering world peace or the liberalization of Chinese society.
Unfortunately, a lot of what’s happened since the conventional wisdom shifted on China is just unprincipled protectionism.
I think that’s wrong. Reducing dependence on imported Chinese manufactured goods is like trying to make sure we have the capacity to produce more ammunition — it’s not an economic policy at all, it’s a national security policy that involves incurring economic costs. We should be freeing up trade with the rest of the world, especially with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Which is just to say that the China situation has made me more supportive of ideas I would have rejected in the past, like increasing the defense budget, while continuing to feel that the new post-neoliberal ideas, on both the left and the right, are basically wrong.
But this really comes crashing into the mainstream progressive view of climate policy. Since the mid-Bush years, American carbon dioxide emissions have fallen nearly 20 percent, while global emissions have risen by over 20 percent.
Just to clarify that I am not a knuckle-dragging moron, the following standard environmentalist points are all true:
On a per capita basis, American emissions are still exceptionally high.
On a historical basis, America is still the major contributor to climate pollution.
The countries poised to suffer most from climate change are not the ones that have benefitted most from industrialization.
Those three considerations do add up, in my opinion, to a compelling moral case for American climate leadership. That said, the cold hard fact that I’ve come around to is that while it would be worth it for the United States of America to bear significant economic costs to avert climate change, it is literally not possible for us to do that. Given that the United States needs tax revenue, we can and should price the externality associated with our domestic carbon dioxide consumption. And we should fund clean energy innovation, continue to drive down the cost of batteries and solar panels, and make complementary regulatory changes to try to speed the deployment of long-range transmission lines, along with geothermal, small modular reactors, and fusion power. But China is doing a lot of that innovation and deployment right now and also building tons of coal plants, and we have no way of stopping them.
Instead of wrestling with these realities, American environmentalists are too often shopping ideas like denying poor countries financing for their own industrialization or trying to stop the United States from supplying the world with natural gas. These ideas almost certainly won’t work as environmental policy, because countries that want natural gas will just get the gas and the financing from other less friendly countries. And if they did work, the outcomes wouldn’t be desirable — trying to reduce emissions by choking off economic development in poor countries inverts the moral logic of the whole argument.”
“What is really different — and dangerous — about today’s justices is not partisanship, but rather a cognitive trap that Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called the “most damaging” of all human biases: overconfidence. Put simply, today’s justices possess a frightening degree of certainty that they can alone answer society’s most pressing problems with just the right lawyerly argument.
The roots of this certitude developed, perhaps surprisingly, from a noble place. When confronted with legal challenges to a slew of racially discriminatory laws in the mid-20th century, the justices needed the ability to proclaim those laws inconsistent with our Constitution’s one, true meaning. For good and important reasons, that is exactly what the court did.
But the power to declare the law’s meaning — and to override democratically enacted policies — is seductive. High constitutional theories such as living constitutionalism and originalism were advanced to justify judicial intervention in disputes ranging from guns to abortion and religion to the death penalty. And our overconfident Supreme Court was born.
The evidence of this overconfidence is everywhere around us, and it affects both sides of the political spectrum. One rough measure is the frequency with which the court overrules the judgment of our nation’s elected lawmakers. Whereas the court struck down less than one act of Congress per year between 1788 and 1994, the court has invalidated an average of more than three federal laws per year since then.”
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“Perhaps most significantly, the court’s overconfidence problem is apparent in its opinions. In overturning the right to abortion, for example, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion declared that the legal reasoning embraced by respected jurists such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Thurgood Marshall was “far outside the bounds of any reasonable interpretation.” Never mind that the “most important historical fact” on which Alito rested his own conclusion — the number of states that banned abortion in 1868 — was riddled with historical inaccuracies.
Opinions reaching liberal results often reflect overconfidence bias, too. In Kennedy v. Louisiana, for example, the court struck down the death penalty for cases of aggravated child rape. Although the Constitution was far from clear on the matter and elected officials had reached differing views, a bare five-justice majority wrote that “in the end,” it is “our judgment” that must decide “the question of the acceptability of the death penalty.””
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“Overconfidence bias has led to the court’s legitimacy crisis by unleashing the justices’ underlying partisan instincts. Humble justices can overcome those instincts by admitting uncertainty and deferring to others.”