Libertarianism, like Marxism, is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to super-smart engineers and others who never really grow up.

Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. The past doesn’t tell us what will happen next, but it suggests what we can and cannot become. The desire to be equal, the individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty, the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and intellect—these won’t disappear.

The most persuasive description of Trump’s ordinary supporters appeared just after the 2020 election, in a reader’s comment on a New York Times op-ed that had attributed his 74 million votes to white supremacy: I grew up in rural America. My home county went 80–20 for Trump. I also spent 6 months in my hometown since the 2016 election. I’m here to

nonessential worker. This was a new category in our economic organization. Writers, architects, accountants, managers, lawyers, bankers, programmers, professors, U.S. senators: nonessential. Highly educated and rewarded, but not the most important people in a crisis. Sixty percent of college graduates were able to work from home, compared with just

Americans live in the future, not the past, which makes us childish to older nationalities. If 2020 is the year in which we finally stopped looking

Foreigners didn’t have to force down our way of life—they ate it up. I don’t just mean our music, movies, food, clothes, sports, manners, and idioms. I mean that our system of political economy, democratic capitalism, which produced our mass culture, was also a universal model, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some yearned for it, some

The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.

He was spawned in a gold-plated sewer with other creatures of our celebrity trash culture: investment gurus, talk-show hosts, evangels of the Prosperity Gospel, surgery-altered TV housewives, bling-worshiping rappers. His supporters are part of us, too. Yes, I’m aware that we’ve become two countries—but each one continually makes the other. A

In the same way that libertarian ideas had been lying around for Americans to pick up in the stagflated 1970s, young people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world. These ideas came from different intellectual traditions: the Frankfurt School for Social Research in 1920s