Phoebe Bridgers recently announced that her upcoming tour would feature “no phones” at all shows. Fans would be required to leave phones at home or lock them in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show.

While many fans expressed excitement and viewed the move positively, other fans went ballistic at the thought of not being able to use their phones. If we’re allowed to be honest, the root cause is obviously that Bridgers’ fanbase skews toward Gen Z, and many of them are utterly addicted to their phones. They find the thought of having to mainline reality without filtering it through the black mirror of their smartphone existentially terrifying.

But they couldn’t exactly say “I’m pathetically addicted to my phone,” so instead these angry fans made all kinds of other claims. The cost-of-living crisis entitles them to record concerts. Banning phones is classist. Comparisons were made to racial segregation. But the most interesting claim to me was that banning phones would hurt disabled people. One user claimed to experience “pseudo-seizures” and said that only looking at their phone could calm them down and stop the seizure.

One approach to this kind of ridiculous claim is to argue in detail about the merits of the claim. I could argue that “looking at my phone” is not a medically necessary intervention for pseudo-seizures. I could mention that pseudo-seizures are a murky concept, a psychogenic “diagnosis of exclusion“ that medical resources claim is difficult to distinguish from malingering,1 and subject to abuse.

I could further point out that perhaps a gigantic arena concert is not the best place for someone who describes themselves as having seizures and passing out in response to overstimulation. I might even mention that if someone did need their phone, they could simply step into the venue’s concourse and use said phone there, away from the show.

But all of those arguments are in some way accepting a faulty premise. What I actually want to argue is that even if you take every single silly claim at face value, even if you allow that some small number of disabled people will be excluded or harmed by this decision, that’s OK. There are times when it’s fine to exclude or harm people. And we need to be better at saying that out loud.

The tyranny of the edge case

If there’s any possible way that an action could harm someone — no matter how unlikely the scenario is, how small the harm might be, or how easily it might be mitigated — there will exist people who demand that nobody take that action. God forbid the action intersect with any of the various -isms like racism, sexism, or ableism. You’ll probably get dragged to The Hague. This is what I call “the tyranny of the edge case.”

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It would be bad enough if this absurdity were limited to social media discourses and online nonsense. But this worldview is now infecting society beyond the crumbling walls of Twitter and Reddit:

• Standardized testing might conceivably harm students of color, so we must abolish it.

• Common-sense criminal justice reforms might perpetuate racial disparities, so we can’t implement them.

• A solar plant might endanger the threecorner milkvetch, so it must be delayed.

• We can’t build housing because new buildings might cast shadows that would be mildly unpleasant, or because some people would be sad to lose a historic laundromat.

Recently, Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was revealed to be an inveterate gambler, one who had even bet on games involving his own team. There’s not yet any evidence that he threw games, but he did bet on games as an insider who knew the state of his team’s readiness better than any outsider could have.

Naturally, the NCAA banned him, but Sorsby sued the athletic organization, arguing that he was a gambling addict and in recovery, and that he would be irreparably harmed by being banned from college football. This week, a Texas judge granted him an injunction that will allow him to play anyway, and the injunction’s reasoning is filled with edge-case nonsense. It argues that Sorsby would be deprived of “coaching, training resources, camaraderie, and regimen”2 if removed from the team, that he would face “hardships” against his rights and interests if he can’t play, and that as long as he’s in treatment for his gambling addiction, he can’t be prevented from being a member of the team.

In other words, you can’t ban a gambler who undermined the integrity of the sport because he might be addicted to gambling!

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The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

Americans are not Luddites, except on behalf of software engineers.

In our latest poll, The Argument asked respondents whether they would support a ban on AI to replace human workers in a number of professions, a policy that would represent, perhaps, the best modern equivalent to Luddism.

I expected Americans to be Luddites for teachers or Luddites for truckers — for any profession that had a human touch or a little bit of workingman’s valor.

Instead, the only profession that got plurality support for a ban on AI use was software engineering:

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Overall, Americans supported the ban on AI in software engineering by a split of 44 to 41. It’s a small margin but a notable one given that bans for many professions were underwater by double digits.

One obvious explanation for this is that the public responds to a drumbeat of news stories about whatever industry is being automated next. The industry with the second-most support for a ban was manufacturing, which was sitting at break-even support (44 to 44). For a long time, manufacturing has been the stereotypical job facing automation, but now that software engineering is in that spotlight, Americans are willing to protect it.

That explanation is probably true, but it’s also a big step from hearing that an industry could be automated to supporting a ban to protect it.

The surprising support for a ban on the automation of software engineering likely also stems from the fact that it has spent over a decade as the field that represented social mobility, including for those who didn’t go to an elite school.

In the 2010s, the advice “learn to code” became something of a mantra, both as advice to young people as well as a taunt to people in declining industries. Now, in the late 2020s, with massive labor market disruption in the offing, it’s unclear what advice replaces it. A lot of Americans are willing to throw up blockers to preserve the old path, even if that path was only aspirational.

Americans viewed coding as the path up

Most bans in our poll showed a strong age gradient. On average, across all of the industries where we polled automation bans, young people (18 to 29) were 9.5 percentage points more likely to support a ban on AI in a given profession compared to 45- to 64-year-olds.1 This makes sense because younger people, earlier in their careers, have more of a stake in any given ban.

With software engineers, that age gradient all but disappeared. Older cohorts roughly matched the support of young people for a ban. Our poll showed relatively muted differences along race and gender lines. The other thing that did stick out along the age gradient was that the young cohort was 20 points more likely to want to ban AI in K-12 education than people in the 45 to 64 cohort, which is double its support for other bans.

As a teenager in the 2010s, I remember getting two kinds of professional advice from my elders: Learn Chinese and learn to code.2 These two things were, respectively, the future of international business and, well… international business, domestic business, business, and even entrepreneurship.

In the early 2010s, it was common to think that everything was computer, or would be.3

In 2014, BuzzFeed published a quiz called “Should You Learn To Code?” The quiz asked people to click on an identity that described them so they could get a personalized answer, listing everything from being a woman to being a rapper.

The joke, of course, was that every square led to a hyperlink where someone was telling that group they should learn to code. Basketball fans should learn to code because basketball star Chris Bosh said you should learn to code. A disabled veteran should learn to code because when one disabled veteran asked Reddit for advice on his future, Reddit users mobbed him with advice to code. Everyone was being told the same thing: Learn. To. Code.

It’s important to distinguish between two versions of this advice. One kind was directed at young people going to college and another was purportedly meant as a DIY path back from a layoff or otherwise dimmed financial prospects.

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In 2012, billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted an endorsement of Codecademy’s campaign #codeyear, posting that coding was his own New Year’s resolution. Codecademy was one of the online outlets that had popped up to give people a DIY way to get into the industry.

Bloomberg’s advice was a common nudge to those living through a decade of slow job growth and flat wages. Retraining as a coder was, apparently, the way back up.

By the end of the decade, that kind of advice would produce backlash, perhaps reasonably.

In 2019, when a round of layoffs hit BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, the hashtag #LearnToCode blew up as a sardonic jab at journalists who had made this suggestion many times to laid off coal miners. “Learn to code” was now seen as the way elites offered outsiders the dregs of an economy that had rewarded knowledge work in superstar cities.

Separately from the retraining discourse, students entering college were driven to computer science in large numbers: Data from Revelio Labs shows that computer science majors peaked at 11% in this year’s graduating class. This means that the peak year for the enrollment of computer science majors was 2022, which had been climbing throughout the decade prior.

That growing share of computer science majors were responding to a real wage premium. In 2016, a typical computer science graduate earned $19,000 more than a mechanical engineering graduate from the same school, according to Revelio. But by 2024, this premium had dropped to less than $10,000.4

There are more reasons for this than the widespread release of chatbots in 2022. For one, the tech industry had major layoffs in 2024 as interest rates rose, lowering demand for software engineers. But whatever the causes, it’s easy to see how the economic bump for computer science majors is unlikely to come back.

The brief path coding offered in the 2010s has now narrowed, if not disappeared.

Americans aren’t learning to vibe code

The irony is that AI makes coding itself more accessible, not less accessible. The threat to software engineers is a threat precisely because it makes their skillset less scarce and more available to others.

As of right now, however, not many people are using AI to code, despite the fact that it requires zero prior coding knowledge to produce fully functional projects. With AI, if you want to start a business, you can not only create your website with AI, but you can now run all your business processes — from expense tracking to payroll — with a set of prepackaged commands.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of people use AI to do enhanced Googling.

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In our poll, we asked responders how they use AI. A majority said they used AI for looking up information (55%), while just 8% used it for coding, despite the immense range of self-starting projects it could facilitate.

But software engineers are themselves an unusual vanguard. Norms in the industry favor disruption, quitting, and entrepreneurship, which makes an odd fit for protectionist politics.

The most valorized software engineers are not old hands who stay at the same company for 30+ years but those who leave and start their own companies. Remarkably, in a recent Pew Research Center poll, workers in information and technology were among the most likely to say the technology would help, not hurt, their future job prospects.

Those workers may be right.

In their latest essay, authors Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan argued that software engineering may not be at risk at all. In it, they cited three recent news stories in which either CEOs or the media credited a tech company’s layoffs to AI when there were really other causes.

It can be helpful for CEOs to point at AI when a business has other reasons for layoffs. It turns a bad story into one where the CEO is a hero for driving adoption. But as Kapoor and Narayanan pointed out, layoffs would not be the sign of rapid AI productivity gains — slower hiring is much more likely to be a sign of AI’s effect on an industry.

In other words, a lot of the stories that have led to concern for software engineers might be based on a false premise and a few flashy news stories.

But if the public is ready to go to war for even the software engineers, it raises the question: How strange will the politics get if AI disruption comes for very different industries? Ones with credentialism baked into the DNA, with lobbyists ready to push for state-by-state bans, with unions ready to fight back?

If AI disruption reaches these industries, then the latent protectionism within large swaths of the American public will no longer be cutting against the professions’ own instincts; they will be aligned.

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Recommended reading:

Welcome to the The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

The Verdict

Elon Musk became a trillionaire this week after his company SpaceX went public.

SpaceX is a genuine achievement — yes, space stuff in general is cool, but what I find the most impressive is the financial powerhouse behind the company: Starlink.

Starlink is an achievement of physics, vertical integration, and manufacturing. Traditional satellites are launched up to roughly 35,000 km away from earth on a rocket and then are launched sideways at tremendous speed. But orbiting 35,000 km away presents a lot of challenges (your signal has to travel 70,000 km back and forth; that’s why the old satellite internet was SO slow).1

Starlink has instead blanketed its satellites at the 480km to 550km range, close enough that it actually beats fiber-optic cable since traveling through glass is slower than in empty space. This isn’t a post about how cool Starlink is, but the number of challenges SpaceX had to solve to do this is extraordinary: Launch costs, manufacturing speed, phased array antennas…

Most of the conversation about SpaceX’s IPO was about Musk himself, who has become a reactionary and powerful political figure seeking to prop up far-right political parties, anti-immigration politics, and a broad hostility to the liberal economic and political regime that made his life story possible.

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I agree with all of those critiques of Musk, but I want to focus on the specific ire that his inauguration as the first trillionaire has drawn, because it’s exposed an unhealthy habit of mind among populists that focuses on gaps rather than absolute measures.

When people hear “world’s first trillionaire” they’re imagining that this is money in a bank account, but around 95% of Musk’s wealth is held in stocks of SpaceX and Tesla. That means if those companies start doing badly, his wealth will decline. Of course, Musk is able to liquify his assets by leveraging his stocks to borrow money if he so chooses, but that would require his companies to continue being successful, which is not an easy thing to do.

If we had a system where Elon was still CEO of SpaceX and Tesla but simply had to redistribute more of his shares and make many more billionares, would that really change how much political power he has? I doubt it. He’d still get to decide whether Ukraine or Russia gets Starlink access.

Sometimes Westerners will do a sort of cope where they point out that the multiples that separate the average American and Musk are way larger than those between the world’s poorest and the average American. But even under inequality-logic, that only works if you ignore the many, many people with zero wealth and negative wealth. After all, the multiple between zero and $193,000 is infinity, whereas the multiple between $193,000 and $1 trillion is 5.2 million.

But most importantly: the difference between me and someone living in rural Eritrea is not just our wealth but the inequality that comes with living in a country without basic access to civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, strong property rights protections, government-provided infrastructure, and protection from casual violence.

Mostly, I just don’t think material inequality is a good way to organize one’s political thinking. Absolute measures of well-being like longevity, access to clean running water, health care, housing, and education are more conceptually clear.

After all, the same flawed logic that would indict Musk for his mindboggling amounts of wealth would indict everyone reading this article when compared to the billions of people living in abject poverty.

Gaps between people, absent material deprivation, is simply not a moral problem. If everyone in the world had access to a decent standard of living, but some people were quadrillionaires, I don’t know that I would care about the latter. Moreover, it’s easy to imagine a world without much inequality but significant deprivation; that’s just most of human history when most people lived in subsistence agrarian economies.

Largely, when you look at measures of inequality, it’s possible to have high-inequality, high-poverty countries (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia) and low-inequality, high-poverty countries (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). I just don’t think inequality is that related to the central problems facing society, and structuring our discourse around it makes for a genuinely incoherent politics.

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Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Not to gas myself up too much, but I think my article on Monday was pretty good. I argued that centrist Democrats should just give up on the 2028 presidential primary. The party has changed a lot since the 1990s, and liberal Democrats are now in the majority.

Jerusalem had an excellent piece on the crisis of patriotism on the left. If you want to save our country from MAGA, you actually need to like our country. But it seems many people on the left are either too embarrassed to say that they do or are not-so-secretly ashamed of America.

Finally, Lakshya had a great piece breaking down the results of The Argument’s May poll. AI isn’t a top priority for most voters — yet. But to the extent that voters are thinking about AI, they’re skeptical of its benefits and fearful about the potential risks. For all the details on what we found in the data, take a look at the article below.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Switzerland voters libbed out and voted against capping the country’s population at 10 million.

• California takes forever to count votes (they should fix this), but earlier this week, Los Angeles counted enough votes to confirm that Nithya Raman will advance to the mayoral runoff election against incumbent Karen Bass. People tend to sleep on Raman (and Zohran Mamdani) because they’re democratic socialists. But they both have elite ball knowledge when it comes to housing. Mamdani was much better than Andrew Cuomo on it, and Raman is far superior to Bass, too.

• The CEO of AstraZeneca said that AI was helping the firm speed up the development of new medicines. “The value of AI in our industry is productivity improvement,” he said. “In the way you design a new medicine, a new drug, you can actually do it faster, of course, do it smarter.”

Worth watching...

On their latest podcast episode, Jerusalem and Matt talked about Silent Spring, which helped kickstart the modern environmental movement. Degrowth environmentalism is still alive and well, but how much can we blame Silent Spring for that? Listen in to find out:

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Lakshya, Kobe, and Jerusalem broke down the results of The Argument’s latest poll on a Substack live video Wednesday. They discussed why so few voters seem to care about AI given the large portion that expects severely negative results from the technology. Will it take a crisis for voters to take notice?

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

Jerusalem said that the (horrific) The New Yorker piece on the Tate brothers “fucked [her] up.” I read the article too, and I concur. Among many other horrifying things, I learned that Paul Ingrassia — the Trump administration appointee who said in a group chat that he had a “Nazi streak” — got his start as the Tates’ lawyer. In the brothers’ defamation suit against a rape survivor who accused them of sex trafficking minors.

Angela read Martyr! for Joey Politano’s fiction book club. The novel follows a young Iranian-American poet as he tries to get sober. “There was so much going on here, to be expected from a poet’s debut novel,” Angela said. “But such fun to unpack every little piece with a group.”

Justin said he’s been listening to the album in “in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music” by Dagmar Zuniga, which he said “feels like a lo-fi folk album out of the 1970s” with “perfect dreamy summer vibes.”

Maibritt finished the show Task, which she could have easily watched in one sitting. The show ticked many of her boxes: “good child acting, complicated yet ultimately positive depictions of masculinity, characters speaking a strong regional dialect, and, well, Mark Ruffalo in uniform.”

I really enjoyed Naomi Kanakia’s essay “The New Yorker offered him a deal,” which was recommended to me by my friend Charlotte. Absolutely fascinating piece; as someone who is not very familiar with this world, I learned a lot about fiction writing in a particular time and a particular place.

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More to read:

Contrary to what you may read online, most Americans love Amazon. I discuss why that might be.

What The Argument’s aggregated polling says about how each state will vote this fall. Hint: Take a look at Ohio and Texas.

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The Argument’s Chief of Staff will have two primary responsibilities:

1. Overseeing day-to-day business and administrative operations for our 10-person team

2. Building out our events business from the ground up

We’re looking for someone entrepreneurial and highly organized, someone who is passionate about both defending liberalism and creating the sorts of processes and systems that keep things running smoothly.

This is an in-person position in Washington, D.C., and the annual salary is $100,000. More details, including instructions on how to apply, below.

Chief of Staff

Washington, D.C. | $100,000/year | Full-time, in-person

Come work at a bold new media startup dedicated to defending and advancing liberal democracy through rigorous, provocative opinion journalism.

Our mission is twofold: mount a vigorous defense of liberal democracy grounded in the real debates people are having about immigration, culture, cost-of-living, and gender, and create a home where liberal thinkers speak plainly and persuasively. We champion abundance over scarcity, evidence over orthodoxy, and meaningful engagement across differences.

We focus on the issues that matter most: promoting abundance-based policies, understanding the American voter through rigorous polling analysis, examining technology’s impact on society, charting a path to gender equality, and advancing human progress.

Position Overview: We’re seeking an entrepreneurial, highly organized Chief of Staff to join our team in downtown Washington, D.C. This role is central to scaling our operations, growing our community and events businesses, and building the systems that will let The Argument grow sustainably while we pursue our mission.

Key Responsibilities

• Oversee day-to-day operations across the organization, ensuring tight coordination between editorial, business, and administrative functions

• Manage and develop our Operations Manager, providing mentorship, structure, and clear priorities

• Lead community-building efforts for our online magazine, developing strategies to deepen reader engagement and grow a loyal subscriber base

• Build and grow our events business — conceiving, planning, and executing public events, salons, and convenings that extend our editorial mission and revenue base

• Design and implement business systems and processes covering project management, vendor relationships, finance and HR coordination, and internal communications

• Partner with leadership on strategic projects, special initiatives, and operational problem-solving

• Will report to the Editor-in-Chief

Qualifications

Required:

• 4+ years of experience in operations, chief of staff, business management, or comparable roles, ideally at a startup or growth-stage organization

• Demonstrated success managing direct reports

• Experience building processes and systems from the ground up

• Strong project management skills and exceptional attention to detail

• Excellent written and verbal communication

• Enthusiasm for our mission to defend and advance liberal democracy

• Familiarity with and genuine excitement for the issues we cover

Preferred:

• Experience in media, publishing, or events

• Background in community building, audience development, or membership programs

• Knowledge of current political and cultural debates

What We Offer

• Competitive salary: $100,000 per year

• Flexible leave policies with 15 paid days off

• Comprehensive benefits package (health, dental, vision, and 401(k) match)

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• Central location in downtown Washington, D.C.

To Apply: To apply for this position, email jobs@theargumentmag.com to tell us why you’d be a good fit for this position. Please include your resume. Rolling applications.

This is an in-person position located in downtown Washington, D.C.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

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The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our last surveys have asked about artificial intelligence, crime, the economy, gender issues, immigration, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

Contemporary American progressives tend to be highly critical of Big Tech. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that the “biggest threats to journalism” are “tech monopolies”; has supported breaking up Meta; and believes that Amazon’s position as both merchant and marketplace creates antitrust issues.

Bernie Sanders says that AI is being pushed by tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Ellisons at the expense of the working class.

Sanders is also vocally opposed to using automation to replace human workers,1 and he recently penned an op-ed in The New York Times advocating for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund using a one-time 50% tax on the stocks of AI companies.2

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a long history of criticizing Amazon and has publicly gone after the company for unpaid fines.

Graham Platner’s entire campaign is centered around fighting the “oligarchy” (and also addressing his latest scandal).

You might think that this rhetoric is a response to popular backlash against technology companies. And yet, Big Tech firms are popular. In The Argument’s most recent national survey, fielded from May 29 to June 3, most Americans had a favorable opinion of four large tech companies: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

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Far fewer Americans had opinions about the leading AI labs. About 87% of respondents had some opinion about OpenAI, but around 4 in 10 had never heard of Anthropic or Elon Musk’s xAI.

Progressives (and some conservatives) are increasingly critical of Big Tech companies and, by extension, artificial intelligence.3 Indeed, Big Tech companies often engage in anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers. But anti-tech populism is poorly suited to serve as the foundation for mass politics.

Americans love Amazon

What is the most popular institution in America? It’s not a government agency — it’s Amazon, followed closely by the military, Google, and the police.

Read more

The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

Share

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

I expected to hate Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring — Carson is often name-checked as a precursor to modern degrowth environmentalism (including by degrowthers themselves). But Silent Spring wasn’t some 400-page diatribe against progress and growth; it was a thorough, dense, and methodical explanation of the harms of various pesticides and herbicides. And it was very persuasive. (And boring!)

In all likelihood, most environmentalists and anti-environmentalists haven’t read the book. What they remember is what the book came to symbolize, in large part due to the public opposition:

When Carson published her book in 1962, the backlash was fierce. Chemical industry groups claimed Carson wanted to send America back to the Dark Ages, with predictions of famine and insect swarms. They wrote books attacking her credibility, spread rumors she was a communist, and suggested that a mere lady biologist had no business second-guessing the manly chemists.

“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” Carson wrote. Her case was that DDT was increasingly harmful to humans and wildlife and decreasingly harmful to mosquitoes. She believed we could use biological controls, targeted application, and other tested solutions that would more effectively solve the problem. That’s pretty much the whole book.

In the end, Carson prevailed over the lobbyists, and DDT was banned, thanks in large part to the fact that she was thorough in her research and advocated for a measured and science-based approach to solving natural issues, rather than an ideological agenda.

I don’t want to oversell it. There are parts of the book that reveal Carson’s underlying Romantic and tech-negative tendencies, most notably the opening chapter, a “fable” that imagines a mythical perfect town with tons of beautiful wildlife and happy farms and travelers who come to fish. The town is destroyed by an “evil spell” that rid the town of birds and made farm life untenable, and the once-verdant countryside is now “lined with browned and withered vegetation.”

It’s telling that this town has no industry (outside of farming, which at the time was under 9% of the population) and therefore no clear way of sustaining human life. This type of Romantic fairy tale (dystopia?) of a place unspoiled by human activity is a recurring one in the degrowth-environmental imagination.

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I came up through the climate movement — interning at the Climate Action Campaign and the Center for American Progress’ Energy & Environment team. Climate change is, to me, a genuine threat to human flourishing. But over a decade later, I’m struck by how much energy in the green movement has been focused on efforts like banning natural gas, blocking denser housing, and counterproductive protest strategies instead of engaging in more objectively effective policies.

The roots of this mismatch are worth understanding. The large-scale environmental movement was fueled by suburbanites who were fundamentally anti-growth. When wealthy people moved to the suburbs in the postwar era, they resented that newer developments kept eating into the green space and seclusion they had been promised.

On our newest podcast episode, Matt Yglesias summed up this mentality based on his own observations from living part-time in Maine: “I’m here to be near the forest. I cut down trees for my house. But you can’t cut down trees for your house because I’m trying to be close to the trees.”

When the movement’s base lives in sprawling suburbs and defines environmental protection as keeping things the way they are, the focus becomes less “protect the environment” and more “degrowth.” That explains why building denser housing, rather than single-family homes with big lawns, is seen as the enemy instead of the solution.

The effects of these positions are felt globally, mostly by poor people in the developing world. The people holding them mostly live in pleasant suburbs.

The real lesson of Carson’s book isn’t in its version of the good life but in its implicit argument for how to be persuasive. Carson is methodical and sober-minded. In the face of increasingly hysterical and sexist attacks, she remained poised and focused on her goals: eliminating DDT and spreading awareness of the negative externalities of various chemical spraying practices.

And she won! The U.S. banned DDT for farming in 1972, the Stockholm Convention put it on its original list of “dirty dozen” pollutants to be eliminated, and global use has collapsed to 369 metric tons in 2023, with just three countries still spraying it.

We get into all of it on this week’s episode of The Argument.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE (YouTube)

New episodes post every Thursday.

For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com.

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Show notes:

• Silent Spring, book about pesticides by Rachel Carson that serves as the central point of discussion: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Silent Spring,” series of articles by Rachel Carson that formed the basis for much of her book: New Yorker article

• Coverage of World War II chemicals being repurposed for pesticides: American Heritage article, The Pantagraph article

• Coverage of Carson dying of breast cancer: Silent Spring Institute page, NOAA page

• Conservative discourse arguing Carson’s work was responsible for millions of malaria deaths: Competitive Enterprise Institute op-ed, AEI article

• Coverage of DDT resistance becoming a big problem in the 1970s: EPA archive, Royal Society of Chemistry article, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health article

• Coverage of planes spreading aldrin over Detroit suburbs in 1959 to kill Japanese beetles. The program was not a secret, but government agencies were not required to inform or gain permission from landowners: Detroit Free Press archive

• Coverage of planes spreading DDT over Long Island in 1957 to kill gypsy moth caterpillars: The New York Times article, Literary Hub article, New York Entomological Society article

• Frankenstein, book by Mary Shelley about messing with forces beyond our control: Goodreads page, Project Gutenberg e-book

• CBS documentary about Silent Spring: IMDb page, YouTube video

• The Population Bomb, book about overpopulation by Paul Ehrlich, mentioned by Matt as a contrast to Silent Spring: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Coverage of program to drop sterilized screwworms in an area to kill large populations and stop them from affecting American farming: The Atlantic article

• Coverage of DOGE cutting monitoring for the effective screwworm program: Agri-Pulse article, Slow Boring article

• Coverage of Clean Power Plan, Obama-era regulation agenda for existing and new coal power plants: EPA archive, The Guardian article, EIA article

• Jerusalem Demsas article about tension in environmentalism between technologists and degrowth, anti-change elements: The Atlantic article

• Coverage of Endangered Species Act being invoked to restrict logging in spotted owl habitats, causing a loss of jobs: EBSCO research, Bird Alliance of Oregon article, University of Chicago article, Los Angeles Times article

• Article about campaign to save the snail darter as a pretense for blocking a dam: The New York Times article, The New York Times archive

• Coverage of deer population in the U.S.: World Population Review data, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service page

• Definition of “angler”: “A person who catches fish with a hook and fishing line,” Merriam-Webster entry

• Don’t Blame Us, book by Lily Geismer about suburban liberalism: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Coverage of Congressional negotiations over energy permitting bill, which would make it easier to construct both renewable and hydrocarbon energy: Politico article, Bloomberg Government article

• Coverage of natural gas power being marginally better for greenhouse gas emissions and significantly better for air particulate matter than coal power: iScience article, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions article, Swarthmore research

• The Feminine Mystique, book by Betty Friedan encouraging women to rejoin the workforce, discussed in previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Previous podcast episode discussing The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast episode

• Coverage of Carson being maligned as a crazy spinster: JSTOR article,

• Speculation of Carson’s relationship with a neighboring woman: Clean Water Action article, Lida Maxwell book

• Coverage of the term “Boston Marriage”: National Park Service article, Boston.com article

• Coverage of Carson not identifying as a feminist (“I’m not interested in things done by women or by men but in things done by people”): Environment and Society portal article

• Coverage of letter to President Eisenhower by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson arguing Carson must be a communist because she was pretty but unmarried: Tulane University article, Environmental History article

• Coverage of solar energy sites being slowed down or halted by environmental reviews: E&E News article, NPR article, Los Angeles Times article, Union of Concerned Scientists explainer

• Coverage of New England oil companies using environmental impact litigation to halt the construction of transmission lines from Canada: Boston Globe article, AP article

• Coverage of boundary reanalysis in Montgomery County, Maryland: Montgomery County Public Schools article, Bethesda Magazine article

• Peer review: “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks,” paper by Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark, and Tim A. Bruckner showing that people who took early retirement faced worse cognitive decline than similar people who didn’t: NBER working paper

• Coverage of the “Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)” movement, a community of people who made it their mission to retire as early as 35: The Boston Globe article, r/Fire subreddit

• “Grandparents’ cognition and caregiving for grandchildren,” paper by Flavia Chereches, Gabriel Olaru, Nicola Ballhausen, and Yvonne Brehmer showing that spending time caregiving for grandchildren was associated with slower cognitive decline among grandparents: Psychology and Aging article

• Montessori Baby Visual Stimulation Cards, which purportedly encourage cognitive development among infants by engaging their eyes: Montessori Toys page

• Clarification of millennial ages, with birth years ranging from 1981 through 1996: Britannica page

Transcript

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In The Argument’s newest poll, fielded nationally among 3,008 registered voters between May 29 and June 3, 2026, over a quarter, 27%, of voters said it’s likely humanity would go extinct because of AI. At the same time, just 6% listed the technology as one of their two top issues — exactly one-quarter of voters think humanity could go extinct but don’t rank it as an important issue.

(NOTE: If you’d like to see the full crosstabs, become a paying subscriber here.)

Voters may see worrying possibilities for AI in the abstract, but as long as they don’t see the impact in their own lives, that danger stays theoretical, argued , The Argument’s director of political data, and in a Substack live conversation with The Argument Editor-in-Chief .

But once a theoretical danger becomes real, public opinion can move quickly. “What do we think changes the salience of this issue in the public mind?” questioned Kobe. “What I worry about is the answer to that question is a crisis.”

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For example, voters oppose a ban on automation in most industries — except for software engineering and manufacturing, the two industries that already have the most AI exposure.

Lakshya pointed out a similar dynamic in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned.

“Ending Roe v. Wade was actually unpopular, but the polling didn’t really show how bad it would get for Republicans in ‘22 until it actually happened, and then opinion just collapsed. And that’s kind of the way I see this,” Lakshya said.

If AI does cause some of the widespread problems people fear, voters would support far-reaching measures such as a jobs guarantee or a universal basic income, according to our polling. But Jerusalem pointed out that the theoretical nature of this question strikes the other way, too, since people haven’t fully thought through the implications of the policy.

“Obviously it just depends on what people mean by UBI. Like, do you mean we’re giving everyone $50,000 or you’re giving everyone $15,000?” she explained. “We’re in such a liminal space right now; the formation of public opinion on AI is literally happening in real time. So nothing is stable or stagnant.”

Lakshya concurred that it’s too soon to know: “I think anyone who ‘knows’ the political implications is lying, honestly,” he said.

Watch the full video above to hear more of our takes on the latest poll, or dive into the poll results below, with full crosstabs available for paying subscribers:

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Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about crime, the economy, gender issues, immigration, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

There’s a giant political prize sitting in the middle of American politics just waiting to be picked up.

In The Argument‘s latest national survey of 3,008 registered voters, we asked which party people trusted more on a long list of issues. On every other issue we tested — including the economy, health care, crime, and corruption — at least 60% of voters could pick a side.

Then we asked about AI.

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Even though AI is everywhere, nobody cares about it yet. In fact, just 6% of voters ranked it as a top-two issue in our most recent polling. It’s close to dead last in voter prioritization at the moment, tied with climate change and above only LGBT issues.

The rest of this article and our poll’s full crosstabs are available to paid subscribers. We hope you’ll consider supporting our work. Thanks for reading!

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Want to know how your state is actually leaning ahead of the midterms? Scroll down. We've turned The Argument's original polling into two maps: one showing Trump's approval and one for which party voters would back if elections were held today. We'll refresh these maps every month until you cast your ballot.

The short version is brutal for Republicans: Trump is 20 points underwater with the voters most likely to turn out, and Democrats are doing even better than the topline suggests. But the national picture hides a lot, and the state-by-state version is where it gets interesting.

How are Democrats looking among 2026 likely voters?

With modeling based off of The Argument’s original polling data, we can assemble an extremely detailed view of how Democrats are doing with likely 2026 voters (i.e. the midterm electorate). We consistently see that this group is slightly more high-propensity and Democratic-leaning than the rest of the country is at large; for instance, Democrats lead our surveys of likely voters by nine points nationally, even though they lead among registered voters by six percentage points.

Here’s how they’re doing on a state-by-state basis. This data will be regularly updated through the midterms.

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How is Donald Trump doing with 2026 likely voters?

Midterms are usually referendums on the president, and 2026 is shaping up to be no different. After winning the popular vote in 2024, Donald Trump has seen his national popularity nose-dive. His approval rating with likely 2026 voters currently sits at -20. This data will be regularly updated.

Here’s what that looks like on a state-by-state basis.

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Methodology:

To construct our state-level estimates for the generic ballot and approval numbers among 2026 likely voters, we use our polling estimates and apply them on a demographic level, with poststratification. By comparing the panel-profiled 2024 presidential vote per demographic to the 2026 margin with likely voters of that same subgroup, we were able to calculate the swing at a demographic level. Demographic swings were calculated from our polling data for the national, regional, and state level, where available.

For each state, the three swings were blended together, weighting each component for sample size (and discarding subgroup sample sizes of less than 100 entirely) to ensure the stability of estimates. These demographic-imputed swings were then blended with the full state-level polling estimates, weighted for sample size. A calibration step is applied to bring each historical survey in line with current estimates of the generic ballot.

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard characterized the United States as “neither dream nor reality”; instead, he argued, it is “a hyperreality … a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams.”

American identity is at once descriptive and aspirational. As a result, the gap between reality and rhetoric has been leveraged into a process of continuous reinvention and progress. This process is so integral to our national identity that we’ve created an entire genre of speech for it: the American jeremiad.

As the academic Sacvan Bercovitch explained, the American jeremiad is “an adversarial celebration of America,” one that “castigate[s] the defects of the present so as to give voice to the abiding national identity.”

Bercovitch was an immigrant, which gave him the perspective to describe the uniquely American tradition of dissenting from some core aspect of national policy or practice while simultaneously affirming core aspects of the national identity. As he put it, “the remedy for American abuses was the American promise.”

The American jeremiad has three essential parts, not necessarily in the following order:

First, the speaker establishes the covenant — an ideal vision that will resonate with his listeners. The blueprint for an American jeremiad is John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he entreats his followers to “be as a city upon a hill.”

Second, the speaker spends much of his remarks warning about the failings of the nation and describing the hypocrisy his listeners are complicit in. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech argues that Black Americans have been cheated of their rightful inheritance.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

And finally, the speaker gives the people a way out of the darkness. Disaster can be averted! Faith in the compact can be renewed! Redemption is possible!

In the waning months of the Civil War, then-president Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address charted just such a path: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

As Bercovitch documented, while the overall structure of the speech remained the same, “the objects of lament, from slavery to corporate greed, were shifting forms of derangement: aberrations of the values and principles that had united the states from the start and accounted for the greatness of the Union.”

The end result is an audience recommitted to the original covenant and given a clear path to achieving the ideal.

The jeremiad is how American patriotism is renewed even at its darkest moments.1 And it is a useful tool for those who wish to resolve the cognitive dissonance of an unstable national identity. Making the public conscious of the ways in which we are failing to meet our stated moral, political, or religious commitments can move us toward resolving those contradictions in the direction of progress.

But this is a process that requires political and moral leaders to believe in — or at least espouse — a commitment to the American project. In recent decades, liberals have become increasingly uncomfortable with patriotism, ceding it to the right. The last great liberal practitioner of the jeremiad was Barack Obama, and since then, the tradition has been upheld not by progressives and liberals, but by MAGA and, increasingly, the postliberal right.

The last gasps of liberal patriotism

“This union may never be perfect,” Obama conceded in a 2008 speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, “but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”

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On Wednesday, I went to WelcomeFest, the annual gathering of centrist Democratic operatives and D.C. types.1 The purpose of the conference is to advocate for moderation in order to flip Trump districts in the House and ultimately to nominate a moderate candidate for president in 2028.

Unfortunately for them, that second part is probably not going to happen.

When the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) came to prominence in the 1990s with the goal of shoring up the party’s moderate faction, the party’s liberal wing was the minority. But today, the liberal wing of the party is the majority, and that means that the DLC strategy of simply bulldozing the left won’t bear fruit in 2028.

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If centrists want one of their own as the nominee, they will need to do something that seems anathema to them: Find common ground with the organized progressive movement.

How the Democratic Party became a left-wing party

Over the last three decades or so, the share of Americans who self-identify as “very liberal” or “liberal” has risen from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2024, according to Gallup’s polling. Over the same period, the share calling itself moderate has fallen from 43% to 34%, while the share calling itself conservative has stayed essentially the same.

In other words, public opinion has shifted to the left, especially relative to the baseline of the 1990s. In 1991, just 48% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. In 1996, less than half of Americans thought that same-sex relations2 should be legal, and only a quarter believed that same-sex marriages should be legal. People were much more likely to favor the death penalty, to oppose abortion and legal marijuana, and to favor decreasing immigration levels than they are today. Views of corporations were much more favorable, while views of labor unions were somewhat less so.

Truly, the past is a foreign country.

Part of this massive shift in public opinion can be chalked up to generational replacement, as older people with more right-wing views died and were replaced by younger people with different beliefs. Part of it was caused by persuasion; there is no other way to explain the massive shifts in opinion on same-sex marriage or marijuana than some people changing their minds.

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Still, it’s important to contextualize the magnitude of this shift. Liberals are still a minority of the population, and on a number of issues, such as crime and immigration, voters have basically conservative views.

But within the Democratic Party, the leftward shift was much larger.

In 1994, self-identified liberals made up just a quarter of Democrats. But sometime between 2018 and 2022, liberals became a majority of the Democratic Party.

In The Argument’s polling, we see the same thing. Across all of our 2026 surveys, 61% of Democrats identify as liberal or very liberal, rising to 67% when you drop Democratic-leaning independents. On social issues, 69% of Democrats call themselves liberal; on economic issues, it’s 61%.

Some people will quibble that describing oneself as liberal doesn’t actually mean that voters necessarily hold left-wing views on the issues. Frankly, I think that’s a cope; there’s robust evidence that self-identified liberals have more left-wing policy positions.

It’s time for moderates to face the facts. The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton is dead and gone. The age of James Carville is over. It’s AOC’s party now, and we’re all just living in it.

Centrists need to learn to count

Many of the WelcomeFest participants seemed sincere in their convictions. Reps. Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray announced a new centrist pledge called Promise to America. The first item on the pledge is: “We are capitalist, not socialist.”

That bullet point serves two purposes: to differentiate Promise to America signatories from Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members like Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders and to serve as a signal that signatories are generally pro-business in their economic positions. But that positioning is increasingly out of touch with the Democratic Party rank and file.

That is another way of saying that the crowd at WelcomeFest is genuinely more conservative on economic and social issues than the average Democratic primary voter. And that makes it hard for them to build trust with the progressives who now make up the majority of the party’s voters, to say nothing of elite political institutions.

It’s one thing to tell progressives that, while you share their ultimate goals, your reading of the evidence suggests that the scope of what’s politically possible is narrower than they think, and therefore the best strategy is to moderate on select issues to maximize the odds of beating Republicans and push policy to the left.

That’s not an easy sell. Progressive political spaces are filled with well-meaning people who tend to have strong ideological views, so there is a natural tendency to engage in a little motivated reasoning.3

But it’s even harder to convince people to compromise on their deeply held principles and hopes when you don’t actually share the same end goals. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani want to create social democracy in America. I don’t think that Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray do.

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Ironically, this argument about how to win intraparty factional disputes is symmetrical to the one that moderates often make when discussing how to appeal to swing voters: People won’t back you if they think you don’t like them and don’t respect the values that matter to them.

The moderate wing of the party is used to calling the shots. When Lyndon Johnson was Senate majority leader, he liked to tell Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas that the problem with the liberal wing of the Democratic caucus was that it couldn’t count. What he meant is that southern senators had the votes and the organization to beat the liberals every time.

For a long time, that was true of the Democratic Party as a whole. No longer. The liberal wing of the party has the voters and the institutional clout and the support of the old guard of elected officials.4

Today, it’s the moderate faction that is the junior coalition partner, which is a position it has not yet reconciled itself to. Now, it’s the centrists who need to learn to count — at least when they’re trying to win intra-party factional battles.

It is still true that, when it comes to national politics, the math doesn’t favor progressives.

Back in the 1950s, political scientists were worried that the two parties were too ideologically similar. Today, we have achieved their dream of having two, big, ideologically distinct parties. The problem for progressives is that liberals are a minority of the population. In The Argument’s aggregated polling, just 29% of registered voters identified as liberals; 35% each identified as moderate or conservative.

So, even though the Republican Party has become thoroughly right-wing, Republicans still have a baked-in edge. Conservatives outnumber liberals in the electorate — and always have — so a left-wing coalition needs to win over a bunch of moderates in order to get to 50% plus one.5

When you’re in the minority of your own party, your optimal strategy changes. You become the supplicant. You can’t run roughshod over your factional rivals anymore. You have to meet them where they are — not where you wish they were.

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Recommended reading:

Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

At concerts, coffee shops, dinners, and dance parties, the ubiquity of cell phones as tools of surveillance and avoidance is killing the vibe.

While most people agree that a crowd of cell phones recording a concert is suboptimal, the dominant reaction has largely been one of despair: No one is going to make it illegal to film a concert, so what can you even do? It’s not illegal to be a downer.

Well, at least one person has finally decided to exhibit some agency.

Phoebe Bridgers, the artist perhaps best known for her 2020 album “Punisher,” which got her nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys, has decided her next concert will be totally phone free. Others have done phone-free shows, but, to my knowledge, Bridgers is one of the first to attempt it for an arena-scale tour.

“Upon arrival at all venues, all phones, smart watches, and accessories will be secured in Yondr pouches that guests will maintain possession of at all times … Anyone seen using a non-permitted device during the performance will be escorted out of the venue,” reads Bridgers’ press release.

Some people got very angry at this announcement. Reasons ranged from the respectably honest — like wanting to record concertgoers’ favorite artist so they can remember the experience — to the absurd suggestion that some people need their phones for their disabilities and aren’t capable of requesting an accommodation.

One Twitter user claimed that “phone-free concerts are classist” because many people cannot afford live music events and therefore can only experience the show through shaky video footage on social media.

But I love what Bridgers is doing: helping us develop a better moral code for how to live in a world with smartphones.

The smartphone is a relatively new invention. The iPhone was first released in 2007, and by 2011, 35% of American adults had a smartphone. By 2023, 90% did. (Worldwide, roughly 54% of all people, including children, have smartphones.)

And society has struggled to keep up. Is it okay to play a video without headphones? What if it’s a busy street? What about FaceTime? Is that really different from talking to a real person in front of you? What are the rules for behavior?

Debates about stopping disorderly conduct are often spurred by conservatives, in large part because liberals are concerned with expanding the sphere of police influence (and because they are skeptical of private action producing widespread positive change). But while few people would want to see someone arrested for playing their TikTok videos loudly on the train, most of us would very much like them to stop.

The problem is that too many of us have forgotten the large set of responses between “do nothing” and “call the police.” But Phoebe Bridgers hasn’t.

Private action to set the rules for behavior is more important in a multicultural society, not less. Having a clear set of rules gives people something tangible to debate over. Everyone knows the discomfort of realizing you’ve broken some unwritten rule and struggling to figure out what you did and why. It’s much better to know that there are strong expectations; then you can decide whether it’s worth it for you to break them.

People who come from different walks of life often have different intuitions about what they find annoying or disturbing, but quasi-public spaces cannot accommodate “live and let live” in all instances. If I decide to be loud, I have decided that for everyone.

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One of the best-studied areas that illuminate differences in behavioral norms is queuing. If you’re standing in line at a coffee shop and someone cuts in front of you, basically everyone thinks that’s rude. But when you’re waiting for your group to get called at an airport gate, many people mill about aimlessly, then rush in to get an early spot.

On Black Friday, norms seem to entirely disappear, and crushing forward and trampling others underfoot becomes bizarrely acceptable.

One newsletter I read characterized different queue expectations in several countries:

• Japanese queues are extremely orderly.

• Indians queue very near one another.

• Thai people use their sandals to queue.

• Chinese line-cutting got so bad that Shanghai Disneyland had to reportedly construct “narrow, single-person queue lanes so that people could not cut ahead of each other.”

More artists should follow Bridgers’ example, but also, more people should get comfortable voicing their opinions. I was sitting in a diner doing some work a few weeks ago, and a couple began watching TV on their iPad. So, I just asked them if they could use headphones, and they turned it off. I did the same at a coffee shop a few days later, and the other person apologized and turned it down.

You shouldn’t call the police on people who irritate you. But you also shouldn’t act as if the social norms of the most disruptive are natural and immutable. At the very least, you should speak up.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But, for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

This week, Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, published original, state-by-state analysis of Trump’s approval among likely 2026 voters. It showed that Trump is above water in just 15 states of the 31 he won in 2024 — an unprecedentedly bad showing for an incumbent president. What does this mean for the Senate? Should Democrats get their hopes up? Read Lakshya’s analysis to learn more:

Speaking of the Senate, Jerusalem Demsas took on the commentators who are trying to excuse Graham Platner’s cheating scandal. Somehow, they’ve convinced themselves that criticizing Platner’s infidelity is an elitist concern and that overlooking it is a way to get in touch with “the people.” Find out how many Americans will fess up to cheating:

Finally, I answer why LLMs can’t count the number of R’s in “strawberry.” How is it that they have made such rapid progress on science, math, and coding but still fail at simple questions like these? The answer has something to do with human memory and the ways it’s replicated, or not, in these systems:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Big news out of New York, where the state budget exempted certain housing projects from the State Environmental Quality Review Act with the governor’s support.

• A bill to speed up geothermal energy permitting passed the House by a unanimous voice vote this week. The bill was championed by AOC and Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., who is known for being friendly to the oil and gas industry. Geothermal has a big tent.

• In a study at UPenn, GLP-1s showed promise for treating breast cancer: “A retrospective analysis of more than 110,000 women between the ages of 45 and 80 found that those who took GLP-1 medications were about 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who did not take GLP-1 medications.”

Worth watching…

Great news! If you missed The Argument’s first-ever debate in San Francisco, now is your chance to watch it. Jerusalem and Kelsey hashed out whether AI will cure cancer, while audience members also weighed in with strictly refereed, one-minute questions (and rants — rants encouraged!). It was an unforgettable night, where together, we not only pressed on major societal questions, but demonstrated the immense value of airing debate. Tune in for top-notch content:

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

California had an election this week. The day afterward, it looked like Republicans might capture the top two slots in a number of House districts, locking Democrats out of the general election in those places. (In California, the top two-vote getters advance regardless of party.) In this video, Lakshya Jain and Zachary Donnini explain that later ballots tilt heavily Democratic, which will shift the early results. They also debate whether taking so long to call a winner undermines voter trust. Check it out:

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

I normally wouldn’t start with my own recommendation, but I am so enthusiastic about the film Train Dreams that I have to take the privilege.

The story follows Robert Grainier in the early 1900s as he builds a life with his family in the woods of Idaho, only to be repeatedly pulled away from them by his work as a logger and then to be haunted by mounting tragedies. I can’t understate how poignant the character arc is; how vivid the supporting characters; how gorgeous the forested backdrop. Throughout, you see the growth of the modern world steadily encroach on the periphery of the great outdoors — just a small taste of what this historical transition must have actually felt like. The movie is truly an experience.

Speaking of experiences, Maibritt Henkel shook up the normal slate of music, TV, films, and books with a baking recommendation this week: an NYT Cooking recipe for chocolate zucchini bread.

“A friend and I baked this zucchini bread for a dinner party and it was a hit,” she reported. “Moist, easy to transport, and not at all vegetably.” I can confirm.

Meanwhile, Justin Zuckerman took us to the basketball court, where he’s been watching on the Knicks’ “generational run” this playoff season. Across the office, Milan Singh said he’s rooting for the Spurs, but he is mainly happy that the Thunder got knocked out. (If there are any OKC fans on the mailing list, feel free to take it to the comments section.)

In addition to the NBA finals, Milan chimed in on music, calling Tha Carter V by Lil Wayne “the best album of all time.” I felt the need to confirm whether he really meant it was the best or just embellishing for effect.

“You’re not going to say this again later about something else? You really mean ‘best?’”

He nodded confidently, didn’t even say anything.

Finally, Eli Richman pitched us all on an opportunity to learn about British land use regulations, farming economics, and livestock welfare in the new season of Clarkson’s Farm, which started coming out this week.

“I know, ‘You should watch this unscripted show about farming hosted by an infamous jerk,’ is a tough sell,” Eli confessed. “But it’s really worth checking out.”

“A city slicker who knows jack-all about farming but insists on doing everything himself helps make all of this accessible,” Eli added, and “his absurd battles with the town council, which repeatedly impedes him from using his own farm in various inoffensive ways,” make it entertaining.

I actually debated putting this in the abundance section of the newsletter. A reality TV show about the horrors of land use regulation as enforced by an imperious local governing body? Eli knows his audience.

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It’s impossible to address the subject of internet snark without first revisiting the classic Tom Scocca essay “On Smarm.” Published on Gawker almost 13 years ago, the essay’s influence continued well past the death of the site.

Scocca described snark as a useful and natural reaction to smarm. Smarm is snark’s opposite, the yin to its yang. Where snark is disrespectful, skeptical, glib, and unconcerned with tone or social niceties, smarm is smug, sanctimonious, condescending, and obsessed with superficial politeness.

According to Scocca, smarm is “a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.”

Snark is The Onion reprinting its classic article “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” word for word in response to the Parkland shooting. Smarm is David Brooks writing a column in response to the same shooting titled “Respect First, Then Gun Control,” where he argued the real problem was that liberals weren’t nice enough to conservatives.

Scocca also distinguished between snark and smarm by pointing out power differentials — a typical example of smarm would be a smug insider with enormous power and influence asking “Why can’t we all just get along and respect each other?” to an outsider critic, all the while abusing said power and deflecting all criticism into complaints about tone.

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Smarm was arguably the dominant conversational tone during the 2000s and 2010s when Scocca was developing as a writer, especially for elites in political, cultural, and journalistic circles. Smarm was the reaction of a besieged elite confronted with people who refused to follow the rules of engagement. Smarm is Dave Eggers proclaiming you should not dismiss a book until you have written one or dismiss a movie until you have made one.

The internet and social media tore down walls and made criticism easier and more direct than ever before. Gawker, an irreverent outlet best known for tearing down elite tastemakers, was the foremost battleground between snarky outsider new media and smarmy traditional institutions.

Writing in Gawker, Scocca defended snark as the appropriate response to smarm, the “fuck you” to sanctimonious bullshitters who would rather tone police their critics and demand credentials than defend their choices on the merits to people they considered beneath them.

And in context, Scocca was right. In 2003, as liberals questioned the government’s case for war in Iraq, the president smarmily resorted frequently to the idea that “now is not the time for politics,” while his administration’s officials fired back by appealing to tone:

“I call on all the vociferous Democrat critics, from Kerry to Dean and from Daschle to Pelosi, to have the courage to tell their hero Ted Kennedy that he went too far,” DeLay said in a statement responding to Kennedy calling the Iraq War a fraud. “Are they leaders or are they just liberal pundits?”

In an environment like that, snark was a useful corrective.

But today’s media environment is different. We live in an age absolutely drenched in snark, especially online. Snark oozes out of the pores of every single platform. It’s almost impossible to have an object-level conversation on any major social media site that doesn’t devolve into snarky asides, cheap dunks, and insults rather than arguments.

Snark was a useful weapon against smarmy, insulated, credential-obsessed elites. But now that the outsiders who wielded it have themselves become the elite, snark has lost its target and moral force, curdling into a cheap and corrosive default register. Snark was a weapon of democratization, meant to pull the self-important off their high horses. But when it’s lobbed freely at any and all people you disagree with, it eradicates the practice of reasonable disagreement.

The age of the quote tweet

It’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent the cynical, ironic, snarky tone has become online. It’s the default conversational register for nearly every social media site.

We communicate in the language of snark now: We celebrate “clapbacks” and “dunks” over our opponents. We “read them for filth” while “throwing shade.” We “mogg.”

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We’ve had to put up with a lot when it comes to AI: From taking people’s clothes off on Twitter to helping kids cheat on tests to producing fruit dramas we can’t help but watch (just me?). But if AI could cure cancer, the holy grail of biotech, would it all be worth it? And would an AI that was powerful enough to cure cancer be an AI we would even want to live alongside?

Now, the bar for a normal business being net positive isn’t “provides a major medical breakthrough.” As staff writer Kelsey Piper recently explained at The Argument’s San Francisco debate: “I see a billboard. It’s like ‘Here’s cloud infrastructure balancing.’ Is cloud infrastructure balancing going to cure cancer? No, but it’s good… The world is good because of lots of things that are small and make something a little bit better.”

Sure, but AI companies carry very different risks from other types of businesses. I’m less convinced than Kelsey by the arguments for potential human extinction, but even if we limit ourselves to potential destabilizations to labor markets, educational institutions, and the very core of what it means to be human, AI has greater risks than any other technology.

All major technological breakthroughs are disruptive, but what makes them worth it is they improve living standards. If the risk of AI is truly as great as its creators believe, then the potential rewards better be worth it.

After reporting on AI’s scientific capabilities, I found myself becoming cautiously optimistic on the ability of AI to help scientists make major step changes in addressing cancer. AI excels at pattern matching, and that’s one of the main ingredients to diagnosing, treating, and ultimately curing cancer.

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For example: The five-year survival rate for localized breast cancer is nearly 100%. However, if the cancer metastasizes, it’s around 33%. If AI made us better at catching many types of cancer early, we would already be well on our way to curing it, at least in the way viewed by epidemiologists.

What it means to “cure cancer” isn’t totally straightforward. Does it mean the possibility of remission is eliminated? That the five-year survival rate for cancer survivors is indistinguishable from the non-cancer-having population?

When Google’s Demis Hassabis says AlphaFold will one day cure cancer, he’s referring to AI tools that can speed up protein prediction and drug discovery. AlphaFold doesn’t work like the typical LLMs or promise a magic cancer-curing pill, but it could allow us to gradually develop therapeutics.

OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, meanwhile, shared a story about a man who treated his dog’s cancer, claiming it was cured with a personalized vaccine developed with assistance from ChatGPT. ChatGPT didn’t actually make the drug or cure the dog, but it was able to help the dog’s owner find the right people, machines, and techniques to treat his pet and extend its life.

And when Anthropic’s Dario Amodei talks about curing cancer, he’s relying on recursive self-improvement: a model that trains a better model until you have something so capable it solves everything.

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When I talked with Kelsey about all this, I was surprised to find that for all her optimism (pessimism?) about AI’s transformational impact, she was skeptical about its application in cancer research. Her bottom-line argument is that while LLMs are good at verifiable tasks, the goal of “curing cancer” is full of unverifiable ones.

So, we decided to debate it live at our first event in San Francisco, where a crowd full of experts could help us figure it out. Listen to us — and them — discuss.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, photo by Mariah Miranda Photography)

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com.

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Corrections:

• Around 13:00, Kelsey says “something like 25% of adults are up on all of their recommended cancer screenings.” This is inverted; researchers found that in 2021, around 25% of adults were not up to date with breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening recommendations, according to the 2021 National Health Interview Survey.

• Around 22:00, Jerusalem says the survival rate for breast cancer that has metastasized is around 38%. The figure is closer to 31% to 33%.

• Around 48:00, Jerusalem says X “stopped letting” users create deepfakes and other nonconsensual images through Grok. But an NBC News investigation revealed it is still happening, despite the company’s pledge to stop.

Show notes:

• AI boosters discussing the promise of AI in cancer treatment:

  • Interior Secretary Doug Burgum promising that “curing cancer” would be among the “wonderful things that can come from AI”: The Hill article

  • Burgum promising AI will “not only gonna cure cancer, but it’s gonna eliminate all kinds of drudgery, repetitive jobs”: Gizmodo article

  • Energy Secretary Chris Wright promising that AI could help turn “most cancers, many of which today are ultimate death sentences, into manageable conditions”: Fortune article

  • Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, saying AI can be used to “cure all disease,” including cancer: 60 Minutes broadcast

  • Greg Brockman boosting story about man who used ChatGPT to help create a personalized vaccine to treat his dog’s cancer: Tweet, The Australian article, Decrypt article

  • “Machines of Loving Grace,” document by Dario Amodei describing using recursive self-improvement to solve various long-term problems, including curing cancer: Dario Amodei essay

• Coverage of AI data centers (among other things) driving up electricity costs: Bloomberg article

• Coverage of AI enabling students to cheat: Education Week article, The Guardian article, UC Berkeley study

• Example tweet contrasting AI promises of curing cancer with observed use-cases of sexualizing women: Tweet

• Coverage of Grok making sexualized images of real people at users’ request: The New York Times article, The Guardian article

• Coverage of oddly common AI-generated dramas featuring animated fruits on TikTok and Instagram Reels: The Conversation article

• 2022 study claiming to show that around half of AI researchers believe AI has at least a 10% chance of causing human extinction: AI Impacts survey

  • Article criticizing the AI Impacts survey for having a low response rate and lack of peer review: AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans article

• Coverage contrasting cancer treatments today to the effective death sentence the disease represented 50 years ago: NIH Medline Plus article, Cancer Research UK article, AARP article

• Explanation of “statistical cures,” or cancer epidemiologists considering cancer “cured” if, after five years, people who had it are statistically indistinguishable from the population: BMC Medical Research Methodology article

• Study showing 25% of adults are not up to date with breast, cervical, and CRC screening recommendations in 2021: Preventing Chronic Disease article

• Policy options to increase the number of preventative screenings performed:

  • Organized screening programs: Cancer article, Best Practice & Research Clinical Gastroenterology article

  • Invitation letters and reminders: BMC Public Health article

  • Mailed kits and self-sampling: Cureus article

  • Patient navigation: Asia-Pacific Journal of Oncology Nursing article

  • Financial incentives: JAMA Network Open article

• Coverage of AlphaFold protein prediction: Nature article

• Coverage of cancer treatments gaining accelerated approval at higher rates than other specialties: The Lancet Oncology article

• Coverage of Firefox making several security-related changes after being informed of vulnerabilities by Claude Mythos: Mozilla blog article, TechCrunch article

• Coverage of Novo Nordisk using Claude to create a platform to help cut down on the paperwork necessary for clinical trials: Anthropic customer story, The Wall Street Journal article

• Coverage comparing breast cancer’s 99% survival rate if it’s caught before it’s metastasized, versus 31% to 33% if it reaches stage 4: National Breast Cancer Foundation overview, National Cancer Institute (NCI) page

• Coverage of AI analyzing screenings better than human doctors:

  • Mammograms: Breastcancer.org article, Diagnostics article

  • Lung cancer: Healthcare article, Northwestern Medicine article

  • Cervical cancer: NCI release

• Coverage showing most cancer-associated genes present in a large portion of the population have already been discovered: Nature Reviews Cancer article

• Research showing that around 85% of proteins are not druggable: Pharmacology & Therapeutics article, Cancer Research UK article

• Coverage of data becoming more valuable as we’ve discovered more AI-related use cases: Forbes article

• Coverage showing around 40% of research labs’ work is spent on operations, not science: Research Management Review article, AAAS blog

• Coverage of C-Myc and p53, two proteins researchers have been unsuccessfully trying to drug for decades: Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article, Creative Diagnostics article, International Journal of Biological Sciences article, Cancer Research UK article

• Coverage of hepatitis C having a 95% cure rate if patients take direct-acting antivirals: CDC page, Antiviral Research article

• Coverage of two-thirds of hepatitis C patients not getting proper treatment: CDC page, Gastroenterology Advisor article, Hep article

• Coverage of Medicaid cuts happening next year: The Commonwealth Fund article

• X statement promising to crack down on Grok creating nonconsensual sexualized images of real women: Statement

• Coverage showing Grok deepfakes are still happening: NBC News article

• “Are you there Grok? It’s me, Margaret,” article by Jerusalem Demsas about the potential for AI to serve as a centralizing technology, restoring some shared truth between fractured communities: The Argument article

• “@Grok Is This True? LLM-Powered Fact-Checking on Social Media,” study showing Grok has proved valuable to spreading real facts on Twitter: Study

• “Do AIs think differently in different languages?” article by Kelsey Piper discovering whether AIs would provide different responses if asked in languages other than English: The Argument article

• Polls showing a plurality of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI: Pew Research Center article

• Coverage of OpenAI Foundation investing in Alzheimer’s disease research: OpenAI Foundation article, TODAY interview

• Coverage of MASAI trial that found the use of AI detection software contributed to a 12% reduction in interval cancers: ScreenPoint Insights article

Transcript:

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No, they won’t, say The Argument’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini in today’s live election coverage.

What’s happening in California is a mirage: Democratic constituencies’ ballots are the latest to arrive, and thus the latest to be counted.

“The late ballots are so blue that Democrats are almost certainly not getting locked out,” said Lakshya. “A lot of Democrats in California just straight up did not return their ballot until the last possible minute.”

While Democrats can take some comfort in this, disproportionate delays in vote counting lead to a large loss in voter trust.

If initial results show “we’re getting two Republicans here, then all of a sudden, one week later, you see the Democrats surge to first place, the first thing a lot of people are going to think is that it’s not legitimate,” Lakshya explained. “Obviously, that’s ridiculous, it is legitimate, but at the same time, I have sympathy.”

“People have a right to be informed on elections,” he added.

Watch the full video above to learn more about how specific races are shaking out — and how California’s banana republic voting system hurts democracy.

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There are no P’s in the word “Google,” but someone still needs to tell Gemini this — Google’s own AI Overview keeps suggesting there are P’s when asked.

Back in 2024, asking a model to count the R’s in “strawberry” became the internet’s canonical example of weird AI failure modes. Most models of that generation counted letters wrong about half of the time.

Since then, LLMs have made rapid leaps in everything from scientific reasoning to agentic coding, while major businesses have begun to rely on them in critical areas like finance. And yet, somehow, they still suffer on tasks like counting the R’s in “strawberry,” the P’s in Google, or the N’s in the days of the week, which I asked ChatGPT to do today:

How is it that models can now solve historic math problems but still fail to count letters in a word?

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The typical explanation here has to do with “tokenization.” LLMs don’t read English characters; they break words into subwords, like “st -raw - berry.” Each segment of the word is a token, which is used because it’s more flexible than a whole word.1 Under this theory, the counting issue has to do with how familiar an LLM is with a given token from its training data.

That explanation never quite made sense to me. “Strawberry” is a very common word. Even if it were tokenized several different ways within the training data (“st -raw - berry” and “straw - be -rry”), its tokens would still be quite familiar.

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I hope Graham Platner wins his election against Susan Collins because I think Democratic control of the Senate is the best path forward for shoring up our democracy.

Because this is a fairly boring view, I’ve refrained from writing very much on what’s going on in Maine despite the repeated scandals that have plagued Platner’s candidacy.

They range from revelations of a Nazi tattoo to various controversial Reddit posts to now — I hesitate to say finally — reports that the candidate cheated on his wife last year. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told the campaign that she had found “sexually explicit” texts between the Democratic nominee and several women. The infidelity all happened in early 2025, months before he entered the race for Senate and while the couple was struggling with infertility.

Remarkably, as of this week, Platner still had an active profile on Kik — an online messaging app that, unlike iMessage or Signal, has a greater focus on meeting new people. If there’s any doubt what Platner was using Kik for, his profile picture was a shirtless picture of him in a towel with his phone strategically covering the aforementioned Nazi tattoo for good measure. (The campaign claims that while he deleted the app a while back, he forgot to actually delete the profile itself.)

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Many reactions to these revelations of infidelity were… bizarre.

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, argued that “nothing that has come out about Graham Platner is scandalous” insisting that the freak-out was due to “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies.”

In another set of tweets, he distinguished between real scandals — like the Iraq War, attacking Iran, and the foreclosure crisis — and the pearl-clutching over Platner’s cheating. The latter being the result of “rule following perfect resume ladder climbing Harvard law grads” who are “lizard people creeps.”

Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, similarly argued that attacks on Platner were downstream of the establishment’s hatred for “real people who aren’t corrupted by the system. They never go after insiders like this, because they’re already good boys and girls who do exactly as they’re told.”

Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker similarly characterized the blowup as “desperate manufactured outrage around [Platner’s] personal issues” that was an attempt to distract from his platform.

Sen. Ruben Gallego said “we all know that he’s lived a very, you know, real experience.”

This strain of argument isn’t new. Morris Katz — a political strategist who works with Platner and is best known for his work on the successful campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani — argued back in March that supporting authentic candidates meant accepting their foibles: “When we talk about wanting real people in our politics, real people have said fucked up things online 15 years ago.”

What unites these reactions isn’t so much the defense of Platner as the staunch denial that there’s anything wrong here at all. Cheating isn’t a moral failing we can forgive; it’s a mark of rugged authenticity, and any qualms about infidelity are the prissy reflexes of an out-of-touch elite.

The fact that voters are forced into a limited set of choices regularly allows the messenger class to make broad pronouncements about what Real Americans believe. Many Trump voters in 2016 were uncomfortable with the “grab ‘em by the pussy” recording; they just made the decision that other issues were more important. Many Obama voters in 2008 probably had racist views, but they liked his economic message more than McCain’s. Voters, even loyal voters, are cross-pressured in ways that polling results don’t surface.

Platner’s behavior is scandalous. It’s morally wrong to cheat on your wife, and most people think so, regardless of whether they think it affects their vote.

Hating cheating is an American value

One thing I learned while getting addicted to short-form video content is how much anti-cheater discourse there is on the internet. There’s content where women try to catch their partners in the act of cheating, debates over whether liking hot Instagram models counts as cheating, men talking about how disrespectful it is for women to wear revealing clothing, skits where people act out underdog-cheater-comes-out-on-top fantasies, unverifiable story times about catching your partner in the act of cheating, and on and on and on.

Earlier this year, Pew Research Center released a survey looking at attitudes across 25 different countries on a variety of moral issues, and the issue where America was the most extreme outlier was on extramarital affairs. Fully 90% of Americans called stepping out on your spouse “morally unacceptable,” whereas the median was around 77%.

For context, even in the most accepting nation — France, duh — a slight majority (53%) thinks cheating is a moral failure.

Gallup has also asked Americans about a range of behaviors. There, too, extramarital affairs had the highest percentage of respondents calling the practice “morally wrong,” more so than suicide, cloning humans, abortion, gambling, and the death penalty.

While Democrats are slightly more likely to be chill with extramarital affairs, there isn’t that big of a gap: In Gallup’s May 2025 poll, just 11% of Democrats called cheating morally acceptable, while 9% of independents and 4% of Republicans said the same.

Interestingly, young people are more hostile to cheating. While 10% of 35- to 54-year-olds and 9% of people aged 55 or older said cheating was morally acceptable, just 4% of 18- to 34-year-olds said the same. I guess their minds were cooked in the short-form video content vat along with mine.

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Now, would all of these people count Platner’s behavior as cheating? Hard to say, but polling indicates that large majorities of people count online messages and secret emotional relationships as cheating.

Is there a silent, cheating majority?

The real difficulty is figuring out how many people who say cheating is bad are themselves cheaters. This is obviously a fraught area for surveys, since most people don’t want to admit to doing bad things, but we can glean some information.

For 34 years, the General Social Survey has asked Americans “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” That number has remained pretty stable, between 15% and 20% for that entire period (This is just for people who have ever been married).

I think some of the respondents are probably lying, and I think a good deal more have cheated without having sex. But, like most bad actions, I think a small percentage of offenders drive most of the behavior.

Even if I’m wrong, and the majority of Americans are cheating hypocrites, I think virtue signaling is good! Making a mistake that you know is a mistake, one you disavow publicly and show remorse for, is different from making a mistake that you pretend is actually fine.

Not all men are cheaters

That many men are standing up for Platner is unremarkable, but there’s a strange undercurrent that having a moral problem with cheating is soyboy behavior.

Leftist writer Ken Klippenstein subtitled his article on the whole affair: “And yet the era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end.”

The whole piece is a real case of telling on yourself:

“The question on Washington’s mind now is: Why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner?

The answer is simple: That’s not what Maine voters want.

People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

There is obviously a grain of truth here. Appearing poll-tested or overly polished and incapable of interacting like a normal person is obviously bad. But the implication that one must accept Nazi-tattooed cheaters or else consign oneself to being ruled by sexless, repressed robots is bizarre.

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Moreover, this entire line of argument undercuts Platner’s best defense: He knows what he did was wrong, and he is working to make it right with his wife. Gertner’s public defense of her husband, revealing their couples and individual counseling work, was proof that both of them view his actions as harmful, but not irreconcilably so.

Why is cheating bad?

Cheating is bad because lying is bad.

Freedom is predicated in large part on having accurate information. If a business lies to me about the safety of its products, or my husband lies to me about the nature of our relationship, that’s a form of stealing my freedom.

A choice I make because someone else lied to me isn’t really my choice at all. This is the old liberal point about why deception wrongs us — it’s not about the sex, it’s the theft of another person’s ability to make an informed decision about her own life.

In 2012, Platner, in one of his controversial Reddit posts, responded to an opinion article in The Washington Post on one of the Secret Service cheating scandals:

“I’ve heard that idiotic sentiment made within the confines of the the military [sic]. ‘If you can’t remain faithful to your wife, how can you remain faithful to your comrades?’ Well, I have many good buddies who lied and cheated with women, and yet were straight shooting hard men when it came to their work. I find it is a sentiment only held by moral relativists who need something to cry about, intelligent people realize they are not mutually exclusive.”

I find it a bit ironic to pat yourself on the back for being intelligent while completely inverting the definition of moral relativism, but I digress. More concerning is that Platner’s infidelity doesn’t appear to be a one-time indiscretion, but rather the result of a 15-year-old worldview that’s dismissive of the concept of having high moral standards.

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All things equal, I would prefer a candidate who had not cheated on his wife. But on the macro point, Platner is straightforwardly correct that there are individuals who behave dishonorably in some ways but are still able to behave honorably in others.

Many commentators have been outraged at what they see as hypocrisy from left-leaning commentators, particularly feminists.

But not all failings are made equal! While cheating is bad, cheating is not a crime.

It’s helpful to push beyond euphemisms like “personal issues” or “marital problems” when deciding whether moral transgressions cross the line. Trump has been accused of sexual assault and has joked about grabbing women by the pussy. Roy Moore was credibly accused of sexually assaulting minors. Anthony Weiner was convicted of a sex crime against a minor.

Platner’s most vocal defenders don’t just want him to win; they want to live in a fantasy world where there’s no reasonable criticism of their candidate. Instead of accepting that politics is about persuasion and reasonable disagreement, they want to make it about a dividing line between good and bad people. Platner is one of the good ones, so that means anyone criticizing him is immediately suspect. That also means anything Platner does is fine. Nothing has to be considered or weighed because nothing is ever in question.

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Recommended reading:

The conventional wisdom is that Democrats are unlikely to flip the Senate this year. Even accounting for Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, doing so requires Democrats to win at least two states that Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024.

Right now, however, they’re on track to do exactly that.

One component of this story is that Donald Trump’s approval rating has rapidly devolved from “poor” to “abysmal.” In the process, he has bled support from every imaginable element of the coalition that powered him to victory in 2024 and from every possible demographic.

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On a state-by-state level, the data paints a catastrophic picture for the president. Using our polling data, we can assemble estimates of Trump’s approval on a state-by-state basis among likely 2026 voters (in other words, the ones who will actually vote in the midterms). With these voters, he sits above water in just 15 states, despite winning 31 of them against Kamala Harris just over a year ago.

There is little precedent for a party having a great midterm when they’re facing such strong headwinds,1 and this cycle is no different. Democrats have made significant gains on the generic ballot as a result of Trump’s immense unpopularity, with our surveys currently pointing to a wave that would actually exceed 2018 in magnitude.

Given the sheer volume of voter discontent with Trump and the corresponding penalty being paid by Republicans, it isn’t exactly surprising that the Senate is in play. Winning Senate seats in Ohio, Alaska, Texas, and Iowa might be tough lifts for Democrats in a presidential cycle. But it becomes much more likely in a midterm like this, especially when Trump is underwater in every one of those states.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Jill Biden is back in the news this week, seemingly incapable of fading into obscurity as honor demands. The former first lady is on a promotional tour for her new book (out June 2) View from the East Wing, in which she revives her well-known grudge against former Vice President Kamala Harris.

I’d heard whispers of this grudge, but it was first publicly reported in two books by political journalists out in 2021 and 2022. During a Democratic presidential primary debate in June 2019, Harris famously slammed Joe Biden for opposing busing integration programs similar to the ones she used as a “little girl in California.” Jill Biden did not forgive Harris, reportedly arguing against her selection as vice president, and Harris complained of poor treatment from the White House team throughout her time in office.

Now, Jill Biden is making news by recounting Harris’ insistence that Joe Biden immediately endorse her following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump nearly two years ago. According to USA Today, Jill Biden describes Harris as going into “courtroom prosecutor mode” by repeatedly insisting that he make the endorsement quickly to head off any buzz about other potential candidates.

Jill Biden recounts walking out of the room in apparent anger.

Jill Biden presumably thinks this reflects poorly on Harris, but when I first heard this anecdote, my first reaction was: “Where was this Kamala Harris on the campaign trail?” The Kamala Harris who could push through the awkwardness of demanding that a man watching his career fall apart in a public and embarrassing manner put that aside and help her clinch the nomination.

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That Kamala Harris would never say “Not a thing that comes to mind” when asked what she would have done differently from Biden; she would have spent 107 days railing against the former president’s failures on inflation.

It is a long-standing tension in moral debates about what one should do when one’s obligations to country conflict with one’s obligations to friends, teammates, and loved ones. Prominent English author and self-described political liberal E.M. Forster’s 1938 essay “What I Believe” is a wonderful, sprawling piece that includes some of my favorite defenses of individualism, but it also contains one very wrong idea:

“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome … Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do—down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.”

I think the Democratic Party has been in an excessively Forster-ian mood in this respect. When people called on the aging and potentially senile 89-year-old Dianne Feinstein to resign, they were called sexist. When Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez called out Congressional Hispanic Caucus member Chuy Garcia for timing his retirement to ensure his handpicked successor clinched the nomination, she was castigated for being divisive.

In politics, loyalty is both vice and virtue. Most people are bound not just by policy commitments, but by personal ones. Mass democratic politics is built on millions of personal loyalties, and representative democracy in particular demands an exchange of trust that rests significantly on policy considerations but not entirely.

And yet, an excess of loyalty is deadly. It breeds corruption and incompetence, and instead of making an organization stronger, it makes it vulnerable to outside attack.

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Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But, for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Jeremiah Johnson closed out the week with a take to make the heart of any culture writer sing: Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside is the definitive art of the 2020s. Five years ago, Burnham’s wacky lyrical masterpiece took the internet by storm, with hits such as “All Eyes on Me,” and “White Woman’s Instagram.” According to Johnson, Inside was an early indicator of the perplexing vibecession to come: a famous funny white guy who seems to have it all, plagued by the anxious melancholia of the digital age, just like the rest of us.

Earlier this week, staff writer Kelsey Piper wrote about how literary magazines are sleepwalking into disaster as AI-generated content takes over. Among the regional winners for the Commonwealth Foundation’s 2026 Short Story Prize, three appear to be written by AI. The foundation says it did not run submissions through an AI detector. But Kelsey points out that, whether we like it or not, the age of simply trusting writers to submit human-generated work is over.

The econ wonks are fighting! Did COVID-era wage growth provide the answer to rising income inequality? Economics writer Matt Bruenig calls this explanation “confused and wrong” in his piece this week. Read more about why:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released his Block by Block: The Housing Plan for a New Era. The plan boasts a headline target of building 200,000 new affordable housing units and preserving 200,000 existing homes over the next decade.

• The International Energy Agency (IEA) dropped its annual investment report, which projects global solar investment will reach $365 billion this year. According to the report, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven many countries to double down on their renewable energy infrastructure.

• A new preclinical study published by researchers at Penn Medicine found that blocking a certain protein could disrupt the spread of toxins to healthy neurons, a promising indication that this process could be used to slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Worth watching…

On the pod this week, Jerusalem and Matt unpack the falling rate of crime. America is about to have its lowest homicide year since the 19th century, but how did that happen?

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On Tuesday night, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican primary runoff in Texas, defeating incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. In their livestream from Wednesday morning, The Argument’s Lakshya Jain, Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas, and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini discuss Paxton’s victory and what it means for the general election in November.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

First up, Jerusalem watched Run Lola Run, a German film from the 1990s that she calls an “incredibly bizarre and fun movie.” It wrestles with free will and how far a girl will go to get 100,000 Deutschmarks for her loser criminal boyfriend.

Operations manager Angela Tracy has long been encouraging the team to get into reading (not watching) plays. She’s been making her way through the collected works of Paula Vogel, and says the 1984 satirical comedy And Baby Makes Seven “absolutely floored” her. The script follows two lesbian women expecting a baby with their gay friend, Peter. But before the baby arrives, the trio gets “wildly deep into role-playing three imaginary kids that they ‘kill off’ one by one.” Sounds like a trip.

Video producer Justin Zuckerman saw a screening of the 2020 Joe Swanberg film Build the Wall, which follows a middle-aged man whose romantic weekend gets interrupted when a friend insists on building him a stone wall. “It was a refreshing watch since I don’t think you really see a lot of films that focus on people in that age group dealing with things like dating and friendship,” he told me. Hear, hear.

If you’re wanting to watch TV and, like , have an Apple TV free trial you’re looking to make the most of, the show Your Friends & Neighbors might be for you. He watched it with his mom and said: “first season good, second season didn't really need to be made.” Apparently Jon Hamm plays a Don Draper-type character.

is our music guy this week. He went to a festival last weekend and saw a “joyous” set by the Brazilian DJ Mochakk. I can only add that the Mochakk remix of Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman” is indeed pretty great (although the original track is more or less unbeatable).

To spice things up, I asked around the office for some visual art recs. I was delighted when agreed to share this painting by his dad, Sam Richman. It hangs in his living room and shows a lifeguard perched under a red umbrella against a vast, yet gentle, ocean.

I will leave you with another landscape painting, which feels at once foreboding and peaceful. Ross Dickinson’s Valley Farms (1934, oil on canvas) hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is a depiction of California farm country, and the first time I came across it, I was disturbed by the creeping shadows and the rising smoke. Now, the scene strikes me as less ominous — the mountains, tired and unbothered, less hostile. If you live in D.C., I highly recommend you go see it in person.

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