Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re looking at why everyone is talking about “Woke 1,” the collapse of the conservative social media ecosystem, Twitter’s new payout scheme, and Anthropic watermarking Claude outputs.

We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC and got caught in a conversation about former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s controversial old tweets. In an effort to downplay Hong’s past statements, AOC repeated a phrase that’s been gaining traction on social media: “Woke 1 was crazy.”

This made quite a few people angry.

Moderates and conservatives felt that the phrase was a stock dismissal of the very real excesses of “Woke 1.”

On the progressive side, many questioned what exactly they were supposed to be backing away from:

Cultural commentator Ryan Broderick insinuated those using the phrase were empowering sexism and bigotry: “Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy?”

The phrase was popularized by New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, who used it in May to downplay his own overbearing 2021 tweet that “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

It’s an implicit acknowledgment from Ossé, AOC, and other left-leaning personalities that during the “peak woke” years, certain things got a little out of hand. Progressive power brokers seem fully aware that they overextended their cultural and political program, and, hey, they’ve learned a valuable lesson, and they’re backing down from things they said back then.

At the risk of being a stick in the mud, I’m not sure that’s good enough. To use a wildly over-the-top analogy:

Woke 1 was not a natural disaster that just sort of unexplainably happened; it was a specific political and cultural project that specific people orchestrated. AOC was one of those people.

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Woke 1 erupted out of reasonable concerns — sexual harassment and police brutality weren’t fake issues — but your head would have to be stuck in the sand to ignore that there were also harmful overreactions that did little to advance social justice:

• Professors were investigated, suspended, and fired for saying a Mandarin word that sounded offensive in English and for showing artwork that depicted Muhammad. David Shor was fired1 for tweeting research that showed nonviolent protests were more effective than violent protests.

• Two Black teenagers in Seattle were murdered because the city wanted to let anarchists cosplay at running an “autonomous zone” with no policing.

• Perhaps most consequentially, we did actually defund the police in many cities, including in AOC’s backyard. Mayor Bill de Blasio cut anywhere from $420 million to $1 billion2 and more than 1,100 officers from the NYPD’s budget (as much as one-sixth of police spending) while murder rates were spiking to the highest level in almost a decade.

What makes “Woke 1 is craaaaazy” frustrating is in part what makes it effective: No one knows exactly what you mean. By Woke 1, do we mean prosecuting Harvey Weinstein? Pronoun buttons and land acknowledgments? Firing professors for wrongthink? Defunding the police? Body-positive models on the Victoria’s Secret runway?

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Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet knows a thing or two about winning in Michigan. She is the only Democrat currently representing a Michigan district Donald Trump won in 2024 and had one of the highest Wins Above Replacement (WAR) scores in the 2024 cycle. Though McDonald Rivet herself was recruited to run for Senate, she decided to stay in the House given that she was only recently elected.

McDonald Rivet joined The Argument’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini for a Substack Live conversation yesterday to provide her analysis of the Senate race.

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Though American support for Israel took center stage for most of the primary, McDonald Rivet doesn’t see the issue as key to El-Sayed’s victory. Instead, she pointed to his success highlighting Michiganders’ pocketbook concerns.

“Abdul being able to talk about ‘more money in your pockets,’ that was far more resonating, I think, than anything else,” she said.

Check out the full conversation above, and read Lakshya’s analysis of El-Sayed’s chances below:

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Men are no longer the breadwinners they once were. In 1972, husbands earned more than their wives in at least 85% of American marriages. Husbands were the sole earners in more than half of those.

Today, the share of heterosexual married couples where the man makes more money than the woman has fallen to just 55%. Only 23% of marriages rely solely on a husband’s income. And it’s not just women’s earning potential that has increased their economic independence: Unlike most of their midcentury counterparts, women today can open credit card accounts and take out mortgages without the bank requiring a man’s sign-off.

Some see the rise of the female breadwinner as a bad deal for men. Women may have gained independence, but they have done so at the cost of men’s sense of purpose. “Men are more likely to flourish when they see themselves as providers,” wrote Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, along with co-author Maria Baer. “Men do better when they feel needed — and being a reliable breadwinner makes them feel needed.”

But The Argument’s latest poll of 3,000 registered voters, fielded nationally between July 20 and 26, suggests that an end to male breadwinning might actually suit men’s preferences just fine.

When asked whether they personally agreed or disagreed with the statement “men should be the breadwinner,” just 34% of all male respondents agreed. A substantial majority disagreed.

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One explanation for what is going on here is that men are answering out of solidarity with women — or, more cynically, a desire to give the socially desirable response — rather than pure self-interest. They reject the traditional division of labor into male breadwinning and female caregiving because they understand that sharing these responsibilities is good for women.

And yet, when we asked men what was more important to them — career success or getting married and having children — 44% of men prioritized family while 41% prioritized work, around the same shares as women. Among conservative men, the share prioritizing getting married and having children was even higher.

On the right, there is a sense that feminism has forced men into egalitarian relationships they do not want. Traditional marriage gave men a clearly defined role: to provide the primary income to their families. They would like that script back because without it they are in crisis.

Conversely, the left has tended to frame men relinquishing the breadwinner role as a moral imperative. There’s a sense that cheering on their wives’ careers and taking on child care is the least they can do.

Neither framing captures what our polling indicates: that changing gender norms around who spends time at home and who spends time at work might actually align with men’s own interests. Indeed, a majority of fathers say they spend too little time with their children, mostly due to work obligations.

Men don’t know what other men want

The idea that most men want to be breadwinners is not just culturally pervasive — it’s what the men we surveyed think, too. Despite a plurality prioritizing marriage and children themselves, our male respondents overwhelmingly assumed other men prioritized career success.

This is not just a male misperception issue. Women also overestimated the extent to which men prioritize their careers. Seventy-three percent of female respondents said they thought career success was more important to a majority of men than marriage and children, well above what men self-report.

Unsurprisingly, many male respondents also seemed to overestimate how many people agreed with the statement “men should be the breadwinners.” A plurality, 44%, thought the majority of Americans held this belief, while a plurality of female respondents, 46%, felt the opposite. In reality, the share of support among both men and women was much lower, at around 34% and 30%, respectively.

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As in our February poll, there is little evidence in our survey data to suggest that men see traditional gender roles as more favorable than modern egalitarian ones. As Jerusalem Demsas recently pointed out, strong baseline support for gender equality is an underrated fact of our modern political landscape: Around 81% of both male and female respondents agreed that women are equally suited to leadership. Among male respondents who voted for Donald Trump, the share was lower but still 72%.

The family-first MAGA breadwinner

Of course, being a man who values family over career is not the same as being a committed feminist. It is possible to think family is important and also want to reinstitute traditional gender roles. In fact, that seems to be more or less the prescription of today’s conservative thought leaders: Men should care about marriage and family, but they should behave as 1950s breadwinners.

The modern MAGA marriage of “pro-family” policy and masculinist ideals finds some support in our poll. Male Trump voters were considerably more likely to prioritize marriage and children over their careers than male Kamala Harris voters — 57% compared to 33%. They were also much more likely to agree with the statement “men should be the breadwinners,” with 51% endorsing the statement compared to just 15% of their Harris-voting peers.1

In itself, conservative men prioritizing family over career in a survey is not that surprising. What is striking is the gap between these men’s self-reported preference and what they assumed about other men. While over half of male Trump voters said getting married and having children was more important to them than career success, just 24% said this was true of most men.

In other words, conservative men want something for themselves that they think is at odds with what the majority of men want.

There has never been a better time to be a father

The reality is that most people would probably like to have fulfilling family lives as well as meaningful careers.

Having both was very difficult for American women until the late 20th century. Marriage bars — employer policies that barred married women from being hired or retained — were common through the early 1900s. But women’s labor force participation rose from around 40% in the mid-1960s to above 55% just two decades later.

Men also gained something tangible in the family realm over the same period. It is now common — and socially accepted — for fathers to be present during childbirth, push strollers in public, and pick their kids up from school. For children born as late as 1993, 77% of fathers didn’t take a single day of leave after their child was born. For children born between 2014 and 2022, that was true of only 35% of fathers.

The gap in the amount of time American men and women spend with their children has been narrowing for decades. Gen X fathers spent more than twice as much time with their kids as their predecessors did at the same age. Many found this time in part by cutting back daily hours at work.

Prominent voices on the right blame liberalism for rupturing the American family. They argue that its careerist individualism pushed Americans to marry later, have fewer children, and care more about money than anything else. Wilcox has dubbed this the “Midas Mindset,” the idea that “what matters most in your life is building your own individual brand, seeing work as the summit of your life, and steering clear of the encumbrances of family life.”

But to the extent that many men today can embrace being involved parents — who can opt out of the rat race in order to spend more time at home — it is largely thanks to the advances of the women who now contribute much more to household earnings than they used to.

In a world where men do not want to be breadwinners, women joining the labor force is a positive-sum game. If we take men at their word and assume that many of them would quite like to trade time at work for time at home, then discarding traditional gender roles is what makes that possible.

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Recommended reading:

The Split Ticket midterms model is updated daily at 5 p.m. Eastern with the latest polls on our website.

We’ve seen a lot of cases where swing-state Republicans nominate ardently ideological, base-aligned candidates over more “establishment” options. Abdul El-Sayed’s primary victory may be the first instance in modern memory where Democrats have done the same in a critical statewide race.

Primary voters are not reflective of the general electorate, and many of those Republicans lost winnable races as a result. But there’s reason to believe El-Sayed’s fate could be different.

There are real risks associated with his candidacy: Our Split Ticket midterms model sees him as a slightly weaker candidate than his primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens would have been. Stevens had an 80% chance of winning the general election, according to the model, while El-Sayed’s odds are currently at 70%. While we estimate that Stevens would have won by 5.4 percentage points, we think El-Sayed will win by just 3.6 points, thanks to his substantially weaker polling.

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Why is El-Sayed still forecast to win, despite his relative weakness? The single biggest reason is a national and state environment that’s uniquely unfriendly to Republicans.

In 2024, when Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points nationally, Michigan was an R+1 state. Today, that number is closer to D+9 by our estimation (or D+8, if you look at Nate Silver’s modeling). In that sort of environment, even if El-Sayed’s candidate quality is similar to that of the average hardline progressive from “The Squad” (meaning he would perform 5 points worse than a replacement-level Democrat), he would still win.

Are national polls simply wrong about how blue 2026 might be? I don’t think so. Every other indication we’re seeing, ranging from special elections to the Washington state jungle primary, suggests that this really is a blue tsunami of a cycle.1 And in a situation like that, El-Sayed doesn’t need to overperform or even match the baseline performance of generic Democrats. He simply needs to avoid being a disaster.

Can he do that? It’s early, but I’d say the initial signs are promising. He has distanced himself from controversial remarks about 9/11 by Hasan Piker, who campaigned with him. He appears to be embracing party unity and has disavowed his own prior left-wing comments on defunding the police.

In doing so, El-Sayed appears to be avoiding many of the same missteps that plagued Republican firebrands like 2022 Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Also working in El-Sayed’s favor is the fact that Republican nominee Rep. Mike Rogers has made absolutely no effort to distance himself from Trump, flirting with election denial despite running in a state where the president is supremely unpopular.2

That’s why, if you forced me to pick today, I’d say that El-Sayed still wins this race.

Our model is more bullish on El-Sayed than other quantitative forecasts,3 in part because we don’t pay as much attention to pre-primary polling,4 and in part because our generic ballot modeling of Michigan suggests El-Sayed would have to underperform at the level of Elizabeth Warren (who underperformed by 11 points in her last Senate race) in order to lose.

This means he’d have to be nearly twice as weak as the average member of “The Squad,” for whom the typical underperformance is 5 points. While there’s plenty of evidence to suggest El-Sayed is weaker than Stevens would have been, there’s simply no evidence to support the hypothesis he’s that much weaker than a replacement-level Democrat.

This has implications for 2028 as well. Because while election nerds like me will look at overperformance and evaluate whether a win was by “more” or “less” than expected, that’s just not how the median voter looks at things. For a party whose left flank is ascendant, any win from El-Sayed is likely to be held up as proof that their candidates can actually win swing states — and probably gives fuel to the left in the 2028 presidential primaries.

For a long time, candidates like El-Sayed were simply boxed out of Democratic primaries — for anything other than safely blue races — due to concerns about electability as well as struggles with nonwhite segments of the party base. It was this phenomenon that tanked both Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary. And if the primary between Stevens and El-Sayed had been held in 2020, it is virtually certain that Stevens — who lost by just 1 percentage point this time — would have won.

But amid the historic unpopularity of both Trump and the Democratic establishment — and in the context of the never-ending conflict in Gaza, which dominated this primary — it is clear that 2026 is a different landscape altogether. Rank-and-file Democrats may well see El-Sayed’s nomination as a relevant test of the left’s ability to win swing states.

Whether that’s true or not, it could have seismic implications for the direction Democrats choose to go in 2028.

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“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.”

Hannah Arendt wrote those words in the 1950s, but concern that modern life has become unbearably lonely has reached a fever pitch in recent years. Basically everyone I know and respect (and many I do not) is worried about a crisis of community driven by individual isolation. The generalized concern draws together several otherwise distinct anxieties about modern American life:

• Kids aren’t partying enough or drinking enough or having enough premarital sex.

• We spend so much time on our phones and not enough time hanging out with our friends.

• Nobody knows their neighbors.

• A decline in social trust seems to be making our politics unbelievably toxic.

I have a knee-jerk aversion to declensionist narratives, so the widespread gloom about an alleged death spiral in American community life makes me suspicious. To begin exploring whether I’m too Pollyannaish about the decline of formal bowling leagues, my co-host Matt Yglesias and I decided to read Bowling Alone (2000) by Robert Putnam.

Putnam’s book argues that American associational life has collapsed dramatically as highly civic older cohorts have died off. There’s very little in the book about bowling leagues per se, but Putnam documents how religious organizations, unions, Rotary clubs, and local organizations of all types have seen their membership fall. Younger cohorts have eschewed the joiner-ism of their parents and grandparents.

The causes of this decline are hotly debated. Putnam largely blames it on generational replacement but also points to TV and suburbanization, among other factors.

Bowling Alone is fixated on the idea of social capital — that associational life is the way that communities build social networks and norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. As a result, if people aren’t joining bowling leagues anymore, they’re slowly squandering the collective bank of social capital, with dire consequences for all.

I think it’s trivially obvious to point out that people are spending more time alone. Being alone is a lot easier and more fun than it used to be.

But the leap people take from that fact to speculating about mass loneliness and disconnection, the end of democracy and liberalism, and generalized unhealthiness seems half-baked to me. Being alone, feeling lonely, and lacking social capital are related but distinct conditions.

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Recent polling from The Argument showed that very few people identify as a lonely person, which directionally supported findings from Pew Research Center that 47% of people say they hardly ever or never feel lonely or isolated. Just 16% say they feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time.

Even if traditional associational social capital has declined, many of the valuable outcomes Putnam attributes to it seem to have survived through other mechanisms. One moving anecdote from early in the book recounts a man donating his kidney to another participant in his bowling league in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Putnam tells this story to illustrate the value of social capital, but that raises the question: Are there fewer people donating kidneys now? No. In 1997, there were 11,701 donations (3,927 from living donors) and in 2025 there were 27,573 (6,521 from living donors).

Other outcomes Putnam points to like crime, dropout rates, teen pregnancies, and premature deaths among children have changed — largely for the better — in the 26 years since he published his book. And it did not take a widespread revival in associational life. At the end of the 544 pages, I was honestly unable to identify a clear reason why I should care about associational life.

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Putnam, like many people worried about social disconnection and the decline of community life, hopes that politics will save us. Throughout the book, he points to increasing political participation as the path forward.

Well, 26 years later and we certainly appear to have a lot more people talking about, thinking about, and working in politics! Has that revived America’s community spirit? You be the judge.

Matt thinks I’m too harsh on Putnam — who correctly understood the threat that watching TV all the time would continue to isolate us — but agrees that some of his prescriptions are wrongheaded.

For more book club episodes:

• “Boy moms and Nazi POWs: How ‘The Feminine Mystique’ changed feminism”

• “How NIMBYs hijacked the climate movement”

• “Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?”

Next month we’ll be reading F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). If you have comments or questions about the book you’d like us to discuss, drop a line in the comments below!

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

Paying subscribers can find the transcript for this post beneath the paywall.

WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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Show notes:

• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, book by Robert Putnam about the decline in American social connectivity that serves as the basis for this episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “How NIMBYs hijacked the climate movement,” podcast episode about Silent Spring: The Argument podcast episode

• Silent Spring, famous book by Rachel Carson about pesticides that is often credited with launching the environmental movement and served as the topic for a previous episode of The Argument: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?,” podcast episode about The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Argument podcast

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, book by Jane Jacobs that served as the basis for a previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Boy moms and Nazi POWs: How ‘The Feminine Mystique’ changed feminism,” podcast episode about The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast

• The Feminine Mystique, 1963 book by Betty Friedan that served as the basis for a previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, book by Robert Putnam comparing outcomes in different Italian regions: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Men, Women and Social Connections,” poll conducted in September 2024 showing 16% of Americans said they feel lonely or isolated from those around them all or most of the time, while 47% said they hardly ever or never feel the same way: Pew Research Center report

• Polling showing a majority of Americans did not approve of interracial marriage until the late 1990s: Gallup poll

• Diminished Democracy: From membership to management in American Civic Life, book by Theda Skocpol about the decline in participatory groups and social movements: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• American Association of University Professors’ first-ever national political endorsement for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed: AAUP release

• “Did cooperation among strangers decline in the United States? A cross-temporal meta-analysis of social dilemmas (1956–2017),” journal article by Mingliang Yuan et al. finding the level of cooperation in studies has not decreased over time: American Psychological Association meta-analysis

• The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett hypothesizing how the U.S. can reforge its social connectivity: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “The elites aren’t who you think they are,” polling showing younger cohorts are more likely to weight career ambitions over family ones: The Argument poll

• “Why We Feel Screwed: Immigration, Growth, and the Zero-Sum Mindset,” podcast episode interviewing Sahil Chinoy about his research on zero-sum thinking: The Argument podcast

• Polling showing most Americans thinking the country is headed in the wrong direction: YouGov poll

• “The Interview: Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely,” interview with Putnam in which he admits he doesn’t belong to many clubs: The New York Times article

• The Road to Serfdom, famous book by F.A. Hayek that will serve as the basis for our next book club episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

Transcript:

Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on August 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next six weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

In today’s essay, economic historian Phil Magness — whom I first came across through his critique of The New York Times’ 1619 Project — turns his sights on Vice President JD Vance and the postliberal right. Postliberals, he argues, are willing to dismiss evidence that their policies make people poorer and impose their vision of the common good anyway. But if we’re going to live with people whose visions of the good differ from our own, we’re going to have to refrain from using political power to force them to live by ours.

To receive every essay in this series, subscribe today.

- Jerusalem Demsas

JD Vance’s disdain for economists has become a pronounced and recurring theme of his political career. In his new book Communion, the vice president devotes an entire chapter titled “A Dismal Science” to attacking the way that mainstream economists have allegedly distorted our entire political system for the worse.

It’s unclear if Vance knows that his chosen pejorative for economics — “the dismal science” — originated in a notorious pro-slavery essay by Thomas Carlyle. The abolition-inclined economists of the 19^th century were “dismal” in Carlyle’s mind precisely because they wedded the tools of “supply and demand” to the “sacred cause of Black Emancipation,” and thereby upended what he saw as a natural social order. Vance largely misses that lesson, although he shares other dimensions of Carlyle’s famously acerbic disdain for measurements of economic prosperity.

Some of Vance’s grievances are expected. He dislikes how most economists favor free trade over his own protectionist beliefs. Others are unconventional, such as when he derides economists as something of a false deity that stepped into a void caused by a “decline of Christianity [that] has left us without a shared moral language.”

But the vice president’s central problem with economics is the common metric: GDP.

Gross domestic product is the best-known measure of the value of all the goods and services in an economy. When people talk about whether the economy is growing, they’re asking whether GDP is getting bigger. All sorts of things are counted in GDP: the clothes you buy, the babysitter you employ, the flowers you get your wife on your anniversary.

Of course, there are many valuable things that aren’t directly counted — taking care of your children, for one. Vance latches onto this age-old criticism of GDP (one that economists have long acknowledged) not because he wants to engage with the decades of debate over the best way to measure an economy’s health but because he wants to inoculate his political project from criticism — criticism that the world that he wants to usher us into will be a poorer one.

If GDP is fake and doesn’t measure what’s important, then that means we can safely ignore the flashing warning signs from economic indicators when the postliberal movement imposes tariffs, pushes for fewer women in the paid workforce, and carries out a hostile deportation program.

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How a deeply confused hunt for Japanese strawberries one-shotted the vice president

Some years back, Vance went to Japan, where he had the opportunity to consume local strawberries. Each bite, he recalled, “tasted like the best strawberry you’ve ever eaten.” He had stumbled upon a famous feature of Japanese cuisine, where centuries of careful cultivation techniques such as hand selection for taste and appearance have transformed this common fruit into a renowned culinary delicacy that commands a premium price.

But this was not the lesson that Vance took from his meal. Instead, he attempted to extrapolate an eccentric lesson about economic measurement from his strawberry-tasting excursion: The existence of delicious Japanese strawberries somehow disproved the concept of GDP.

This head-scratching assertion initially led me to laughter, yet the next several paragraphs revealed that Vance was completely serious. He proceeded to lay out his case against GDP in a style befitting Captain Queeg’s similar obsession with the bright red fruit. As Vance explained:

“If you’re focused on GDP, a $6 pint of Japanese strawberries is no different from a $6 pint of American strawberries. If you’re focused on dollars and cents, each contributes equally to the economic indicators. But if everyone in Japan eats better strawberries than everyone in America, the economic indicators have failed to measure something meaningful.”

It was a peculiar discovery, and one that Vance eagerly shared with a friend who “asked me if I learned anything on my trip to Japan.”

“Yes,” Vance “snidely” quipped, per his own account. “Maybe economics is just fake.”

Except almost any economist could easily diagnose the many faults in Vance’s reasoning: It begins with the assumption that Japanese and American strawberries have identical prices. In reality, Japanese strawberries typically cost much more than the mass-cultivated produce-aisle versions in the United States. Choice Japanese specimens of the ultra-premium “Amaou” variety are known to sell for as much as $10 per berry, and grocery store packages of more common Japanese varieties go for substantially more than their American counterparts.

The Japanese strawberry market displays a classic example of what economists refer to as product differentiation on margins of taste, appearance, and even packaging — all with premium price tags and a niche consumer base of high-end food enthusiasts. Vance had mistaken two similar but quality-differentiated products for the same thing.

More importantly for Vance’s argument, GDP does not tabulate strawberry production by simply counting the number of berries produced — it measures the market value of their final sale. In the case of Japanese strawberries, the differences in taste and a multitude of other factors already register as part of GDP through their prices.

This type of mistake is common for Vance, who repeatedly tries to invalidate economic statistics that undermine his policy agenda.

In July 2025, Vance infamously tweeted, “It’s almost like the economics profession doesn’t fully understand tariffs” after a Producer Price Index (PPI) report came in lower than gloomy forecasts. But the PPI only measures stuff made in America — it excludes imported goods and the tariffs charged on them. Vance seemingly ignored all the other indicators that track tariff-responsive retail goods, showing unambiguous price increases in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

But GDP, already conclusively debunked by the existence of Japanese strawberries, occupies a special place in his ire. Vance returns to this theme after griping that even family relationships between a husband and wife have been “infected by economics.”

In his mind, economists “struggle to put a value on anything that can’t be specifically measured” and respond by discounting its importance. Since family relationships allegedly fall outside of the measurable realm, they too succumb to the economists’ statistical tyranny.

GDP uber alles?

Vance isn’t alone in attacking GDP. He cites Oren Cass — the Harvard-trained lawyer who appointed himself as the “chief economist” of his own think tank, American Compass — as an influence. One of Cass’ main contentions is that the pursuit of growth statistics has created an “economic piety” that privileges consumerism over other unmeasurable tenets of life.

Of course, this whole thing is a straw man — no one is suggesting we sacrifice all that is good and meaningful on the altar of GDP. In fact, the U.S. regularly sacrifices growth in order to satisfy other goals. Most economists recognize some of those as bad — like stringent zoning codes that stifle growth in American cities — and others as good — like child labor laws.

Economic statistics don’t tell anyone what to do — they are just tools for measuring the effects of our choices. But, of course, Vance hates measurement too.

In a representative example from his book, Vance chastises the “language of technocratic cost-benefit analysis” and the “sanitized tone that is the hallmark of the dismal science” for allegedly supplanting moral considerations, even on quintessentially moral issues such as chattel slavery. If it wasn’t clear enough, cost-benefit analysis is the practice of tallying up the upsides and downsides of a policy and making sure the former column is bigger.

Just to put this plainly: The vice president of the United States and front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in 2028 is opposed to the concept of a pro-con list.

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Vance isn’t searching for a better way to measure growth, though. He believes that measurement itself is a faulty task, that American society has gone astray by making other intangible values subordinate to numbers. Economists, he contends, have subjected us to rule “by numbers on a spreadsheet and the people who built those spreadsheets,” which leads to “a society almost blinded to considerations outside of the economic.”

One reason that Vance discounts economic indicators like GDP is that they don’t include unpaid domestic labor done by parents:

“Long before I ever held political office, it occurred to me that economic statistics often see kids as burdens despite the fact that they’re the best part of my life. Domestic labor—that done by moms and dads—if unpaid, is uncounted in measures like GDP. When I leave work to spend time with my children, when I cook them dinner or argue with them about eating their carrots, I am engaged in economically unproductive work. No money changes hands, so it doesn’t show up in our national figures. By contrast, if I left for dinner at 6 p.m. and returned to work until midnight while paying a total stranger to look after my kid, my contribution to GDP would be much higher.”

This hypothetical scenario is not merely speculative though, at least in Vance’s telling. He considers it to be the source of one of his main recurring objections to modern American society: the rise of two-income households. Vance is savvy enough to avoid prohibiting women from choosing to pursue professional careers, but it’s clear that he views the rapid expansion of female labor force participation rates since the 1950s as a consequence of GDP-driven “economic piety.”

As Vance explains, “a majority of women with small children wish to spend more time with their kids instead of at work.” But in our measurement-driven economy, “every one of these preferences is economically unproductive.”

Since household labor does not produce an exchange of money for goods or services, it does not contribute to GDP. Or, in Vance’s telling, “Each time you choose family time instead of working longer hours, you are doing something directly at odds with the cult of growth.”

The vice president has a long history of making offhanded comments that deprecate women pursuing professional careers. In a 2021 podcast for the American Moment group, Vance described this choice as a “path to misery” and faulted it for declining family formation.

He sees similar social ills everywhere, all attributable to reckless appeasement of “the gods of GDP.”

When seniors move into nursing homes instead of taking up multigenerational residency, it must be “for the simple reason that it’s not economically efficient.” “Every minute of a family member’s time spent tending to my great-grandmother was a dollar not spent paying someone else to do the job,” Vance explains. And “this reduces GDP.”

The Black Friday shopping escapades supposedly reinforce his indictment of “classical economics” as well, because they force service-industry employees to work a holiday shift in the name of “productivity” when they could be at home doing an “unproductive” task such as reading a book to a child. The relentless pursuit of GDP strikes again.

Barely a paragraph later, he shifts his line of attack to critiquing retailers for offering too few hours to these same employees and canceling their shifts on short notice. But the internal consistency of his argument does not matter, as he’s already settled on the relentless pursuit of GDP as the source of all problems.

Unsurprisingly, Vance’s claims do not hold up under empirical scrutiny.

For several decades, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has provided detailed estimates of the economic value of household production, including unpaid work such as “cooking, cleaning, and child care.” Note that these are the very same “unmeasurable” tasks that Vance considers to be the Achilles heel of GDP. And yet, easily accessible reports from the BEA’s website not only measure them with a high degree of accuracy — they also estimate an “adjusted GDP” growth rate that incorporates these measurements.

If Vance’s story about two-income households were true, we might expect a sharp divergence between the growth rates of official GDP and the adjusted figure, including household production. Yet the BEA’s study reached a much more tempered conclusion: “From 1965 to 2020, the average annual growth rate of nominal GDP was 6.3 percent. When household production is included, this growth rate drops to 6.1 percent.”

Indeed, both the conventional and household-adjusted GDP growth rates have closely tracked each other since the early 2000s, with the lone exception of a temporary surge in the household figure during the COVID lockdowns of 2020.

No economist would ever maintain that GDP is a perfect measure of productivity, even after including the BEA’s household measure or any number of other accounting adjustments to the base data. But GDP-based measures do provide a useful approximation of a country’s output over time and, equally important, they strongly correlate with other indicators of prosperity and well-being.

Anti-empiricism offers a convenient escape from unwanted empirical data though, be it a BEA report that chafes with your claims about household production or numbers that show your flagship policies are not performing as promised.

For example, Vance and Trump have both made shrinking the U.S. trade deficit the pretext for their sweeping tariff agenda. They have cited this measurement across dozens of executive orders and court filings, even declaring it an economic “emergency.” Yet after more than a year of tariffs, trade deficits persist — exactly as many economists predicted they would.

Even by their own favored measure, the Trump-Vance tariff agenda has failed. And yet neither man shows any sign of changing course on this policy.

The same principle appears to be at play in Vance’s anti-GDP tirade. He views the measure as an incidental convenience if it shows positive growth but something to be conveniently overlooked if it delivers bad news. If an economic measurement suggests his policies have harmed the economy, it isn’t a failure — it’s just proof that other “unmeasurable” goals have taken precedence.

Or, as Vance puts it, “We care about GDP in the Trump administration, but we also care about wages, and how many people are dying of drug overdoses, and whether our country can get the things it needs in times of international emergency. If that means the GDP is a fraction of a percent lower, then so be it.”

The important point is not simply that Vance thinks GDP is an imperfect measure — nearly everyone does. It is what he believes follows from that observation.

Again and again, Vance treats the failure of economic statistics to fully capture family, community, national resilience, and other genuine goods as evidence that economic considerations have been granted too much authority in American life. (Notably, the American people rank cost-of-living and related economic concerns above almost every other issue, so Vance’s “populist” rhetoric does not even align with popular opinion.)

Vance has self-identified with the postliberal right, and it is his beliefs about GDP that most clearly link him to postliberal economics. Postliberals argue that the liberal fixation on economic growth actively crowds out higher goods, that politicians can and should have clear, prescriptive visions for what the common good is and impose that on the public even if that comes with severe economic costs.

Vance is comparatively guarded about where that logic leads. Other postliberal thinkers are not.

The road to postliberal degrowth

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Next week marks one year since The Argument was born. The very first thing we published was an essay of mine called “How do we live with each other?“ It asked the question at the heart of this magazine.

Well-meaning people disagree profoundly on the best way to live. Some of them think you should get married and have children by 22. Others think religion is a poison. Still others believe that eating a hamburger is a grave sin.

These people are often illegible to one another.

So how do we build a society together amid all that disagreement? That is the work of liberalism and is therefore the work of The Argument.

To mark our first anniversary, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand.

Our first piece in this series came out today. In “I don’t need you to believe I’m a woman,” Cassie Pritchard argued that trans rights cannot depend on persuading everyone to share the same beliefs about gender.

Over the next six weeks, we’re going to be publishing writers you know and love — like Kelsey Piper and Matthew Yglesias — as well as some new voices — like Julian Brave Noisecat and Dylan Matthews — all wrestling with this fundamental question.

You’re a free subscriber to The Argument, which means you’ve only seen a fraction of what we have to offer. Over the past year, we’ve built a magazine with original reporting and essays, live events, an innovative polling program, and a flagship piece delivered every weekday.

If you’d like to get everything we have to offer, join us. We’re libbing out.

- Jerusalem

Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on August 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next six weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

Cassie Pritchard opens the series by confronting the painful reality that many of the people with whom she shares a country will never believe she is a woman. Rather than seek their affirmation, Pritchard demands something less intimate and more important: That they defend her freedom and security anyway.

To receive every essay in this series, subscribe today.

- Jerusalem Demsas

I don’t think of myself as a particularly respectable trans woman.

I didn’t start taking hormones until I was 30; I’m a lesbian; I don’t pass as cis female, nor do I make much effort to modulate my voice to sound more feminine. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m also kind of weird-looking. Conventional beauty is the single biggest weapon in a trans woman’s arsenal for assimilation and respect, and I’m decidedly outgunned in most situations.

I say all of this to explain why I find it so odd that other trans people regularly criticize me for promoting “respectability politics.” Their assumption seems to be that I’m one of the small handful of trans people who disagree with the premise that trans people actually are our transitioned sex. But I do not. Indeed, I can’t really imagine why someone would bother going through hormone therapy, hair removal, and difficult surgery recoveries if they didn’t think all that work resulted in a genuine and thoroughgoing transformation.

The core of my contention is that we need to move away from airy, philosophical debates about the ontology of sex and gender and instead ground our advocacy in common values and clear moral narratives. After years of slogans like “trans women are women” functioning as progressive shibboleths — so rarely explained, so rarely justified through persuasion — it’s time to sideline them from our mass politics. That would mean fewer condescending explainer videos about what gender really is and more straightforward appeals to individual liberty, pluralism, tolerance, care for the disenfranchised, and parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children (including the right to choose youth gender medicine!).

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I am not interested in policing what cis people think about me. Many think of me as a man. Others think of me as some strange liminal creature between male and female, a “secret third thing,” as the meme goes. A few (I tend to believe very few, but I’m a bit pessimistic by nature) genuinely think of me as a woman, and that’s lovely! I prioritize those people as friends or partners, as human beings generally seek out those who validate our self-conception, who respect our capacity for self-realization.

That said, what makes for a good social life and secure friendships is not necessarily what builds the kind of popular coalitions needed to secure political and material rights, like access to health care. Pro-trans positions have taken a beating over the last decade. For example, while Pew Research Center found that majorities of Americans opposed bathroom bans in 2016, recent polling has found a complete reversal, with majorities of American voters supporting these restrictions: A February poll from The Argument showed 52% of respondents supporting such bans. I can’t help but think that part of the explanation for this whipsaw in public opinion is that we have built a pro-trans advocacy movement too interested in disciplining thoughts and words — and Americans really dislike a scold.

It’s not just bathroom policing where we’ve lost ground. Even bigger majorities were in favor of banning youth gender medicine and barring trans youth from competing on K-12 sports teams that conform to their transitioned sex.

These majorities reject trans-specific policies that are dependent on a firm belief that trans people like me are our transitioned sex. Sports is a good example: If you believe trans girls are girls, then even if they possessed a generalized advantage over cis girls, excluding them would make no sense. That axis of difference would be orthogonal to the “girls’ sports” classification giving them the right to compete — it would be like forcing especially tall girls to play basketball on boys teams as a remedy for their innate advantage over shorter players.

To put it more bluntly, I see the majority who oppose sports inclusion as a kind of minimum percentage of Americans who reject the ontological premise of transition — that we really are, or can become, the gender we transition into.

Many trans people find this incredibly bleak or downright hopeless. Because we have so thoroughly premised our claims to rights and inclusion on the logic that “trans men are men, trans women are women,” it can feel like an irrevocable defeat to even acknowledge that large majorities of cis people disagree with our beliefs about the nature of sex and gender.

But the same poll from The Argument also found 63% of voters in favor of laws to protect trans people from housing and job discrimination. Other polls have delivered essentially the same result: Majorities of Americans still support classic, familiar civil rights protections for trans people that closely mirror the rights won by other minority groups through persuasive political struggle.

These strong pro-civil-rights majorities point to the way forward: It’s not merely that we can secure some protections while giving up our (presently) losing issues as lost causes. Almost the entire pro-trans platform can be defended in the moral language of civil rights and American pluralism, rather than via the epistemics of gender identity.

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As an example, letting me use the women’s bathroom doesn’t have to be premised on your agreeing with (or politely humoring) my self-conception. Instead, you might oppose bathroom bans because the enforcement regimes are necessarily open to abuse by busybodies and delusional conspiracists who think hordes of cis people are secretly trans.

Do you really want to get arrested because a crazy person accused you of being in the wrong bathroom at the airport? Sure, you can prove your natal sex in the end, but in the meantime, you’ve had to endure a humiliating, invasive, and stupid ordeal to get there — and missed your flight in the process.

Such an argument is classically American, in my view: against intrusive government overreach and in favor of sharing public space with people we may not agree with, like, or feel kinship with. The freedom to pee in whatever bathroom you want may seem trivial compared to free speech or religious practice, but, like so many freedoms, curtailing it requires a distinctly un-American apparatus of mutual surveillance, control, and nuisance.

It’s the kind of busybody policymaking that might jibe with, say, the English nanny state, but not here in the land of the free.

These are urgent questions because trans people face real material insecurity: We are about five times more likely to be unemployed than the general population, we make substantially less money when we are employed, we face housing discrimination, and we face concerning levels of violence. Maybe most distressingly of all, the president and his party are assailing us with a wave of punitive policies, including barring us from the military and attempting to restrict youth gender medicine. Though the administration has suffered setbacks on the latter, 27 states currently restrict youth gender medicine.

These very real threats make it essential to have coalitional arguments that foreground civil rights if we want to restore public support for pro-trans policy. This can benefit both trans people and a left-of-center coalition anxious about how our rights might be an electoral drag.

I analogize it to the bedrock American principle of religious freedom: Most Muslim or Mormon Americans don’t premise their rights and dignity on everyone necessarily sharing their religious convictions, but on a mutual ethic of noninterference and nondiscrimination. If trans people can make the same kinds of arguments — that we have a common interest in mutual respect despite different beliefs about gender — we stand a chance at rebuilding the coalitions we need for our security.

Respectability without respect

Still, my opening question remains: Why, exactly, do my beliefs about effective political communication so regularly draw this accusation of “respectability politics”?

The logic of respectability politics is that, by assimilating to hegemonic cultural norms, the minority group in question will be seen less as a threatening and deviant “other” and instead as a harmless, superficially distinct extension of the mainstream. The term was coined by historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham to describe efforts to “reform ... individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for the reform of the entire structural system.”

Classically, this has meant things like Cosby-style advice to young Black men to pull up their pants, efforts to use “correct” English in place of Black vernacular, and so on. In the LGBT rights context, it has generally meant publicly sidelining behaviors like cruising and orgies in favor of the respectable image of two gay people in a monogamous marriage raising children in a house with a white picket fence.

But here’s the thing: I like lesbian orgies, my sex-worker friends, and my natural baritone voice that juxtaposes strangely (for most people) with my 540 cc breast implants. I long ago realized that passing as a cis woman was not possible for me — and I wasn’t willing to put in the work even if it were. I’m trans, I’m odd, and I don’t have much interest in hiding either fact.

The “respectability politics” accusation is all the more confusing because, to my mind, requiring cis people to agree that “trans women are women” seems precisely to be a demand for respect — in this case, a respect for the ontological status of our transitioned sex. Doing that while decrying respectability politics — the effort to secure the majority’s respect by appealing to its normative sensibilities — is an incoherent position.

The position of my accusers seems to be that the majority’s respect is politically essential, that we need to secure it as the foundation of our political advancement. But the very same people argue that we have a moral duty to eschew any effort to actually cultivate that respect by appealing to majority sensibilities.

It’s the solicitousness of respectability politics without any of the practical upside. We might call this degenerated form of respectability politics “respect me!” politics instead.

Anyone who has spent time in progressive or leftist circles is immediately familiar with this dynamic: an unyielding commitment to rhetorical hostility coupled with a demand for affection from the very people they’re attacking. There seems to be a belief that respect, affinity, or solidarity can be enforced through disciplinary measures like shaming, belittling, and ostracism.

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While, mercifully, this rhetorical strategy seems to be on the decline on the broader left (perhaps best exemplified by Zohran Mamdani’s refrain that we need to “[go] from lecturing to listening”), it remains alarmingly pervasive on trans issues. This was particularly evident in the online reaction to The Argument’s February poll.

The survey simply reported the dire facts about public opinion on trans issues, yet it resulted in a wave of backlash in which commenters accused Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, of “preemptive surrender” and “suggesting Dems abandon trans rights.” One of the top Twitter responses captured the anti-democratic implications succinctly: “fuck whatever a poll says.”

Whenever I make the case to other trans people that we need to stop making demands on cis people’s feelings, beliefs, and speech — and instead appeal to common principles like liberty and equality — I am met with choruses asking me, incredulously, “Where’s your self-respect?” This further complicates the picture; it seems that self-respect is curiously tied up in the active antagonism of the majority.

On the one hand, the insistence on securing cis people’s respect for our gender identities betokens a kind of insecure, almost conservative premise shared by classic respectability politics. On the other hand, those committed to antagonism recognize that there’s something a bit beggarly in this premise, something self-consciously weak.

Instead of reconciling the tension between these two urges — for self-respect and pride on one side, and longing for the majority’s normative respect on the other — by simply choosing one and following through, “respect me!” politics amalgamates both into a miserable chimera. The resulting creature craves approval but loathes the prostration required to secure it; instead, approval is demanded but never obtained, because you can’t actually browbeat people into liking or respecting you. It is a self-defeating urge, simultaneously haughty and insecure.

The way I choose to resolve this problem is not by denying its existence or capitulating to it. Instead, it is precisely because I believe trans people are not generally respected as our transitioned sex that I believe we must shift to an argument for our rights and safety premised on moral narratives and values that sit apart from that question entirely.

You do not need to believe I really am a woman to think I deserve protection from employment or housing discrimination. You don’t need to believe people really can change their sex to think that trans people deserve access to the primary kind of medical care that resolves the empirically documented harms of gender dysphoria. You do not need to think gender is a spectrum to think that parents and doctors — and not the government — should be making health care decisions for their children.

I’m willing to be part of a coalition where many people do not believe the things I believe about transsexuality and gender. I’m not thrilled about it, and it’s often dispiriting. But I am willing to tolerate those beliefs, even when they’re uncomfortable or painful, for the sake of obtaining our freedoms and material security.

Without improving trans people’s actual security, I don’t think we’ll ever arrive at the kind of social acceptance that will eliminate the insecurities at the heart of “respect me!” politics.

Recommended reading:

Hank Green has committed the internet’s newest unforgivable sin: admitting to using AI.

The trouble began when Green, a prolific science educator and communicator with a wildly popular YouTube channel, used the somewhat awkward canned phrase “I appreciate the pushback” in a solo monologue segment of a video.

For frequent users of ChatGPT — or unwilling recipients of AI-generated emails — this was a tell. Many of Green’s fans immediately accused him of using AI to write his script, which Green denied. But he did admit that he’d used ChatGPT to help research the episode. Many of his fans treated this as though he’d admitted to blending baby seals to make his morning smoothie:

Look at the language here: Green is a sellout with “no standards.” He’s a “fraud” whose “credibility is in the trash.” It’s “disappointing” and “incredibly scary.” Make it make sense!

Green subsequently posted a pseudo-apology on Reddit in which he said he was “mortified” to have disappointed people. He admitted that he had been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid while maintaining that he had not used AI to write his script. But he added that he was getting an unhealthy level of dopamine from using LLMs — and essentially soft-canceled himself by promising to pause several projects and reduce his video output in the future.

Some people continue to suspect that Green used ChatGPT for more than just research. His phrasing, after all, seemed odd. Pangram flags the scripted portion of Green’s video as 86% AI-generated, and Green certainly has an incentive to lie if he did write with AI. On the other hand, Pangram can sometimes struggle with false positives. And Green’s reputation for honesty should matter here —he’s built up quite a bit of goodwill over nearly two decades of producing high-quality educational content.

Perhaps controversially, I’d like to argue that whether or not Green used AI is one of the least important things about this entire episode. What’s far more interesting is how a fan base built on a love of science began conducting itself like a dogmatic religious sect, eager to police the boundaries of predetermined good and evil.

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Believe science

Hank Green’s entire public persona is built around endless curiosity, optimism, and enthusiasm for science. He frequently highlights new scientific discoveries. But AI itself is one of the greatest technical advances of our lifetimes. In addition to being incredibly impressive in its own right, it’s contributing to breakthroughs in science and math.

So why are Green’s science-loving fans so incensed that he would use AI for research?

To understand the outrage, you first need to realize that for many people “science” functions as a sort of new religion. And this new religion’s adherents have decided that AI technology does not count as science. They’ve decided AI is evil to its core.

There have been many attempts throughout history to turn science and reason into full-fledged belief systems. The French Revolution produced the Cult of Reason, an atheistic substitute for Christianity complete with repurposed ceremonies and churches. In the 19th century, Auguste Comte proposed a Religion of Humanity meant to fulfill the social and cultural roles of organized religion but with positivist reason in place of supernatural beliefs.

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The Verdict, by John Thomason

Americans, we keep learning, are obsessed with the price of groceries. At the same time, many of them seem very uncomfortable with one of the ways that meat producers make groceries cheap: by cramming livestock so close together that they can’t even turn around.

When you pose this problem to voters a kind of commonsense decency can sometimes win out: Healthy majorities in Florida, Arizona, Massachusetts, and California have voted in favor of raising confinement standards over the last 25 years.

You might notice that none of those are major pork-producing states.

But because the initiatives in California and Massachusetts limited not just what their farmers could do, but also what sorts of animal products could be sold within their borders at all, the animal welfare implications were immense, amounting to perhaps the most substantial protections for farmed animals in U.S. history. The 2018 passage of California’s Proposition 12 meant that, if hog farmers in Iowa want to sell whole cuts of pork to Californians (which they very much do), they have to abide by Golden State standards.

All of that was almost thrown out over the course of this spring and summer.

The Farm Bill is a sprawling document that covers everything from food stamps to irrigation programs — an ideal vehicle for a policy change to escape public notice. That seems to be at least in part what the proponents of the Save Our Bacon Act were hoping for. The provision, championed by members of Iowa’s congressional delegation, would have preempted state-level reforms like California’s and Massachusetts’s, making it impossible for states to bar the sale of pork from pigs whose mothers couldn’t turn around or extend their limbs during pregnancy (so long as those farms’ states allow it).

Farm-state Republicans lined up behind the provision, while food safety groups, animal rights groups, and most of the Democratic Senate caucus were against it. (The pork industry is actually split between those who have not yet complied with strict standards and those who have already invested in compliant practices.) The latter appeared to be winning out in June, when the Senate decided not to include the provision, apparently over the controversy it had engendered. But that doesn’t mean Save Our Bacon is dead. The Farm Bill stalled in the Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday, over a dispute on an entirely different issue, with the committee now in recess until the fall. The Save Our Bacon Act is likely to get a second wind at that time.

If we’re being honest, the vast majority of the nation didn’t just miss this drama — they probably wouldn’t have cared all that much if they’d known.

It’s common to hear political junkies talk about “high salience” and “low salience” issues. The cost of pork is high salience — something voters will definitely notice and express their dissatisfaction about at the polls — while the welfare of the pigs who suffered to keep prices down is low salience, the purview largely of those who in some sense have made a choice to care about it.

With high salience issues, the will of the voters is clear enough and the cost of ignoring it is losing elections. But on low salience issues, democracies count on elite political actors reaching some sort of reasonable agreement that is in the best interests of the public.

The conflict over Save Our Bacon unsettles the idea that low and high salience issues are cleanly separable.

First of all, which “will of the voters” should be honored in this situation? That of the median 2024 voter, angry about the price of groceries, or those of the actual majorities in multiple states who voted for farm animal protections? (Even Iowa voters appear to reject the Save Our Bacon Act, though the poll in question was commissioned by an advocacy organization.)

Still, asking people to improve pigs’ lives is one thing; asking them to pay a lot more for bacon, let alone give it up entirely, is another. Ending farm animal suffering would require the latter. If animal rights become high salience, animal rights groups lose. If it stays low salience, then they never even get a shot at winning. Such is the fate of those with unpopular convictions in a democratic society.

No country for moral fanatics?

Four years ago, a very small dog wandered into my life, and it changed my politics forever.

I had always been a little judgy about people who dote on their pets, yet there I was, realizing that I might find myself in tears if this ornery creature had so much as a hangnail. It no longer made sense to me to care so much about the welfare of this one animal without caring about others who seemed just like him.

Most market hogs are mutilated without anesthesia, spend their lives on bare slats above their own manure, and never go outdoors until slaughter. If we did any of this to dogs we’d call it torture. None of this was exactly news to me, I’m ashamed to say, but for the first time I actually felt that it might be impossible to live with myself if I knew that, while I doted on this dog, creatures just like him were being put through hell on earth for me.

In a political climate where we’re constantly being told that the moral stakes are higher than ever — that, as former President Obama lamented in 2015, “those who disagree with us are not merely wrong but bad” — contemplating the fate of livestock induces a kind of vertiginous loneliness, precisely because it’s not a matter of public controversy. Quite the opposite: Per-capita meat consumption has never been higher, and all either party can talk about is making that consumption cheaper. Meanwhile, more than 80 billion farm animals are slaughtered worldwide every year after the sort of lives I described above.

But different people have dramatically different moral red lines. Many of my fellow citizens think that we’re living through a genocide of unborn children. Others think that we should strip private property rights from anyone with one too many 0’s in their net worth. I don’t agree with either of them, and most of them don’t agree with me. We have to live together anyway. A certain amount of moral loneliness — the kind that could keep you up at night, aghast at the evil that people will tolerate — is the price that every zealot pays to live in a democratic society. At least I know they won’t hang me for it.

It’s uncomfortable to realize you’re part of a moral minority. What options do you have, besides the despair of accepting majority will, or the tireless fanaticism that characterizes groups like PETA?

It’s here that I take some solace in the weird indeterminacy of representative democracy. If you put the actual question I care about before voters — would you give up meat as you know it to end farm animal suffering? — it would lose. If you put the question purely to elite power brokers, it would also lose.

In a majoritarian society, moral minorities will never be entirely satisfied. Ninety-nine percent of the time this brings me great relief: I don’t want anti-abortion zealots dictating health policy by fiat. Yet I too believe that egregious moral crimes are being committed daily and, yes, I would impose my preference for stopping these crimes on everyone else if I could. If only I could.

But of course I don’t want to be imposed upon myself. For all its backsliding, the American system still does a pretty good job of ensuring that. And the very fragmentation that helps shore up this freedom — the separation of powers, the strategic veto points, the uneasy coalitions — also gives radicals of every stripe avenues to pursue their goals. It’s not such a lonely place for a fanatic after all.

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Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

Starting off the week, Kobe Yank-Jacobs wrote about the popularity of different AI labs in The Argument’s polling. OpenAI is the most popular lab — even among regular AI users and those especially concerned about existential risk.

For the first time ever, more people are employed by remodeling companies than by single-family and multifamily developers combined. Economics writer Joey Politano highlighted the surge in home renovations: Rather than building new units, Americans are increasingly renovating existing homes. Unfortunately, renovations alone aren’t enough to fix our housing supply problems.

Have you ever seen a 2-year-old learn the commutative property of addition? Staff writer Kelsey Piper, who recently welcomed her fourth child, explains how certain aspects of modernity have made parenting harder, even as life has gotten better. Come for the precocious 2-year-old; stay for the meditation on Baumol’s cost disease.

🌟Abundance wins of the week🌟

• The feds closed a $489 million loan to add 220 megawatts of batteries to Puerto Rico’s grid, capable of providing backup electricity to more than 100,000 customers during shortages, thus avoiding millions of customer interruption hours. Puerto Rico’s notoriously unreliable grid certainly needs it!

• Wayne County, Michigan, is doing state-capacity praxis. On Tuesday, a supermajority of voters approved a plan to bring 17 previously opted-out communities into the single countywide system, filling longstanding gaps in the region’s public transportation network.

• Because of Texas’ new statewide preemption, the Nacogdoches City Council unanimously changed its zoning code. HUD-code manufactured homes, for the first time in over 20 years, will be buildable by right in a residential zoning district.

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Worth watching…

This week on the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem discussed the #MeToo movement. Jerusalem thinks it didn’t go far enough, a somewhat troll-y way of saying that the work of feminism is not yet finished. Matt strikes a more skeptical tone, arguing that the movement lacked a clear set of policy “asks,” which makes it difficult to even evaluate its successes.

Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini discussed counting mail-in ballots with Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. You can’t run elections cheaply, accurately, and quickly, Aguilar said; you have to pick two of the three. If you’ve ever wondered why California takes so long to count votes, this is for you.

Kobe Yank-Jacobs went live with JS Denain, a senior researcher at Epoch AI, to discuss recursive self-improvement (RSI). The big labs are very bullish on RSI’s ability to speed up the pace of AI development, but Denain argued that AI’s potential to actually make useful research contributions is more limited than boosters let on.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

Both Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem Demsas and Staff Writer Kelsey Piper recommend you pick up A Trade of Blood, the recently released third book in Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy series.

“For those who haven’t read it, the first book, The Tainted Cup, is a fantastic book about the murder of an imperial officer that is part Sherlockian mystery and part meditation on the running of an empire,” Jerusalem explained.

“I think the murder mystery format is weirdly well suited to the meditations on empire,” added Kelsey. “If you read British mystery novelists (Doyle, Christie, Heyer, le Carré) you can kind of watch the empire exhaust its case for itself and collapse in the background, and Bennett is clearly wrestling with American empire — notwithstanding the extremely wild biopunk sci-fi setting.”

Senior Editor John Thomason has been listening to Don DeLillo’s White Noise while commuting into the office: “Something about the folksy narration — from veteran stage actor Michael Prichard, who grew up on a farm himself and absolutely nails the chapter on the most photographed barn in America — is making me see DeLillo’s novel less as the landmark of postmodern lit that I remember from college and instead as surprisingly faithful to the 19th-century realist tradition, or maybe a kind of pastoral.”

Gender and culture writing fellow Maibritt Henkel watched the millennial classic 13 Going on 30: “While it is a very silly movie, I would say two things in my defense: (1) it belongs to Mark Ruffalo’s complete works and should therefore be considered part of the cinematic canon, and (2) considering your life and your morals from the perspective of your 13-year-old self is a pretty profound exercise.”

Editor Eli Richman has been going back and forth between reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and watching the new season of House of the Dragon. “I worry [House of the Dragon] is catching The Boys syndrome, where the need to have things go badly for the protagonists overwhelms the need for the story to make sense,” he said. “Dungeon Crawler Carl is unironically fantastic, ping-ponging between absurdly silly and very real without missing a beat.”

Finally, I personally do not recommend being hit by a car. The adrenaline rush is something else, but it hurts quite a bit.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal, the death of a CancerTok star, the state of Substack, and narco-influencers.

Get in loser, we’re bundling

Last week, investigative journalist Scott Carney wrote a viral Substack column titled “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing,” which pointed the finger at subscription fatigue and the increased prioritization of free content on the platform. Substack began as a site that functioned like a neutral service provider, merely sending emails and hosting pages. But it has recently added features that make it more like a social media network, including Notes, livestreams, followers and short form video.

Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz has had similar concerns.

The top comments on Carney’s post are complaining about how expensive it is to follow multiple writers (which inspired a secondary round of discourse with writers defending the concept that writers deserve to be paid). If you want to follow more than just a couple of bloggers, it’s easy to find yourself paying far more than you would expect. When you add lots of Substack subscriptions to all the streaming services, it’s understandable that people feel stretched thin.

Substack, as a company, represents the peak of what Ben Thompson called the Great Unbundling: Cable packages used to bundle together hundreds of channels into one expensive package, but now you pay separately for a wide variety of streaming services. Newspapers used to bundle sports, news, lifestyle content, comics, classifieds, and weather, but now there’s a separate app or publication for each of those. And while magazines used to contain articles from a wide range of writers on a variety of topics, today you can directly subscribe to single blogs.

Everyone likes unbundling in theory. Why pay for the things you don’t care about in the bundle? Why not only pay for the thing you care about? But the end state isn’t always what you want — some folks find themselves paying more for all the streaming services than they ever did for cable, and paid subscriptions to 10 different blogs might cost more than their previous magazines and papers did.

If you’ll permit me a moment of navel-gazing, I think we’re due for a moment of re-bundling. That’s part of why I joined up with The Argument. There’s so much more value for readers if I’m bundled with all the other fantastic stuff being produced here than there would be if it was just me alone.

Sure, we’re basically reinventing the wheel with this new “bundle a bunch of good writers together” idea. But I think — and hopefully you, dear readers, agree — that publications like The Argument are the future.

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Babies are a lot of work.

Two months ago, my family welcomed home our fourth, and he has thus far been wildly easier than the first three. He sleeps on his back, in his crib, for hours at a time — an ability I previously believed was a myth perpetuated by some sort of safe sleep industrial complex. He is sweet-tempered and takes his siblings’ manhandling with good grace, only crying when he has a legitimate complaint and stopping as soon as that complaint is addressed.

If he were our first baby, I would be unbearably judgmental of all those other people talking about how having a new baby is a several-months-long marathon of sleep deprivation.

Still, babies are a lot of work.

He is held almost all hours of the day. He generates an astonishing amount of laundry. For weeks, we were doing overnight shifts, with someone awake at all times to solve baby problems or be a baby sleeping service. He spends the whole evening nursing, and he goes through a lot of diapers.

If you were to ask someone who isn’t a parent what they know about parenting, they would almost certainly tell you they know that it’s hard. But while child care is hard, it is simply not true that it’s harder today than it ever has been.

However, it is harder today to know what parenting would be like than it ever has been.

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A growing share of American families have only one child, so those children can’t see their nieces and nephews grow and get a sense from that of what parenting is like. Our cities have fewer children than even a decade ago, so young adults don’t see children in their day-to-day lives or get a concrete vision of what it would be like to raise them.

A lot of the most thoughtful adults I know are, for this reason, hesitant to have children. It’s a huge commitment to make, and it hardly seems wise to make it without having a real sense of what it will be like. And the fewer people who make the leap, the harder that sense is to get.

As my parental leave comes to an end, I want to make the case, as a parent and a liberal, that parenting is an incredibly worthwhile endeavor, one that is hard but joyful and full of meaning — and also one that we as a society could be making so much better.

The dismal economics of child care

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“You can imagine this as being equivalent to Anthropic [today], except it has 100 or 1,000 times more researchers than the company actually has,” Epoch AI senior researcher JS Denain told me, working through the hypothetical scenario in a Substack Live with The Argument Wednesday. “And also, all those researchers are working at 10 times, 100 times the speed.”

That scenario, which AI researchers call recursive self-improvement, would not necessarily mean that humans lose control of AI. That said, most of the scary, sci-fi-adjacent scenarios do at least start from this premise.

So, just how close are we to self-improving AI?

One way to try to answer the question is to look at the recent overall arc of AI progress: How long and complex are the tasks that AI completes? How many resources are dedicated to this project? In both of those cases, progress has grown exponentially, lending weight to bold predictions about what could happen if such trends continue.

Another thing you could do is look at what’s happening inside the labs: OpenAI recently had its latest model optimize a smaller model. Anthropic reported that it tested Claude’s decision-making at certain critical junctures in the AI research process. Successive models made better and better decisions until Claude Mythos Preview beat human researchers 64% of the time.

Successfully outsourcing AI research decisions to Mythos would be, to some, an obvious sign that agents could lead research soon. With this evidence in mind, aggressive predictions that we’ll have automated AI researchers in just two years do not sound quite so far-fetched.

But making key decisions isn’t the same as running a whole scientific research process. That involves novel thinking, critical judgment, and resource management.

To figure out whether AI is up to these tasks, Denain has proposed treating AI research the way economists treat any other automatable job in the economy: Itemize all the tasks involved in the job, then figure out how well AI can do each of them specifically.

In other words, what does it actually look like to be a scientist who is building AI? As I put it in our conversation: “What is the equivalent of an AI researcher dropping a drop of solution like a chemist does to run their own experiment?”

Denain and I tried to separate things AI currently does well in the research process from the things it can’t yet do well.

It’s common to say that AI succeeds at defined tasks but struggles at more open-ended ones. This discussion shows there are still layers of complexity below that. You have to ask what particular aspects of open-ended tasks AI struggles with: Can it set new research directions? Can it incorporate critiques? Can it manage a budget?

Recent research suggests that, for all three, the answer, so far, is “no.” This complicates the picture of steady progress coming out of the AI labs. Watch the interview to learn more about why.

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Once a month, Matt and I do a book club episode of The Argument podcast. In an upcoming episode this month, we are reading Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Read along if you are interested, and please comment with any questions or ideas you would like us to explore!

True freedom requires a person with a will — and a society that is organized to allow the expression of that will.

I can want something as simple as to walk my dog at night. But if roving gangs threaten my life, then my freedom to pursue that desire is only theoretical. Even worse is if the threat is so pervasive that I can’t even imagine walking my dog at night. In neither case am I really free.

This diminished freedom has long been, to greater and lesser degrees, the status quo for most women in most places.

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Even in a society as egalitarian as the contemporary U.S., polling shows that women feel less safe to roam. Globally, “men are over 20% more likely than women to say they feel safe in their communities.” One paper about women in Delhi finds that women will choose to go to much worse colleges in order to feel safer while traveling, whereas men with similar choices will choose to attend the better colleges more frequently.

One researcher, Alice Evans, recently argued that “our analyses of progress towards gender equality still focus on economic activity and political representation, omitting a far more basic question: can women walk down the street alone at night and be at ease?”

It is not immediately obvious that women should feel less free than men: Men are much more likely than women to be victims of homicide and robbery. Of course, a big part of this is that boys are more likely to be in public spaces unsupervised in the first place.

The freedom to move in the world unburdened by the fear of violence and harassment is a fundamental prerequisite to basically every other freedom we care about: to say what you really think, to associate with whomever you wish. It can be hard to imagine a world where the average woman remains physically weaker than the average man and yet feels as free. But one thing gives me hope: If you were to describe the freedom enjoyed by many women in rich, low-crime neighborhoods in modern-day America to a woman living in the 1700s, it would become clear just how much legal, social, and cultural progress can be made.

#MeToo’s unfinished revolution

The slogan Me Too was first used in 2006 by the activist Tarana Burke to promote what she called “empowerment through empathy.” The idea was that victims of sexual violence and harassment often feel isolated by their experiences. Making people aware that there are others who have gone through the same thing plausibly makes them feel less alone.

But after the hashtag went truly viral in 2017, the slogan’s original purpose no longer seemed to meet the enormity of the task. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein and other abusive male power brokers were horrifying, and the veritable downpour of crimes revealed by women everywhere felt endless. We couldn’t wait for the broad social awareness being cultivated by the hashtag to trickle down into people’s behavior. Responding to stories of assault, harassment, and inequality with mere “likes” on social media was clearly not enough.

But the signal failure of #MeToo was that in seeking to counteract the norm of doubting women’s accounts, “accused” became nearly synonymous with “guilty.” More broadly, #MeToo, by highlighting women’s vulnerability, cast all men in the role of perpetrator.

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In 2022, Burke wrote a retrospective in which she gave examples of the accomplishments of #MeToo. Besides removing “captains of industry” from positions of power, her examples were largely expressive:

• “More than any law that has been passed or policy that has been changed in the past five years, this movement has created visibility and community.”

• “The language we use is shifting, replacing words like victim with survivor.”

• “We talk about mental health and healing.”

• “[E]mployers are crafting thoughtful human-resource policies.”

• “Consumers are more conscientious about the cultural content they consume.”

• Consumers are “vocal about calling out rape culture.”

Burke, not totally comfortable with this accounting, quoted another feminist author, Imani Perry, who argued that “awareness is not a virtue in and of itself.” Burke expressed ambivalence about incarcerating more rapists and ended her piece by calling on the reader to do their part.

But what is their part? If awareness is not enough, and the goal is to effect mass cultural change without incarcerating a lot more rapists, what exactly should we be doing?

My cohost Matt Yglesias argued that the #MeToo movement was thin on specific demands and failed to accomplish very much, which is reasonable enough. Earlier feminist wins were concrete: Recognize our right to vote. Recognize our right to own property. Recognize our right to divorce our husbands and attend college.

The main problem is that both critics and supporters of the #MeToo movement tended to underrate just how radically society would have to change for women to feel as safe as men, or even to come close.

For starters, there is no specific legislative demand that could eliminate sexual harassment. And sexual violence is different from other serious crimes like murder or theft. There is often not dispositive physical evidence like there would be if someone shot you or broke into your house, and therefore cases are typically based almost entirely on witness testimony.

Moreover, victims themselves are often torn about going through the legal system. Sometimes they just want to move on rather than deal with a years-long process that may retraumatize them while hinging entirely on their perceived credibility as a witness. Sometimes the perpetrator is a friend, partner, or community member who they don’t actually want sent to jail.

And, of course, so much of what makes women and girls feel unsafe is not rape itself but the threat of sexual harassment that does not rise to the level of criminal activity.

True equality for women cannot exist in a world where girls are afraid to walk home from school alone and women have to remain on high alert while going about their normal lives. The unfortunate fact is that you can’t legislate freedom.

You can’t bar men from catcalling 13-year-olds, or from leering at women jogging at night. So, what do you do? I don’t think there’s an obvious answer.

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.

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New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Corrections:

• Around 19:00, Jerusalem says The Argument’s February poll found that “44% of Americans say it’s harder for men to socialize with women than they did 10 years ago, versus 14% saying it’s easier.” The true figures are 45% and 15%, respectively, and these are percentages of voters, not all Americans.

• Around 49:30, Matt says Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, in response to the New York Post article about Sen. Ruben Gallego, “did a tweet, and she was like, ‘this is wrong because of the extreme power differential that exists.’” While Luna did tweet about the article, the tweet that used the power imbalance argument came from Rep. Lisa McClain.

Show notes

• She Said, film about the Harvey Weinstein investigation: IMDb page

• “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” June 2020 op-ed by Mariame Kaba: The New York Times article

• Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, 1979 book by Catharine MacKinnon: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “#MeToo Has Done What the Law Could Not,” February 2018 op-ed by Catharine MacKinnon: The New York Times article

• Disclosure, 1994 film about a sexual harassment allegation: IMDb page

• “I was harassed at the New Republic. I spoke up. Nothing happened.” article by Sarah Wildman about Leon Wieseltier: Vox article

• “Leon Wieseltier: A Reckoning,” article by Michelle Cottle: The Atlantic article

• Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, book by Zeynep Tufekci about social media launching mass movements: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, book by Susan Faludi debunking antifeminist talking points: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, book by Amia Srinivasan that includes an essay on power dynamics in professor-student romances: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Swalwell pal Sen. Ruben Gallego had sexual relationships with two House staffers, sources reveal to The Post,” article about Gallego’s relationships with staffers in other offices when he was a representative: New York Post article

• “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry” report on how restaurant servers often have an economic incentive to ignore sexual harassment, which garnered much coverage: ROC and Forward Together report

• Off Campus, the “straight Heated Rivalry”: IMDb page

• Heated Rivalry, the “gay Off Campus”: IMDb page

• Peer review: “Dynamic Individuals, Static Neighborhoods: Migration and Earnings Changes in Poor Neighborhoods,” article by Andrew Garin, Ethan Jenkins, Evan Mast, and Bryan Stuart about why poor neighborhoods stay poor: NBER working paper

• “What’s Causing Black Flight?” article by Jerusalem Demsas about the decreasing Black share of urban populations: The Atlantic article

• “You don’t actually want to buy a house,” podcast episode about homeownership: The Argument podcast

• “Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?,” podcast episode about The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Argument podcast

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, book by Jane Jacobs that formed the central topic of a previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, book by Robert Putnam that will form the central topic of an upcoming episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

Transcript

Compared with 20th-century norms, the U.S. is building astonishingly few homes, even as its population continues to grow. The result is a persistent housing shortage and record prices.

The country has only built 44 new homes per 1,000 people across the last decade, down from 57 in the 2000s and 63 in the 1990s. In fact, the U.S. currently builds at a more sluggish pace than it did even during the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to this persistent failure of supply to meet demand, more and more Americans are now convinced they will never be able to buy a home.

Decades of underbuilding have left the U.S. with an aging housing stock that is only poised to get grayer: Today, the average American home is 37 years old, a record high. That number has shot up from less than 30 years old in just two decades.

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In a healthy housing market, the age of the housing stock would be kept down by a steady supply of new construction to meet the needs of new families, a growing population, and rising incomes. Stringent land-use restrictions prevent much of this new construction from happening, particularly in the metro areas where demand is the highest.

Yet Americans’ growing housing needs don’t vanish just because homebuilders are turned away. In 2025, Americans spent more money on home improvements and renovations than on building new single-family homes — a historical first, excepting a brief period during the Great Recession. Total renovation spending now exceeds $430 billion per year, an increase of 36% in inflation-adjusted dollars over just the past decade.

Higher housing costs mean lower mobility. That pushes homeowners to renovate rather than move into more appropriate new homes when they experience major life events like getting married, having kids, or becoming empty nesters. Restrictive permitting processes make replacing many old homes a nonstarter, so an entire cottage industry has erupted around renovating and flipping existing homes to meet the needs of new buyers.

Thanks to dynamics like these, what initially looks like American homeowners’ insatiable appetite for renovation may actually be a structural shift in construction activity that is directly caused by — or is perhaps a kind of relief valve for — the country’s chronic housing shortage.

If that’s the case — that a large share of housing investment has been redirected from building new homes to fixing old ones — then we may already be doing more to address the housing shortage than pure homebuilding and permitting data indicate. After all, converting a two-bedroom home to a three-bedroom does expand the housing supply (though it doesn’t directly address the problem of depressed household formation). And the booming business of energy-efficiency upgrades, while not increasing housing supply, can nevertheless make a big dent in the broader cost-of-living crisis.

Yet the housing market’s increasing dependence on renovations has inherent drawbacks:

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Is it so hard for elections to be run cheaply, accurately, and quickly?

Well, according to Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, it’s actually impossible.

“You can’t have all three. You have to pick two,” he said in a conversation with The Argument’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini. “Accuracy is always going to be the priority. So you’re going to choose between fast and low-cost, right? If you want fast, there’s going to be a cost to it.”

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For instance, Florida is one of the fastest states in the nation in counting votes (roughly 99% within hours) and it also spends the most ($15 per voter). California’s big problem is that over 80% of its ballots come in by mail, which requires a human to verify the ballot signature against the voter’s registration record.

Nevada has demonstrated significant innovation in vote-counting to help speed things up. Lakshya and Zachary were both impressed by the dashboard Nevada recently released, which shows how many voters are turning out in every county in near real time, updating every six minutes.

“It’s become the norm. The fact that a person could know where their pizza is when they order it on an app to the time it arrives at their door, that is more information than they knew about their ballot at one time,” Aguilar said. “We need to make sure that we had that information available to voters.”

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Check out the full conversation above to hear about how Nevada has modernized its elections and how Trump’s election interference could unwind that progress.

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available for paying subscribers at the end of this post. You can see every single poll published by The Argument here. Our full methodology can be read here.

Republicans used to be the party of free trade. From Gerald Ford all the way to George W. Bush, Republican presidents vocally supported lowering barriers to international commerce. Ronald Reagan said that there were no losers, only winners from trade, and the elder George Bush negotiated NAFTA while his son said that free trade helped make America into a global economic power.

Donald Trump put an end to that. Trump’s crusade to slap tariffs on an astonishingly wide range of imported goods is one of his defining policies, and economists broadly agree it’s been a disaster. One analysis showed that Trump’s tariffs increased the Consumer Price Index by 0.8 percentage points by October 2025, and a study from the Federal Reserve agreed.

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Economic analyses from the Tax Foundation, Penn Wharton, and the Peterson Institute all agreed that tariffs are weakening U.S. economic growth.1 The Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome told me that adding new tariffs is like chopping off your own fingers: It’s unlikely to kill you and you can probably live a normal life afterward, but you’re causing yourself pain for no real benefit.

Though voters consistently rank cost of living as one of the most important issues facing the country, Democrats have not exactly seized the mantle of free trade.

While most rank-and-file Democrats oppose Trump’s tariffs, Joe Biden shared many of Trump’s protectionist instincts and kept many of his tariffs in place, even expanding specific tariffs on China. And prominent senators like Elizabeth Warren couched their opposition to Trump’s tariffs in terms like, “tariffs are an important strategic economic tool, but Donald Trump’s desire to start and stop random trade wars will not protect jobs.”

Prominent Democrats often seem to leave tariffs completely out of their messaging against Trump. For example, neither Kamala Harris nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tweeted the word “tariff” once this year, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has tweeted it just one time. And I used ChatGPT to scrape the congressional record for tariff mentions and analyze their sources, finding that neither AOC nor Sanders had mentioned tariffs in Congress at all this year.

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But, according to new polling data from The Argument, Democrats may be leaving a golden opportunity on the table. Free trade is wildly popular with Americans.

This result is consistent with other polls that asked specifically about Trump’s tariff policies. Navigator Research found that 59% have an unfavorable view of tariffs while only 29% are in favor. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 64% of the public disapproved of Trump’s handling of tariffs, while a YouGov poll found that 72% think tariffs lead to higher prices. (Only 3% think they decrease prices.)

In our most recent poll of 3,000 registered voters, fielded nationally between July 20 and July 26, support for free trade was remarkably widespread. College-educated respondents supported free trade by a wider margin, but noncollege respondents overwhelmingly supported the policy as well.

In every income bracket measured, the support-to-oppose ratio was more than 4-to-1.

Free trade is popular with Republicans, Democrats, and independents. And among Democrats, it’s wildly popular with both voters who approved of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and those who disapproved.

Free trade’s popularity is remarkably consistent across virtually every demographic and political split we measured. Indeed, our results showed that traditional economic liberalism more generally is favored by a majority of Americans — for instance, 79% of respondents opposed government ownership of most businesses, and a majority also opposed government ownership of utilities and railways.

Why did protectionism become so popular?

The intellectual climate around trade shifted dramatically after economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson released their 2016 paper “The China Shock.” Their research claimed that increased trade with China led to greater job losses than economists had previously assumed and that those losses were particularly concentrated in regions with economies built around manufacturing. The findings, which showed many workers never fully recovering, shook both left and right because they appeared to confirm that globalization’s costs had been badly underestimated.

The losses from the China Shock were also concentrated in electorally important states. After Trump swept the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan in 2016, many politicians concluded that free trade was electoral suicide and began embracing protectionist policy more openly. It was easy to do so by romanticizing manufacturing jobs as “Real America,” the type of honest work that carried more cultural legitimacy than white-collar or service-industry jobs.

But the lessons from the China Shock were overlearned. More recent research has called into question the scale of the shock. One paper from Lorenzo Caliendo, Maximiliano Dvorkin, and Fernando Parro found that only 16% of the decline in manufacturing employment from 2000 to 2007 could be traced back to the China Shock, while other research emphasized that when you examine all employment sectors, increased trade with China may have led to net job gains.

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And even the authors of the original paper emphasized that their findings were primarily focused around local shocks and didn’t dispute the overall benefits of free trade. The New York Times reported that David Autor, “like most economists, is still persuaded of the long-established benefits that global trade confers on the economy as a whole.” He believes the benefits are large and widespread but diffuse, while the losses are painfully concentrated.

The authors are also deeply skeptical that more tariffs can fix any of this. Gordon Hanson wrote that “China’s rise, although disruptive for many workers, has nevertheless benefited the U.S. economy” and rejected protectionism, instead calling on the U.S. to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump’s barrage of new tariffs in his second term has not led to a manufacturing renaissance, with the U.S. continuing to lose manufacturing jobs since he took office.

Importantly, the political momentum that led to increased support for protectionism has stopped. Trump’s use of tariffs has been so lawless, so haphazardly implemented, and so offensive to so many of America’s traditional allies that the public has clearly turned against tariffs and back toward free trade.

Of course, it’s entirely plausible that voters approve of free trade in the abstract while specific trade liberalization deals, with all their inherent messiness, are more likely to attract disapproval (especially once interest groups, such as particular unions that benefit from the status quo, get to have their say).

But the good news is that Democrats don’t have to negotiate a new NAFTA or a new Trans-Pacific Partnership to champion free trade. They can just promise to undo Trump’s newest tariffs with a stroke of the pen when they retake the presidency.

If free trade is so popular, what’s stopping Democrats from attacking Republicans more vigorously on the issue?

One theory is that Democrats are worried about losing support from unions and other interest groups that have a vested interest in tariffs. But capitulating to unions on protectionist policy isn’t working.

Joe Biden was the most pro-union president in generations. The American Rescue Plan bailed out the Teamsters union — providing approximately $35.8 billion to keep the Central States pension plan solvent and protecting over 350,000 participants from benefit reductions of roughly 60% — and the Teamsters still didn’t endorse Biden or Harris in 2024.

Democrats may simply be so used to catering to unions that it’s hard to break the pattern. But the time will never be better to overcome the old protectionist muscle memory and come out forcefully for free trade.

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Recommended reading:

Today’s leading AI labs claim to be determining the course of humanity’s future. Those claims can seem grandiose to the average chatbot user, who may view programs like ChatGPT as advanced forms of Google search. But recent dust-ups with the U.S. government show that the stakes are already getting higher.

In February, Anthropic and the Defense Department feuded over whether the military should have access to an unfettered version of Claude that could conduct mass surveillance of Americans and operate weapons autonomously1. The immediate standoff ended when a competitor, OpenAI, swooped in to offer the department access to ChatGPT on more favorable terms.

This episode encapsulates the reputations that the two companies have developed among those in the know: Anthropic is considered the safety-conscious lab, with a thoughtful CEO who pens essays about the promise and peril of the technology. OpenAI is the unscrupulous competitor whose CEO was once ousted by the company’s board for “not being consistently candid in his communications.”

This perception, however dominant in elite discourse, appears not to have filtered through to the general public at all.

Six months ago, very few people had even heard of Anthropic, although it has essentially cast itself as humanity’s protector. A December 2025 poll by the Searchlight Institute found that 81% of respondents had no opinion on Anthropic. Another analysis around that time by Democratic data scientist David Shor suggested that the true proportion of people who hadn’t heard of Anthropic could be as high as 95%.2

While that number seems to have fallen dramatically over the past few months — now that Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in terms of annualized revenue, run funny Super Bowl ads, and clashed with the Trump administration — a lot of people still don’t know what Anthropic is. The Argument’s poll of 3,008 registered voters fielded between May 29 and June 3, 2026, found that 42% of respondents had not heard of Anthropic and 38% did not know xAI.

OpenAI led the pack in name recognition, with just 13% of respondents saying that they had not heard of the company — a whopping 29 points better than Anthropic. All told, this means that Anthropic gained somewhere between 39 and 53 percentage points in name recognition over the past six months.

But increased public awareness of Anthropic hasn’t necessarily translated into favorability.3

When we asked respondents whether they had a favorable or unfavorable view of each AI company, OpenAI led favorability by a healthy margin. Among people who knew of each company, OpenAI had a net favorability rating of +11 points, while Anthropic had a net favorability rating of only +3.

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Whether or not you think Anthropic’s self-styled heroism is genuine, you might expect it to have some discernible effect on public opinion. After all, while few people have read CEO Dario Amodei’s musings, millions watched Anthropic take a shot at OpenAI in Superbowl ads or heard about its choice to stand up to the Trump administration.

You could even imagine a world in which the company’s earnest approach has the opposite of its intended effect: The clash with the Trump administration, say, could politically polarize views of the company, leaving MAGA supporters with a bad taste in their mouths.

But there seems to be no good evidence that any of this has happened yet.

In fact, it seems that public approval of individual AI labs isn’t driven by much of anything they say or do, outside of delivering a useful consumer product.

OpenAI isn’t Kleenex, it’s Amazon

My starting hypothesis was that OpenAI’s lead in net favorability was due to its first-mover advantage. Maybe the public had come to associate AI with OpenAI above all other companies, the way Coke stands in for soda or Kleenex for tissues.

This led me to suspect that frequent AI users, being more aware of the various companies’ brands, would look different from those who barely used AI at all.

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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

Readers — maybe even you — love to click on stories about how young men are becoming Andrew Tate acolytes and young women are becoming misandrist shrews. Scarcely a day goes by without the commentariat debating the plight of contemporary men and women in tired, circular arguments.

Yet many polls indicate that, while voters may shy away from the label “feminist,” they have broadly positive views on the idea of equality between men and women, which raises the question: What does everyone think feminism is doing?

We asked them.

In a poll of 3,000 registered voters conducted between July 20 and 26, The Argument asked respondents “which of the following — if any — do you believe describes ‘feminism’ in practice?”

A large majority — 64% — selected “the belief that men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.” No other potential answer broke 30%.

Notably, even among Trump 2024 voters, 51% agreed with that egalitarian definition of feminism.1

For access to our full cross-tabs and analysis on all of our original issue polling become a subscriber!

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But when asked whether the majority of Americans and the majority of elites agreed with them, our respondents grew pessimistic.

Just 48% agreed that the majority of Americans would select the egalitarian definition of feminism, and just 28% thought the majority of elites would.

As our director of political data, Lakshya Jain, explained earlier this week, our poll generally shows a clear trend where “most people think their fellow Americans agree with them while elites disagree with them.” The feminism question complicates that pattern: There’s a 16 percentage point drop between those who personally define feminism as equality and those who think most Americans do.

That’s the single largest drop-off between personal views and majority perception in our poll, save one: the question about whether “men and women are equally suited to leadership,” where 81% personally agree but only 51% think most Americans do.

Americans’ gender egalitarianism is an underrated fact of our modern political landscape. In our earlier February poll of 3,003 registered voters, The Argument asked about a range of issues related to gender and sexuality. Normie feminist opinions repeatedly won out:

• Only 18% agreed that women were “taking jobs that should go to men.”

• Among respondents who thought one parent should stay home with children, 40% said it should be “whichever parent wants to stay home” and just 29% said it should be “the mother.”

Similarly, in our July polling, liberal feminism beat out explicitly hierarchical positions:

• 81% of voters agreed that men and women are equally suited to leadership, including 74% of Trump voters.

• Only 31% of voters thought men should be the breadwinners.

These are all positions associated with the basic achievements of feminism: Women should be eligible for the same jobs and positions of authority as men, and family roles should not be automatically assigned according to sex. Substantive egalitarian principles that feminism fought to establish are considerably more popular than the endless gender-war commentary suggests.

Before I paint too rosy a picture, the polling does show some substantive disagreement on the question of feminism — not about the value of gender egalitarianism, but instead about whether or not we have already achieved it. In our polling, men are much more likely to believe that particular gender disparities have been overcome. Women are not so sure.

This disagreement on empirical questions is no small thing. If you believe that men and women have largely already achieved equality, then any further demands by feminists can be interpreted as women seeking unfair advantage. On the other hand, if you still think there’s a lot of progress yet to be made, then feminism is merely continuing its egalitarian project — and the doubters must be hostile to true equality.

This disagreement helps explain how a country where most people think equality between the sexes is desirable has found itself continuously locked in internecine gender feuds.

Millennials, we have a problem

As a millennial feminist, I was disheartened to see that 30-to-44-year-olds had the least egalitarian perception of feminism.2

Now, I don’t want to overstate this — 59% still believe that feminism in practice is the belief that men and women should be equals — but they were also the age group most likely to say feminism means women should have more power than men (19%) and that women are superior to men (also 19%).

Nor was this a one-off result: In The Argument’s February polling on gender issues, millennials lagged in several responses as well. They were nearly twice as likely as adults under 30 to say society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. They were also the age group most likely to agree that women were taking jobs that should go to men.

I want to refrain from making some grand pronouncement about what this generational divide means. It’s entirely possible that this has nothing to do with generational differences and everything to do with the fact that the 30-44 age cohort is in the middle of having children, dividing household labor, and confronting gender roles in intensely personal ways.

It’s wonderful that we can mostly agree on equality in the abstract. The question of the 21st century is whether those principles can be translated into who takes a hit at work to figure out after-school childcare.

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Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

In his piece covering our new poll’s headline findings, Lakshya Jain argues that voters, despite what folks like Christopher Rufo would have you believe, don’t actually think the elite means journalists and college professors. Rather, it is billionaires and celebrities who voters suspect don’t share their values.

The Argument columnist Matt Yglesias is not convinced that American seniors are hoarding power. In his column this week, he points out that there are many real problems plaguing society, none of which have to do with old people running for office or getting tenure. Instead, we should probably be celebrating the fact that more of us are living, working, and engaging in politics for longer.

Staff writer Kelsey Piper loves a Waymo. In her latest article, she takes on a group of people who have been lobbying against the autonomous vehicles under the radar: personal injury lawyers. Because AVs are on track to significantly reduce the number of people hurt or killed in car crashes, they threaten to put a dent in the trial lawyer business model. But no tiny self-interested group should be able to kill an invention with such immense potential to do good.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• At least 8,400 apartments have now officially been enabled in Texas since Senate Bill 840 took effect last September.

• Study finds that a GLP-1 pill can reduce heavy drinking in adults with alcohol use disorder.

• Renewables now provide more than 30% of U.S. electricity, according to new data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

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Worth watching…

On the podcast this week, Jerusalem lays out one of her hottest takes: You don’t actually want to buy a house. Unlike George W. Bush, she does not want everybody in America to own their own home. But Matt, a very satisfied homeowner himself, thinks it is good for individuals — and society — when people save money through homeownership. (A friendly reminder that neither podcaster is a financial advisor.)

Tech and society fellow engaged NYU researcher Nathan Witkin in a live discussion about the “most important graph in AI.” Stay tuned for more live Kobe content in the coming weeks.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

I asked the team to recommend cultural content that had recently made them cry. I’ll let you decide how seriously they followed that instruction.

Politics & polling fellow , for instance, recommended the new upload from his favorite YouTube channel The Wildlife Homestead. The 20-minute video follows a family of swallows from inside their bird box for an entire nesting season.

Operations manager Angela Tracy also recommended a wildlife vlog, this one of a guy swimming with giant tadpoles in Florida’s Ocklawaha River.

Both editor and staff writer recommended you go see the live stage recording of Hadestown, still playing in theaters thanks to huge popular demand. Here is what Eli had to say about it: “If you don't tear up at Hadestown, I don't know what to tell you. For the uninitiated, the musical reimagines the Orpheus-Eurydice and Hades-Persephone Greek myths in a sort of steampunk, dystopian setting. ‘It’s a sad song’ are among the first words uttered in the show, but knowing that doesn’t soften the blow.”

To this, Jeremiah added that Hadestown is an “honest tragedy,” one that “tells you directly that this has all played out before, that it's going to end badly, but that it will be beautiful anyways.”

I also recently shed a tear at the theater. Last weekend, I saw Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on Broadway, starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf. Totally heart-wrenching and timeless. It made me desperately want to see the 1985 Dustin Hoffman film adaptation.

Tech and society fellow recommended the song “Ooh La La” by Faces, sent to him by a friend on his 24th birthday. The lyrics — “Poor young grandson / There's nothing I can say / You'll have to learn / Just like me / And that's the hardest way” — hit him with force this past weekend while on a run. In a similar vein, senior editor recommended Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street.” Here is a live performance of the song from 1978.

Finally, I’ll leave you with editor-in-chief ’ list of books that made her cry this year:

1. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

2. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

3. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

4. Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

5. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

6. Possession by A.S. Byatt

7. The Employees by Olga Ravn

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into what’s driving anti-capitalist messaging, how youths are disguising themselves as Charlie Kirk, and the young men who found community on a porn message board.

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A story about gooners that explains our antisocial century

I have no idea what sort of journalistic steroids they’re feeding the reporters over at The Cut, but it must be the good stuff. The most remarkable story I read anywhere this week was Ezra Marcus’ “Revenge of the Simps: How a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp.” (In case it’s not obvious, the link is highly NSFW.)

First of all, yes, let’s savor that incredible title.

The story details how users on “SimpCity” — a message board largely devoted to discussing livestream porn performers — began to suspect that some of their favorite webcam girls were victims of human trafficking and abuse. They noticed that the girls they followed had unexplained bruises, and that at times they could hear crying and screaming from women not on screen.

This being the internet, a group of these gooners banded together to try to investigate what was going on. They called themselves The White Knights (hopefully with a touch of irony).

The White Knights’ sleuthing skills eventually led them to a Seattle-area man named Nikita Tyukalo. Tyukalo, a 21-year-old Andrew Tate admirer, was subsequently arrested and charged with four counts of human trafficking after the Bellevue Police Department received tips from the White Knights.

This story rides the edge between horrifying and absurd. The contrast between the seriousness of the alleged crimes being committed and the ridiculousness of The White Knights (these are, after all, men posting hundreds of pages of commentary on various porn stars) makes the entire thing sound farcical.

At one point, Tyukalo finds out that the simps are on to him and joins one of their group chats to mock them, leading to this astounding exchange:

The back-and-forth continued all night — the simps calling Tyukalo an abuser; Tyukalo mocking the simps as broke, misguided losers and bragging about his McLarens.

“Cars aren’t status in the real world. Just to little kids showing off overpriced Hot Wheels,” wrote Hal.

“Brother,” Tyukalo responded. “Your in a Chaturbate chat.”

Last year, The Argument columnist Derek Thompson wrote that we are living in the Anti-Social Century: Public life and institutions are deteriorating as we spend more time alone, isolated, and online, staring at our phones rather than engaging in real-world relationships and activities. Thompson is definitely on to something important, but the antisocial century is also spawning new forms of niche, online socializing — like, well, Chaturbate chats.

People never stopped wanting community. They’re just getting it in these incredibly strange places. And while it may not be great for society that people are now turning to message boards like SimpCity for social community, it’s certainly interesting.

The White Knights may have been isolated men sitting alone in separate rooms — and many of them exhibit an unhealthy relationship with pornography and women in general — but together they possessed a shared culture and built a common purpose. Some of them spent time tracking down government records. Others tried to build rapport with the performers. They archived streams, tracked addresses, and communicated with police. Eventually they scraped together enough information that they legitimately contributed to the arrest of an abusive criminal.

Part of what happens when mainstream institutions weaken is that people look for alternatives. The failure of reputable systems leads disreputable systems to take their place. As the antisocial century marches forward, I expect to see more stories that revolve around the actions of subreddits, fandoms, message boards, or TikTok audience mobs. These are the places where culture is being created, and whether we like it or not it’s where community happens. And I have a growing sense that every online subculture is a latent institution just waiting to be activated by the right event or discourse.

Trend reporting under late-stage capitalism

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