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Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”
This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.
Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.
Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.
Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.
This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.
Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.
Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.
Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.
Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”
Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.
For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.
By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.
This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”
Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would end fact-checking on its platform. In the process, a partnership with the network of third parties that has provided review and ratings of viral misinformation since 2016 will be terminated. To some observers, this news suggested that the company was abandoning the very idea of truth, and opening its gates to lies, perversions, and deception. But this is wrong: Those gates were never really closed.
The idea that something called “fact-checking” could be (or could have been) reasonably applied to social-media posts, in aggregate, is absurd. Social-media posts can be wrong, of course, even dangerously so. And single claims from single posts can sometimes be adjudicated as being true or false. But the formulation of those distinctions and decisions is not fact-checking, per se.
That’s because fact-checking is, specifically, a component part of doing journalism. It is a way of creating knowledge invented by one particular profession. I don’t mean that journalists have any special power to discern the truth of given statements. Naturally, people attempt to validate the facts they see, news-related or otherwise, all the time. But fact-checking, as a professional practice linked to the publication of news stories and nonfiction books, refers to something more—something that no social-media platform would ever try to do.
Here at The Atlantic, every story we put out goes through a fact-checking process. That usually takes place after the story has been reported, written, and edited. Some of that process is pretty straightforward: A quote from a source might be verified against an interview recording or transcript; dates, locations, or statistics might be compared to the sources from which they were drawn.
Other aspects of the process are more discursive. Is the writer’s sentence fairly paraphrasing someone’s statement? Does it—and the publication—mean to present that person’s statement as informative, dubious, or something else? Sometimes additional research, follow-up interviews, and internal negotiations will be required. In some cases, fact-checking has more to do with evaluation, judgment, and wordsmithing than getting any single line “right” or “wrong.” The process can be very strange. It’s often time-consuming.
Outside of newsrooms, though, fact-checking has come to have a different meaning, and a smaller scope. It may describe the surface-level checks of claims made by politicians in live debates—or of assertions appearing in a dashed-off post on social media. Small-bore inspections like these can help reduce the spread of certain glaring fabrications, a potential benefit that is now excluded from Meta’s platforms by design. But that’s a whack-a-mole project, not a trust-building exercise that is woven into the conception, research, authorship, and publication of a piece of media.
Fact-checking, in this broader sense, assumes its practitioners’ good-faith effort to find or construct truth, and then to participate in the interactive process of verification. When done seriously and deliberately, it imbues a published work with an ethos of care. Journalists retain detailed records of their reporting, annotate them, and submit them with the stories they file. They may be asked to provide additional support or to consider possible objections. The scope of each claim undergoes consideration. Scene-setting—writing that describes a situation or environment—will be subjected to the fact-check, too. “Even the bathroom wallpaper had a bovine theme,” I wrote about a filling-station bathroom in a profile of the children’s author Sandra Boynton, who puts lots of cows in her books. The fact-checker asked if I could prove it. Having anticipated the question, I had taken a photo in the filling-station restroom. Would we have printed the line had I not done so? That’s not the point. Rather, such evidentiary concern suffused the entire effort, not just the part where someone made sure I wasn’t lying.
This process sometimes fails. It may be foiled by sloppiness or haste. But many posts on social media lack even the aspiration to be true. Some people posting may intend to mislead, coerce, or delude their audiences into believing, buying, or simply clicking. Others are less malicious, but still, as a rule, they are not engaged in journalism and do not necessarily share its values. That makes their content not lesser, but different in kind. On social media, people share their feelings, the things they saw, the images they made of the activities they performed (or pretended to perform). They comment, like, and share posts that spark delight or fear, and they may do so without too much concern for their effects on other people’s choices or opinions.
As I’ve writtenbefore, giving everyone with a smartphone the ability to say anything they want, as often as they want, to billions of people, is a terrible idea. In the deluge that results, verification is impossible. Sure, one might take the time to affirm or reject the truth of a tiny subset of the claims posted to a platform, but even modest efforts run afoul of the fact that different people post for different reasons, with different goals.
The effort Facebook attempted under the name fact-checking was doomed. You can’t nitpick every post from every random person, every hobby website, every brand, school, restaurant, militia lunatic, aunt, or dogwalker as if they were all the same. Along the way, Facebook’s effort also tarnished the idea that fact-checking could be something more. The platform’s mass deployment of surface-level checks gave the sense that sorting facts from falsehoods is not a subtle art but a simple and repeating task, one that can be algorithmically applied to any content. The profession of journalism, which has done a terrible job of explaining its work to the public, bears some responsibility for allowing—even encouraging—this false impression to circulate. But Facebook was the king of ersatz checking. Good riddance.
A politically powerful opponent of birthright citizenship railed that the United States cannot “give up the right” to “expel” dangerous “trespassers” who “invade [our] borders,” “wander in gangs,” and “infest society.”
Was this Donald Trump speaking in 2024? No, the quote is from an 1866 speech on the Senate floor by Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, a leading opponent of adding a provision to the U.S. Constitution granting citizenship based solely on birth on U.S. soil. Who were the “invaders” that Senator Cowan so feared? “I mean the Gypsies,” Cowan explained, despite offering no evidence that Roma migration posed a risk to the United States.
Senator Cowan lost the fight. In 1868, the nation ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the first sentence of which guarantees birthright citizenship. The amendment invalidated the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that no Black person could ever be a U.S. citizen. Equally important, the Constitution now guaranteed citizenship to the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil, “no matter from what quarter of the globe he or his ancestors may have come,” as one senator later put it in a speech to his constituents.
More than 150 years later, Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship on “day one” of his new administration for children without at least one parent who is a citizen or green-card holder. He made that announcement in a three-minute video prominently posted on his campaign website, which he repeated in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last month.
In 2025, the end of birthright citizenship is more than just an applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It has a genuine, if slim, chance of making its way into law. If it does, it will upend the lives of millions, and create a caste system in which a new set of people—native-born non-Americans—can never work or live in the open.
This prospect ought to be taken seriously. How would President Trump implement such a plan? Is it constitutional? And would the U.S. Supreme Court back him up?
The first question is easy, because Trump has told us exactly how he intends to proceed. In the video, the president-elect commits to issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025, that would deny citizenship not only to the children of undocumented immigrants but also to those born to parents who both are legally in the United States on a temporary visa for study or work. (Trump’s order as proposed would apply only to children born after it is issued.)
The consequences would be immediate. Trump says he will order government officials to deny these children passports and Social Security numbers. They will be prohibited from enrolling in federal programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and likely state benefits as well.
As adults, if all goes according to Trump’s plan, they will be barred from voting, holding elected office, and serving on juries. States could deny them a driver’s license and block them from attending state universities. They would be prohibited from working in the United States, and any U.S. citizen who employs them could be fined or even jailed under federal immigration laws. Many would be rendered stateless. Perhaps worst of all, they would live in perpetual fear of being deported from the only country in which they have ever lived.
Ending birthright citizenship for these children would affect everyone in America. Everyone would now have to provide proof of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status on the date of their birth to qualify for the rights and benefits of citizenship. The new law would necessitate an expanded government bureaucracy to scrutinize hospital records, birth certificates, naturalization oaths, and green-card applications.
Lawsuits are sure to follow, which leads to the second question: Will Trump have the constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants?
Per the text of the Constitution, the answer is a hard no. Some constitutional provisions are fuzzy, but the citizenship clause is not one of them. It states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Even the deeply racist Supreme Court back in 1898 couldn’t find any wiggle room in that language. Just two years before, in 1896, the Court had somehow read the Constitution’s equal-protection clause to permit “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, ushering in the Jim Crow era. But when the U.S. government argued in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the children of Chinese immigrants were not birthright citizens, the justices balked. The language granting citizenship to “all persons born” in the United States was “universal,” the Court explained, restricted “only by place and jurisdiction.” More recently, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that point, stating as an aside in a 1982 opinion addressing the rights of undocumented children to attend school: “No plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”
Despite the clear text and long-standing judicial precedent, Trump claims that undocumented immigrants and their children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and so fall within the exception to universal birthright citizenship.
That is nonsense. Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed. They are required to pay their taxes and renew their driver’s license, just like everyone else. Trump certainly agrees that undocumented parents of native-born children can be deported for violating immigration laws at any time. So in what way are these immigrants and their children not subject to U.S. jurisdiction?
The citizenship clause’s exception for those not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States applies only to children born to members of American Indian tribes and the children of diplomats, as Congress explained when drafting that language in 1866. In contrast with undocumented immigrants, both groups owe allegiance to a separate sovereign, and both are immune from certain state and federal laws. (Native Americans were granted birthright citizenship by federal statute in 1924.)
As nonsensical as they are in an American context, Trump’s ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1985, the law professor Peter Schuck and the political scientist Rogers Smith wrote an influential book, Citizenship Without Consent, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants. These scholars asserted that “immigration to the United States was entirely unregulated” before the 1870s, and so there was no such thing as an “illegal immigrant” and likewise no intent to grant birthright citizenship to their children. Many scholars and commentators, including some members of Congress, have repeated that same claim. In 2015, the law professor Lino Graglia testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “there were no illegal aliens in 1868 because there were no restrictions on immigration.” Then-Representative Raúl Labrador repeated the same point at that hearing, asserting as fact that there was “no illegal immigration when the Fourteenth Amendment came into being.” In an op-ed in June 2023, a former Department of Homeland Security policy adviser declared, “There were no immigrant parents living unlawfully in the United States” in the 19th century.
These critics have their facts wrong. In a recent law-review article, the legal scholars Gabriel Chin and Paul Finkelman explained that for decades, Africans were illegally brought to the United States as slaves even after Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, making them the “illegal aliens” of their day. The nation was well aware of that problem. Government efforts to shut down the slave trade and deport illegally imported enslaved people were widely reported throughout the years leading up to the Civil War. Yet no one credible, then or now, would argue that the children of those slaves were to be excluded from the citizenship clause—a constitutional provision intended to overrule Dred Scott v. Sandford by giving U.S. citizenship to the 4.5 million Black people then living in the United States.
Even so, these ideas have gained traction in the right-wing legal community—a group that will be empowered in Trump’s next term. The Fifth Circuit judge James C. Ho, who is regularly floated as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court, recently said in an interview that children of “invading aliens” are not citizens, because “birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion”—a reversal of his previous position on this issue. (This is the judicial equivalent of shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!”) Never mind that undocumented immigrants—a majority of whom entered the United States legally and then overstayed their visa—don’t qualify as invaders under any definition of the word. And never mind that there is no support for that idea in either the Constitution’s text or its history. In 1866, Senator Cowan opposed granting citizenship to the children of the “flood” of Chinese immigrants into California, as well as to Gypsy “invaders” of his own state. His colleagues pointed out that the only invasion of Pennsylvania was by Confederate soldiers a few years before. Birthright citizenship, they explained, would ensure that the United States would never revert back to the slave society that the Confederates invaded Pennsylvania to preserve.
In truth, all of these baseless arguments are window dressing for the real goal. The Fourteenth Amendment’s overarching purpose was to end a caste system in which some people had more rights under the law than others. To be sure, that ideal has always been a work in progress. But many opponents of birthright citizenship don’t even hold out that ideal as a goal; they would rather bring caste back, and enshrine it in our laws.
If birthright citizenship were to end tomorrow for children without at least one parent who was a citizen or lawful permanent resident, it would bar from citizenship hundreds of thousands of people each year. These people wouldn’t be eligible to participate in our democracy, and they would be forced to live and work in the shadows, as would their children and their children’s children. The end of birthright citizenship would create a caste of millions of un-Americans, locked in perpetuity into an inferior, exploitable status. Ironically, if Trump were to succeed in ending birthright citizenship, he would preside over the most dramatic increase of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history.
That brings us to the third question: Would five members of the Supreme Court uphold Trump’s proposed executive order?
No sitting justice has addressed this question directly. At his confirmation hearing in 2006, Justice Samuel Alito was asked whether he thought the children of undocumented immigrants qualified for birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. He refused to answer on the grounds that a future case might come before him, but he also observed: “It may turn out to be a very simple question. It may turn out to be a complicated question. Without studying the question, I don’t know.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to respond to the same question for the same reason. (These two justices also dodged questions about whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade on those grounds.)
The Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court, believes that, at most, “two” or “maybe … even three justices” on the current Court would vote to end birthright citizenship. But all it takes is five, and the Court’s composition may well change. Trump appointed three justices during his first term in office, and he could appoint a few more before the end of his second. It is they who will have the last word.
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Americans are spending more and more time alone. Some are lonely. But many people—young men in particular—are actively choosing to spend much of their time in isolation, in front of screens. That proclivity is having a profound effect on individual well-being and on American’s “civic and psychic identity,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes in our new cover story. I spoke with Derek about what he calls our anti-social century.
Lora Kelley: The pandemic was obviously very disruptive to people’s social lives. How much is it to blame for this trend toward aloneness?
Derek Thompson: I never would have written this story if the data showed that Americans were hanging out and socializing more and more with every passing year and decade—until the pandemic happened, and we went inside of our homes, and now we’re just slowly getting back out. That’s not a story about America. That’s a story about a health emergency causing people to retreat from the physical world.
The anti-social century is the opposite of that story. Every single demographic of Americans now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis. Overall, Americans spend about 20 percent less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the century. For teenagers and for young Black men, it’s closer to 40 percent less time. This trend seems, by some accounts, to have accelerated during the pandemic. But as one economist pointed out to me, we were more alone in 2023 than we were in 2021.
Lora: We’ve talked a bit about shifts in isolation for young people. Where do older Americans fit into this? Are we seeing similar dynamics play out for that cohort?
Derek: Aloneness is rising across the board—for every age group and for every ethnicity and for every type of education—but it’s rising slower for old people and faster for young people.
Older people have always spent more time alone than young people. They don’t go to school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; they’re not legally forced to be around people the same way that many young people are. They aren’t in college, and they are often unemployed, so they aren’t in offices.
The solitude inequality that used to exist between different age groups—where old people were very alone, and young people were very social—is shrinking. You could say young people are acting more like old people.
Lora: What would you say to someone who thinks: Well, what’s wrong with spending time alone? If people are doing what they want to do, and pursuing their idea of a good life, why not spend more time in the house?
Derek: I don’t want this article to be a criticism of introversion, and I certainly don’t want this article to be a criticism of quiet. I myself am somewhat introverted and love a bit of quiet time. But what’s happening in America today is not a healthy trend of people simply spending more time being happy by themselves. Many researchers who looked at the rise of alone time have come to the conclusion that Americans self-report less satisfaction when they spend lots of time alone or in their house.
I think a certain amount of alone time is not only acceptable; it’s absolutely essential. But as with any therapeutic, the dosage matters, and people who spend a little bit of time taking moments by themselves, meditating, or decompressing are very different from people who are spending more hours, year after year, isolated.
Lora: To what extent is the rise of isolated lifestyles an individual issue—one that’s concerning because it’s making people sadder—versus a civic issue that’s causing a shift in American politics?
Derek: This pullback from public life started with technology, with cars and television, and ultimately smartphones, allowing Americans to privatize their leisure. But I absolutely think it’s becoming a political story.
I think we don’t understand one another for a reason that’s mathematical, almost tautological: Americans understand Americans less because we see Americans less. More and more, the way we confront people we don’t know is on social media, and we present an entirely different face online—one that tends to be more extreme and more negative and more hateful of the “out” group. I don’t think there should be any confusion about why an anti-social century has coincided with a polarized century.
Lora: You write in your article that “nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.” How do you think about the way that so many Americans use technology—things like phone reminders and calendar tools and self-improvement apps—to inscribe rituals into their personal routines?
Derek: We haven’t just privatized leisure. We’ve privatized ritual. Modern rituals are more likely to bind us to ourselves than to other people: Meditate at this time alone. Remember to work out alone, or around other people with noise-canceling headphones.
It’s profoundly ironic that a lot of people are optimizing themselves toward solitude. The anti-social century is about accretion. It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.
Wildfires are ravaging Southern California, scorching thousands of acres and forcing more than 70,000 people to evacuate. Below is a collection of our writers’ latest reporting on the fires:
Federal prosecutors said they plan on releasing the part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report that details Donald Trump’s election-interference case if the court order blocking them is lifted.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Trump against taking over Greenland, Denmark’s autonomous territory.
Trump asked the Supreme Court to halt the sentencing hearing in his New York criminal hush-money case, which is scheduled to take place on Friday.
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: BFA / Alamy; Roadside Attractions / Everett Collection; Pablo Larraín / Netflix.
The Film That Rips the Hollywood Comeback Narrative Apart
By Shirley Li
[Demi Moore’s] fame, when contrasted with some of her forgettable films—The Butcher’s Wife, The Scarlet Letter—turned her into an easy punch line. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sneered at the start of his review of the latter: “What is the point of Demi Moore?”
Try something new. The unique awfulness of beef’s climate impact has driven a search for an alternative protein that’s ethical and tasty, Sarah Zhang reports. Is the answer ostrich meat?
