The U.S. invasion of Iraq was the most consequential political event of the past two decades. But it doesn’t feel that way. It has the faint whiff of youthful indiscretion, an episode that many Americans would rather forget. I was 19. The tenor of that time in American life—after the September 11 attacks—seems ever more foreign to me. Instead of the chaotic information overload of the current moment, in which consensus appears impossible, the early 2000s were a time of conformity, authority, and security. When I think about why even the mere idea of consensus makes me anxious to this day, I ke ..read more

For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct? Recent studies on the link between political awareness and individual well-being have gestured toward a liberating, if dark, alternative. Sometimes—perhaps even most of the time—it is better not to know. Like taking a drug, learning about politics and following the news can become addictive, yet Americans are encouraged to do more of it, lest we become uninformed. Unless you have a job that require ..read more

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on October 19, 2022 I never expected to look back on the George W. Bush era as a time of relative innocence for the United States. My country changed much more quickly than I could have imagined. In the early days after 9/11, I was still in college. The nation, in a show of bipartisan unity, was on a war footing that produced some of our darkest moments, darker even than what the Donald Trump era would bring. Dissent was rare. To doubt the wisdom of the war in Afghanistan, the passage of the Patriot Act, or the invasion of Iraq was to find oneself in a lonely place.&nbs ..read more

Donald Trump will be remembered as one of the most consequential presidents in American history. On a political level, he attempted to overturn an election—an unusual enterprise for a president—and popularized the idea that democratic outcomes can be rejected outright if you don’t like the results. Oddly enough, however, Trump’s impact may prove more distinctive and perhaps even more lasting on an intellectual level. Trump had an instinct that something had gone fundamentally wrong in America and felt that his supporters should be angry as a result. And he came to channel that impulse visceral ..read more

President Joe Biden’s much-touted trip to the Middle East—his first as president—was almost entirely devoid of drama or excitement. It produced no significant deliverables, nor was it meant to. To be underwhelmed, however, is to miss a more troubling story. The visit may have been pointless and performative, but it was also a major setback for American interests, confirming what many long suspected: Supposed allies can disrespect, embarrass, and undermine the United States at will. The costs are already evident. On Saturday, less than 24 hours after Biden left the region, the United Arab Emira ..read more

Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on June 21, 2022. On a recent June weekend, 10 people were killed in shootings across cities in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee, and South Carolina. In Philadelphia, multiple active shooters fired into a crowd in the popular nighttime destination of South Street. “It was chaos,” one witness told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “People were coming off the street with blood splatters on white sneakers and skinned knees and skinned elbows.” Coming so soon after the horrific Uvalde school shooting, these other killings were perhaps unlikely to garner much national attention ..read more

In the early days of the war on Ukraine, tens of thousands of Russians protested an invasion launched in their name. This was encouraging. Americans could content themselves with the possibility that Russian citizens might take matters into their own hands, challenging and weakening their president, Vladimir Putin. In recent weeks, however, such protests have become rare. This is in no small part due to the criminalization of opposition; publicly contesting the Kremlin’s war propaganda carries prison terms of up to 15 years. But fear is only a piece of the story. Russians also appear to be ral ..read more

If there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power—or, for that matter, Western power—is not a better world. For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For tho ..read more

The stock market has plummeted, erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in household wealth in the span of weeks. War in Ukraine is a distinct possibility and not merely a worst-case scenario. Stakes as high as this tend to concentrate the mind. As a result, the ongoing and seemingly endless debates about “wokeness”—for want of a better term for the way a powerful sliver of the left discusses race and identity—seem odd and even unimportant. Every day, social media blows up over some new excess of language policing, the latest unintended offense against elite manners, or the most recent eruptio ..read more

The future of American politics is taking shape, and it is frightening. I, along with many others, thought—or at least hoped—that Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House would allow enough Americans to unspool themselves from the daily efforts of outrage and apocalyptic thinking. Biden was bland enough that politics could revert to something more measured than it had been under his predecessor, Donald Trump. This was wishful thinking.   Politics seems more existential, not less. Pundits and partisans cast everything as a culture war, even those things that have little to do with cultur ..read more